69: Look at This Entire Aisle of Standoffs

Mike Szczys (@Szczys) discusses @Hackaday, the SPACE! prize, being a professional musician, and visiting Silicon Valley.

Hackaday.com blog including Mike's post about Why Open Design is the way forward 

Hackaday.io project site

Hackaday Prize

Supply Frame FindChips and (upcoming) Parts.io

In response to a listener question, Elecia wrote a blog post about things to do in Silicon Valley. When Mike visited for the first time, he caught many highlights: he went to HSC/Halted, enjoying how organized it is, woke up early for the De Anza electronics flea market, and had a ball at the Computer History Museum. 

Mike's Science Friday segment

69: Look at This Entire Aisle of Standoffs
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68: Dancing with Hundreds of Women

Angie Chang (@thisgirlangie) joined us to talk about the coding bootcamp Hackbright Academy, their upcoming hardware hackathon, Girl Geek Dinners, and the extreme awkwardness of networking.

Sign up to be a hackathon mentor (not gender limited) or to be on the waitlist to attend (women only). Get your team together on Hackathon IO.

Sign up to be a Hackbright Academy mentor.

Oh look! Elecia signed up to speak on Sunday!

Grace Hopper Conference

The article on Peter Thiel and women founders by Kate Losse that Chris referenced toward the end of the show.

68: Dancing with Hundreds of Women
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67: Software for Things that Can Kill People

In front of a live audience, Chris and Elecia talk about their experiences with FAA and FDA.

This show was recorded live in front of the Silicon Valley Automotive Open Source meetup group at Hacker Dojo. 

The Wikipedia article on DO-178B is a good place to get an overview of the FAA process (even for other levels of concern).

For FDA, their guidance is the best place to start. Also see their 510k information. Finally, note that all class III (3, very high risk) require the more difficult Premarket Approval (PMA) process.

Everything we know about car safety certification, we learned by reading Wikipedia's ISO-26262, including Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL).

Jack Ganssle's Embedded.fm episode was Being a Grownup Engineer.

Photo by Alison Chaiken

Photo by Alison Chaiken

67: Software for Things that Can Kill People
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66: As Simple as Possible

Jack Gassett (@gadgetfactory) is the creator of the open source FPGA Papilio development board. He joins Chris and Elecia to answer the age-old question of how to get started with FPGAs.

Jack's company is Gadget Factory.

Chris got the Papilio Pro and Arcade MegaWing.

Recommended reading:

Chris and Elecia will be recording live at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA on Monday, September 8, 2014 at 7 P.M. RSVP!

66: As Simple as Possible
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65: Resonant Frequency of My Butt

Darma (@Darma_inc) is a nascent start-up focusing on optical sensors in a seat cushion to aid in posture, stress reduction, and meditation. Chris and Elecia speak with CEO Dr. Junhao Hu and Sharif Kassatly about building a company, going through the Haxlr8r's accelerator program, and choosing a crowd funding platform.

Keep up with Darma on their webpage and on their Facebook page.

One of their advisors is NASA's Dr. Joan Vernikos, author of Sitting Kills, Moving Heals. 

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64: Making Making Embedded Whoops

WHOOPS! We didn't record Elecia's mic this week and are taking a track direct from Chris' computer mic. Sound quality is not up to our normal standards. Sorry!

Chris (@stoneymonster) hosted the show, asking Elecia (@logicalelegance) what it was like to write her Making Embedded Systems book. (Thanks to Chris Svec for the request!)

Put in your idea to O'Reilly

Write a novel this November with NaNoWriMo

Come hear Chris and Elecia talk about writing software that can kill you at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View on Monday September 8, 2014, 7pm. Sign up!

Also, bonus quotes:

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." - Benjamin Franklin

"Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being." - A. A. Milne

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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).

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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

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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

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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.

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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!).

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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.

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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
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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. 

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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:

Embedded 53: Being a grownup engineer