114: Wild While Loops

Andrei Chichak rejoins us to discuss error handling. 

Andrei's website says how to reach him or email embedded 'at' chichak.ca

Windows 10 "Something Happened" error

Hitchbot

Book Elecia mentioned: Kindness of Strangers by Mike McIntyre

Elecia's book covers logging module in Creating a System Architecture (pp 21-25)

Robots and children

 

Andrei's Wolf E-series oven punished him for being on the show.

Andrei's Wolf E-series oven punished him for being on the show.


113: A Little Noddy Program

Clive Turvey (Clive1), master of the ST Forums, talks with us about ARM cores and answering difficult technical questions for fun.

Some answers:

ST's Cortex-M7

Books (though we talked more about these being good authors, these are the ones Chris and Elecia have or want):


A bare metal Scheme interpreter for ARM.

Bookshelf Chris was looking at during show.

Bookshelf Chris was looking at during show.


112: My Brain Is My Resource

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) chat with each other about drones, listener emails, conferences, fighting robots, and moonlighting.

Elecia's Solid talk, an Introduction to Inertial Sensors is on youtube.

Washington Post article about Amazon's good drone behavior 

Apple's IOS security guide (Elecia's security checklist)

Photon WiFi Module (Chris' Linker articles part one and part two)

DAB+ FM Digital Radio Development Board

Sad autonomous fighting robot video and lightning fast autonomous sumo bots video

OpenSCAD- CAD tool suggested by a listener

Elecia's conference apology

Light painting pictures (500px)

Aaron Loar, Chris, and Elecia took Aaron's light stick out and played at the park.

Aaron Loar, Chris, and Elecia took Aaron's light stick out and played at the park.


111: Potty Train Your Tamagotchi

Natalie Silvanovich (@natashenka) discussed reverse engineering hardware, working on security software, and the fantastic world of Tamagotchis.

Natalie's site and blog

Hardware Excuse Generator 

Original CCC 2012 talk: Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation

CCC 2013 talk: Even More Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation 

Natalie's upcoming BlackHat talk: Attacking ECMAScript Engines with Redefinition 

Flash exploit article for Project Zero: One Perfect Bug: Exploiting Type Confusion in Flash 

Tamagotchis are still available as are the works of Shel Silverstein (Snowball is in Falling Up). 

Natalie's Tamagotchi board

Natalie's Tamagotchi board


110: Happiness Is a Warm Puppy

BeagleBone's Jason Kridner (@Jadon) returns to tell us about his new book.

Jason co-authored a new book: BeagleBone Cookbook: Software and Hardware Problems and Solutions (or at O'Reilly). His older book is Bad to the Bone: Crafting Electronics Systems with Beaglebone and BeagleBone Black.

Previous Embedded.fm episode 60: Fun Things You Can Make out of Beagles

BeagleBoard.org's Google Summer of Code page (including BeagleSat and underwater drones!)

Some information about putting Xenomai on a BeagleBone Black for real time response.

Chris mentioned Brillo, an alternative Google supported OS that isn't on the BBB.

Project Ara: an open source smartphone

Ardupilot: Autonomous drone piloting. 

Dronecode: Drones in Linux

OpenROV: Underwater vehicles

Mars lander Beagle 2 (the Apollo 11 Lunar Module was the Eagle despite some comical confusion). [UPDATE: Listener Mark Stevens pointed out that the Apollo 10 Lunar Module was named Snoopy who was a beagle.]

TI's E2E Forums

BeagleBone Green

 

 

 

109: Resurrection of Extreme Programming

James Grenning (@jwgrenning) returns to discuss TDD, Agile, and web courses. 

James was on Embedded.fm episode 30: Eventually Lighting Strikes.

James' new company is Wingman Software.

His excellent book is TDD for Embedded C

James suggested Training From the Back of the Room! as resource to people looking to put together a class. He uses and recommends CyberDojo as a coding instruction tool.

Before Agile was Agile-for-business, it was Extreme Programming. James recommends Extreme Programming Explained.

James will be the keynote speaker at AgileDC in October.

108: Nebarious

Jen (@RebelbotJen) joined Chris and Elecia to discuss security, privacy, and ethics in wearable computing. 

Elecia's Linker post is especially relevant this week: Device Security Checklist..

There is already a standard for privacy and security: HIPAA (Title II). While not easy to read, it is a reasonable starting place. Another good (but not quite on-point) resource is the EFF Secure Messaging Scorecard, especially if you consider your device as messaging your user (it's a metaphor, ok?). Also, read all the way to the methodology, not just the pretty checkboxes.

Mike Ryan has great explanations for how to easily crack BLE security. Video to watch. His website has more resources, papers, videos, tools.

The Embedded Systems Conference (Silicon Valley) will be held at the Santa Clara convention center July 20-22. 

Casino article: Breaking the House

Chris and Elecia were guests on The Amp Hour

Jen is interested in putting together a workshop/conference on the intersection of art, dance, and technology. Contact her on Twitter or email info at rebelbots dot com. 

107: Until They Are Spaghetti

We talked to Craig Cook about learning embedded systems. He recently attended an embedded edX course through University of Texas.  

The microcontroller and boards used in the course

Craig's next course will be Interactive Python through Coursera

As we discussed Craig's alarm clock we mentioned many parts including:

Chris has also been looking at Particle.io's Photon board for WiFi + cloud development. This will be mentioned on other shows (as well as on The Amp Hour).

104: Only the Paranoid Survive

Atmel’s Andreas Eieland (@AndreasMCUguy) spoke with us about low power chips and benchmarks, including tips for measuring and achieving the lowest power possible.

EEMBC has a low power benchmark: ULPBench. EETimes wrote up a great introduction to the benchmark. Atmel’s SAM-L posted some excellent numbers for ULPBench.

Chris wanted to look at processors between Cortex-M4 and phone chips. Andreas suggested the SAM7, SAM E, and Cortex-A5.

Programmable logic blocks (Look Up Tables)

Coding tips and tricks for AVR micros (most things apply for all embedded development)

App Note: Ultra Low Power Techniques

App Note: Performance Levels and Power Domains

Andreas was also on Episode 15: Robot on the Front, speaking about how the AVR processor line came to life, why there is an AVR in Arduino, and the spirit of making things.

The Planet contest ends Friday June 12 (at midnight your time). Check out their jobs and send in your contest entry.

Also, check out Elecia’s BLE Intro.

103: Tentacles of the Kraken

Mark VanderVoord (@mvandervoord) spoke with us about leading open source projects and test driven development.

His site is ThrowTheSwitch.org, a good place to get started with test driven development. Get more info (and a coupon) for his course. Mark's book is Embedded Testing with Unity and CMock

Lengthy list of unit testing frameworks for C

Why's Guide to Learning Ruby (free! with entertaining comics!)

D Lang

 

102: The Deadly Fluffy Bunny (with Wifi)

Charles Lohr spoke with us about $5 WiFi (ESP8266), hacking as a hobby, arcade games, and music visualization.

Updated 06/02/2015: A listener pointed out that the Arduino IDE can program the ESP8266, probably an easier setup than Charles' original article. Also, the Linker post for this show is about getting started with BLE.

Follow Charles on YouTube (or say hello on Google+ and Hackaday.io). To get you started, here are Elecia's favorites:

For more about the ESP8266:

ST 9 axis inertial measurement unit LSM9DSO

 

 

101: Taking Apart the Toaster

Micah Elizabeth Scott (@scanlime) spoke with us about Coastermelt, art installations, FadeCandy, teaching electronics to artists, and mental health. 

Her Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) installation is mesmerizing, some videos

In her Coastermelt project, Micah uses the IDA disassembler.

FadeCandy is for sale at Adafruit.

Zen Photon is online, demonstrating ray tracing.

Micah's website shows her current projects. 

Micah's previous Embedded.fm episode focused on FadeCandy: 41: Pink Universes Die Really Quickly.

Robot Odyssey looks awesome.

Captain Awkward is a site where you can get advice on how to say things and deal with difficult situations/people.

Micah's shop has a TypeA 3D printer (note: Tuco's favorite bolts) as well as an OtherMill

100: Unintentional Radiator

Star Simpson (@starsandrobots) and Jen Costillo (@RebelbotJen) catch up with Elecia and Chris, discussing how hobby projects have changed over the last two years since the show started. 

Jen's website: RebelBot

Star's website and weekly drone newsletter The Buzzer. Star works at Orion (formerly OnBeep).

Novena board and Star's project Balboa

ODROID

Open Cores

Crowd supply and What it took to make the Octopart reference card

RecordingWithStar.jpg

99: You Can Say a Boat

Andrei Chichak spoke with us about MISRA-C and ethics. 

Linker post: It's dangerous to go alone! Take MISRA-C

Embedded.fm listener survey (please!)

Andrei's has personal website (we failed to talk about his kite aerial photography, it is really neat though) and his company is CBF Systems.

Plum Hall C Compiler Validation

PC Lint

JPL Coding Standards for C (and the mentioned video discussing Mars Code)

ISO 26262 Automobile software standard

Cortex-R for high reliability systems (ARM's description)

National Society of Professional Engineers code of ethics and Canadian Engineering Guidelines on the Code of Ethics

Offline, Andrei recommended two books and another podcast about MISRA:

 

98: Figments of My Imagination

Chris and Elecia talk about memetics, learning, and processors. 

Elecia was coy about the Pasadena party May 9th and 10th, but Hackaday announced it so you can invite yourself. She will also be speaking at the Solid conference in June in SF (email for a coupon!). She'll also be at ESC-Silicon Valley in July

Star Wars Teaser #2 and SpaceX almost-landing

BLE fun: TI's CC2640 and Nordic nRF51822 (Elecia likes the BLE Nano with the free, online mbed compiler for getting started with the nRF5122).

Everything seems to be a Cortex-M0 these days (including the aforementioned CC2640 and nRF51822). The new Atmel SAM-L series is Cortex-M0 and even more low power than usual. On the other hand, the MSP432 is low power and is a more powerful Cortex-M4 (and inexpensive dev kits!),

Elecia has a book: Making Embedded Systems. It makes a great gift.

 

97: Bubblesort Yourself

Professor Paul Fishwick joined us to talk about CS and STEM education, excellent analogies, and the crossover of art and technology. 

The Linker post related to this episode managed to be reasonably topical for a change.

Paul's work:

 Radiolab Color Episode

Forrester System Dynamics

Max is a visual programming language for music and multimedia.

CS Unplugged is a collection of free learning activities that teach Computer Science through engaging games and puzzles that use cards, string, crayons and lots of running around. 

There are many bubblesort dance videos (mindboggling) but this is the one Elecia knew about previously.

The Computer History Museum is awesome. If you are in the area, you should definitely go. 

Conference and contact notes:

96: Yarn Is Very Serious Business

Carrie Sundra (@AlpenglowYarn) spoke with us about doing a Kickstarter on her own… and nearly failing.

The SkeinMinder is an automation tool for small yarn businesses (and enthusiastic amateurs). When the successful Kickstarter nearly fell short, Carrie candidly wrote about it (includes a great description of the economies of scale).

Carrie’s yarn company is Alpenglow Yarn. You can use the contact page there to ask for electrical engineering help as well. Carrie is active on Instagram and her blog is a blend of crafts and engineering.

Ravelry is the social media site for knitters and crocheters (requires free account to see anything)

The insanely popular Potato Salad Kickstarter