63: Dingo-Rabbit Deathmatch

Steve Dalton (@spidie) told us about starting a hackerspace, visiting Silicon Valley with a homebrew incubator group, and tech and fencing Australia. 

Gold Coast Tech Space started off building the Rep Rap 3D printer

Steve's consulting group is Refactor

Silicon Lakes incubator just opened a call for applications to the SURF accelerator

The Arduino-like GCDuino, available on Little Bird

Rabbits are not indigenous and not appreciated in Australia. They have the rabbit proof fence and the Easter Billby

Steve had a podcast Six Degrees and now also listens to STEAM and Engineering Commons.

Steve's Hackaday Prize entry: What the Chook (also, Stuart's Wifi Rocks).

62: Costs a Penny to Go to the Bathroom

Josh Bleecher Snyder (@offbymany) joined us to talk about PayPal's Beacon, being acquired, the Go programming language, BTLE, computer vision, and working at a large company after founding small ones.

Bluetooth Low Energy: A Developer's Handbook by Robin Heydon

TI CC2540 BTLE module

Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision by Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler

Gatt is a Go package for building Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals (video description by Josh from GopherCon 2014)

Card.io

Machine learning's Theano

Eigen Library for matrix math


61: I Want Programmable Pants

Jen Costillo (@rebelbotJen) brings Fashion Professor Kyle Chan to discuss wearables from a different perspective.

California College of the Arts' Summer Series: Design of Wearables. Jen and Kyle's session is Fashionably Practical on Wedneday, August 6th, 2014 8:15pm-10pm in San Francisco.

Sparkfun conductive ribbon and thermochromatic pigment (blue)

Athos athletic body monitoring

Cute Circuit's photonic couture

Smoke dress (neat!)

Necomimi: thought controlled cat ear headband

Reebok Checklight for detecting concussions and the Adafruit teardown

Hövding scarf airbag for cyclists

60: Fun Things You Can Make Out of Beagles

Jason Kridner (@Jadon) joined us to talk about the BeagleBone Black... and other things.

Some good books for Beagle :

BotSpeak - A programming language for internet endpoints

To contact Jason about ordering a bunch of units for your OEM use, see his contact info on BeagleBoard.org's About page.

58: Use These Powers for Good

Joe Grand (@JoeGrand) spoke with us about his life as Kingpin, hardware hacking, hosting a TV show, and being a Hackaday judge.

Joe's company is the Grand Idea Studio. His TV show Prototype This was on the Discovery Channel. He created an Atari game: SCSIcide.  Joe will be giving his hardware hacking training at Black Hat USA in August (as well as some of the other security conferences in also Las Vegas at that time).

Joe and Elecia are on the Hackaday Prize judging panel. There are some amazing projects if you want to check out your competition (or vote for the ones you like!).

56: Rodents of Unusual Size

Matt Haines (@beardedinventor) and Tom Byrne (@tlbyrn) spoke to Elecia and Chris about Electric Imp (@electricimp). This discussion goes far beyond our first with Matt (Episode 6!). It is more software and implementation oriented than last week's Amp Hour

In the vein of "what do I do after I've made an LED blink from a webpage?":

Finally, the SparkFun contest winner was announced. There were many great entries, choosing a winner was difficult. Ken M (@Deamiter) won the grand prize. Luckily, Matt and Tom brought two April board + Electric Imp sets to give away so Chris Svec (@christophersvec) and Alex Irvine (@EternalPractice) were runners up. Thank you to all who participated, your ideas were awesome and we loved to hear about them.


54: Oh the Hugh Manatee

Elizabeth Brenner (@eabrenner) returned to the show to talk about the are-you-ok widget that she and Elecia have been working on. (The initial problem-statement show is episode 17.)

There is now a SparkFun tutorial so you can build one of the are-you-ok widgets yourself. As announced in the show, there is a contest to get a SparkFun gift card, it ends 6/13/14 so get your answer in by then (maximum of two entries per person, please).

Elecia already took the name Sal Right out of the running (reference). In the photo below, are Maxwell, Hugh (Cation pattern!), Haley, and Grimes (from left to right) so those are all taken as well.

Noted on the show were two things El saw at the Solid Conference: 3D printed flexible materials from Kinematics and circuit stickers from Chibtronics. Also, we look forward to trying out the Fitbit channel for if-this-then-that (IFTTT) to see if that can monitor our loved ones too.

groupPhotoOfAyoks


BONUS: From Solid Con

Elecia attended O'Reilly's Solid Conference, recording a few of the people she met there. Note: this episode is recorded in a noisy location.

Also, thank you to O'Reilly for giving away copies of my book


53: Being a grownup engineer

Jack Ganssle shared his wisdom on being a good embedded software engineer (hint: it takes discipline). 

Jack's website is filled with great essays and new videos. He's also written the Art of Designing Embedded Systems and The Embedded Systems Dictionary (with Michael Barr).

We covered a lot of ground, here are some of the highlights:


51: There is no crying in strcpy

Jen Costillo (@r0b0ts0nf1r3) joins Elecia and Christopher to discuss their experiences interviewing (both as interviewer and interviewee).

Elecia did an hour long webinar on how to conduct technical interviews. In this show, she mentions a good post-interview ratings system.

Google discovered that their brainteasers are not a very effective way to interview.

Despite the news that swearing is good for you, we tried to bleep everything.

Also, it is minesweeper, not minefield. What were we thinking? It was obviously all Christopher’s fault. Though we should have stood up to him. 

Elecia's book has more interview questions but from the perspective of how do you ask a question and what do you look for in a response.

PartsOfAnISRBingo.jpg


50: The podcast formerly known as...

Christopher White (@stoneymonster) and Elecia celebrate a year in podcasting by talking about the show. Then they decide whether or not to change the name of the show to Embedded (yes).

Elecia's list of current and soon activities:

Other things they mentioned include an amazing anti-tremor spoon, using trampolines to go to space, how drinking the blood of youth will keep you young, oil sensing, and our consulting episode.

49: Is that an Arduino in your pocket

Tenaya Hurst (@ArduinoWoman) shares her incredible enthusiasm for teaching Arduino and the San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation (The Tech).

Being a geo-anthrop-actress, Tenaya teaches chemistry, geology, Arduino, and beginning wearables for the Tech, for their Galileo summer camp, for Oakland's Workshop Weekend, and on her own recognizance through her website

Tenaya will be at the Linino booth at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA on May 17-18, 2014

Tenyana's movie credits

Lilypad sewable (washable!) electronics

Other places to connect: @TenayaRocks@LininoWoman, and Google+

Penny Arcade Museum

Also noted, Elecia was interviewed in Circuit Cellar magazine, May 2014 (#286). In the first few minutes of this show, she gives a discount code for their store.

48: Widgets on the hands of ants

Dr. Kevin Shaw, CTO of Sensor Platforms, spoke with Elecia about his career progressing from designing MEMS to building a company that makes sensor fusion algorithms. Wandering from the Internet of Things to Singularity University to power management in Android development, Kevin and Elecia had a wide-ranging conversation.

Due in July, check out Sensor Platform's Open Sensor Platform project, an open source framework for developing sensor systems (sample timing is critical!). 

47: Bridge of toothpicks

Nathan Tuck joined Christopher White (@stoneymonster) and Elecia White to chat about varied topics relating to being an embedded (and graphics) engineer (and manager).

Nate works at NVidia on the Tegra K1-64. He mentioned some openings in his team at the end of the podcast, email the show to get a connection.

We also noted that Eyefluence is hiring for an EE and/or technician for work somewhere between San Jose, CA and Reno, NV. Direct resumes to Peter Milford using the email you find on their webpage (info @ ...). 

We asked if managers are sociopaths.

If you haven't seen The Expert tragicomedy sketch (7 perpendicular red lines...), you need to as it is becoming engineering vernacular.