123: Banished from Running Unix

Bob Coggeshall (@BobCoggeshall) runs a boutique assembly house. And he co-wrote sudo. There are sandwich jokes. 

Bob's business is Small Batch Assembly (@SmallBatchA). (There might be a discount on your first order near the end of the show. Maybe.) His pick and place machine is a Mancorp MC400. 

Octopart's Common Parts Library

We mentioned OSHPark a few times, Laen has been on Embedded.fm: 92: Everybody Behave, Please

Boldport makes nonlinear traces (SEAHORSE!!)

Relevant XKCD panel

My Date with Drew

How did we not know about Astromech.net?

Bob's Wifi Nixie driver board (also: how Nixie tubes work)

122: Glue a Board to Your Resume

Chris and Elecia try out their new recording location, give advice for getting a job in embedded software, and respond to listener emails.

SparkFun's Pit of Despair is a blog post about how to create products from prototypes.

Visual Studio has plug-ins that support microprocessors, see Visual Micro.

The Guardian reports that 2016 VW models have a different defeat.

121: The Idea of Mojo

We spoke with Fran Blanche (@contourcorsets) of Frantone about guitar tone. 

Fran has several articles and posts about space, electronics, and assorted whatnot at her design writings page. Her video blog is on YouTube.

There are many different guitar pedals you can build for yourself as a way to get a better handle on analog electronics. Elecia found these at Mammoth Electronics.

The song that was the first to have flanging was "The Big Hurt" by Toni Fisher in 1959.
 

120: Boll Weevil Eradication

Kathleen Sidenblad discusses her career through Silicon Valley, from engineer at Systems Control Inc in 1976 to VP of Engineering today.

For more about Kathy, check out this Storehouse interview. 

119: Do Your Neighbors Have Any Idea?

Ben Krasnow of the Applied Science YouTube channel talks with us about scanning electron microscopes, generating liquid nitrogen, and cookies. 

Hackaday Conference is Nov 14-15, 2015 in SF, CA! Call for proposals. (Ben and Elecia are Hackaday Prize Judges.)

Contact Ben through twitter: @BenKrasnow

Applied Science YouTube channel (and don't forget the associated Patreon). Some specific videos we talked about:

• Cookie machine
• Electron microscope scanning vinyl record
• Faraday effect (control light with magnets!)
• LED contact lens (not for the squeamish)

Other people's videos and projects:

• Brady Haran's Periodic Videos
• Veritassium channel
• Build your own waterjet

Amscope microscope and low cost hot air rework soldering station

118: Awesome and Frequently Useless

Morgan Allen (@captain_morgan) spoke with us about Sphero and Node.JS. This is all not-so-secretly a discussion of the BB8 robot.

Correction: Despite Elecia's repeated insistence that these are steppers, she's just wrong. The motors are DC which only makes sense in a consumer product. More details on this in a later episode.

BB8s from Amazon (probably won't arrive until next year)

More info on Elecia's teardown and talk: embedded.fm/hddg 

The BB8 toy is based on Sphero (buy). They have an open SDK and a wonderful education program. Check out the clear SPRK (buy). It also has a teach-your-kids-to-program app that is pretty neat (but doesn't seem to work with BB8 yet).

Morgan has been involved with NodeBots (@nodebotsSF). They use Node.js (wiki) to send Bluetooth serial commands to Spheros. Their issues list is where new meetups are posted.

Johnny-Five is also a popular way to do computer based robotics with an Arduino (or other dev board) as a hardware intermediary.

IPFS: Distributed file system

ESPruino is a Javascript board.

People's Open: Free Wireless Internet and Local Network in Oakland, California. Also in Oakland, check out Sudo Room hackerspace.

117: In as Much as Which

Chris and Elecia discuss listener emails and other assorted topics.

Preprocessor fun

BLE 4.2 writeup from EETimes and the FAQ from Bluetooth.org

Drones should follow existing aviation keep out standards (Nick links us to some wiki pages)

• Automatic dependent surveillance
• NOTAM
• Federal Aviation Regulations: Temporary flight restrictions

NYT Amazon culture article

Cake under a microscope

116: You Have to Care

Glenn Scott (@GlennCScott) spoke with us about API design and techniques for writing good software.

Glenn glossed over his bio but it is quite impressive. You can reach him via his PARC page.

PARC's Content Centric Networking home: ccnx.org which we talked about in 75: End Up in a Puppy Fight.

Literate Programming by Knuth

And the more recommended Bob Martin's books

While latest source code requires licensing, the binary version of CCN includes the LongBow tools (in user/local/parc/bin). Description of tools and doxygen docs. The LongBow getting started guide should be part of the mid-September binary release.

PARC's C Style Guide and C Function Naming Guide

115: Datasheeps

Daniel Hienzsch (@rheingoldheavy) spoke with us about reverse engineering a board, bypass capacitors, and serial protocols.

Rheingold Heavy is Dan's company for educational boards. The one he started with was the I2C and SPI education board (its fulfilled kickstarter page). He brought us the the Graphic Equalizer Kit and Bubble Display Experimentation Pack.

Dan's Arduino from Scratch blog series looks at the Arduino hardware in great detail. 

Contextual Electronics course for learning to build boards

Chris wrote about his Photon based garage door opener on the Linker blog

TinEye for searching schematic snippets

Goodies.

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.

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:

• NVIC Interrupts on the same pin number
• STM32F4 PWM channel 3

ST's Cortex-M7

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

• The Definitive Guide to ARM Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 Processors, 3rd Edition (Joseph Yiu, 2013)
• The Definitive Guide to ARM Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M0+ Processors, 2nd Edition  (Joseph Yiu, 2015)
• Z80 Assembly Language Programming Paperback (Lance A Leventhal, 1979) 
• Programming the 6502 (Rodnay Zaks, 1979)

A bare metal Scheme interpreter for ARM.

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.

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

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. 

• Wearables and IoT Growing Up: Talking To Your Products About Security And Ethics (Jen, Wed 11am)

• Teardown: Wearing Security on Your Sleeve (mostly Jen with Elecia telling jokes if/when things go wrong, Tue 1:30pm, on the show floor so free to attend with an Expo pass. We'll be taking apart a Nymi band.)

• Faker to Maker in 45 Minutes or Less (Elecia, Wed 1:30pm)

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:

• FM Module
• ESP8266 WiFi Module
• Electric Imp (Sparkfun or Digikey, don't forget the April breakout board)

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).

106: I Am a Scientism

Chris and Elecia talk about satellites, survey results, and entertainment.

ESP8266 has an Arduino IDE (thanks, Karl!)

Elecia will be speaking at Solid June 25th and ESC July 22nd.

To celebrate the first 100 episodes, Elecia made a spreadsheet of all the guests and topics.

Chris read and recommended Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. He was ambivalent about the latest incarnation of battlebots.

105: Certain Paths Are More Suicidal

Manny Wright of Cortus spoke with us about developing processor IP and how it goes from RTL to silicon. 

Cortus development platform with a Xilinx Spartan and Arduino Due compatibility.

Planet Labs satellite contest winners are announced and Elecia has a cold.

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.