Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) answer listener emails.
Get your entries in for March Micro Madness, the matches start very soon.
The short story Elecia finds most memorable is All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury.
We mentioned Procopio who teaches microcontrollers at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education ITESM (site, wiki)
Hector sent up the IEEE Code of Ethics, a good high-level set of rules.
Matt Godbolt (@mattgodbolt) spoke with us about settling arguments with Compiler Explorer.
Compiler Explorer comes in different flavors:
You can see the beta version by putting a beta on the end: https://gcc.godbolt.org/beta/
This a fully open source project. You can read the code and/or run your own version:
Matt works at DRW working on low latency software. Note that DRW is hiring for software engineers. You can read about the evolution of Compiler Explorer on their blog.
Matt’s personal blog is xania.org. You might like parts about 6502 Timings. He also has several conference talks on YouTube including x86 Internals for Fun & Profit and Emulating a 6502 in Javascript. Matt was previously at Argonaut Games.
Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and his C++17 Commodore 64
Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? paper (with a nod to Don’t Panic GeoCast’s Fun Paper Friday)
Kari Love (@ikyotochan) spoke with us about creating soft robotics. You can see her edible soft robots talk from 33c3. Kari works at Super-Releaser. Her personal site (and blog) is Kari Makes.
Kari mentioned that the Super-Release intern Aidan had some picks for soft robotics on Instructables.
Super-Releaser created the Glaucus soft robot and Adafruit has an in-depth tutorial for how to make it.
Some videos of soft actuators and soft robots:
Soft Exoskeletons
Rat heart cell robot from Popular Mechanics
First Autonomous Entirely Soft Robot (Harvard Octobot)
VoxCad Tutorial for simulating soft robotics
Also, if you haven’t seen Big Hero 6, you should. Consider it computer science homework. If you just want to see Baymax, here is a short video.
Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate (Elecia’s latest octopus related reading, the previous one was called Kraken)
Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) of the Hanselminutes Podcast talks about technology podcasting and philosophy.
You can find Scott's blog on Hanselman.com/blog and his other podcasts on Hanselman.com/podcasts.
We talked about Hansleminutes' WebVR episode with Ada Rose Edwards and Alcohol and Tech with Victor Yocco. We also mentioned Scott's blog post from 2014 about what technologies he would learn if he had to start over.
Crossing machine intelligence, robotics, and medicine, Patrick Pilarski (@patrickpilarski) is working on smart prosthetic limbs.
Build your own learning robot references: Weka Data Mining Software in Java for getting to know your data, OpenIA Gym for understanding reinforcement learning algorithms, Robotis Servos for the robot (AX is the lower priced line), and five lines of code:
pred = numpy.dot(xt,w) delta = r + gamma*numpy.dot(xtp1,w) - pred e = gamma*lamda*e + xt w = w + alpha*delta*e xt = xtp1
Patrick even made us a file (with comments and everything!).
Once done, you can enter the Cybathlon. (Or check out a look at Cybathlon 2016 coverage.)
Machine Man by Max Barry
Snow Country by Bokushi Suzuki
Aimee Mullins and her many amazing legs (TED Talk)
Patrick is a professor at University of Alberta, though a lot more than that: he is the Canada Research Chair in Machine Intelligence for Rehabilitation at the University of Alberta, and Assistant Professor in the Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and a principal investigator with both the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) and the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (RLAI). See his TED talk: Intelligent Artificial Limbs.
Indrek Rebane (@RebaneIndrek) spoke with us about the Garage48 Hardware and Arts hackathon, hardware incubators in Estonia, linguistics, hydrology, and startup investments.
Garage48 Hardware & Arts hackathon is February 17-19, 2017 at the Institute of Physics, University of Tartu (Tartu, Estonia). The event is organized by Garage48, University of Tartu and the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Indrek is CTO of Build It Hardware Accelerator and electronics engineer for Hedgehog Engineering.
Recommended book: The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
Other resources Indrek mentioned after recording:
While we planned to ask Andrei Chichak to podcast when he was in town for the Embedded.fm party, we spent too much time goofing off. So we are replaying Andrei's first appearance on the show where he spoke with us about MISRA-C and ethics. (Note that this is the same Andrei who writes the STM32 Embedded Wednesday posts for the Embedded.fm blog.)
Linker post: It's dangerous to go alone! Take MISRA-C
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
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:
Debby Meredith (@DebbyMe) stops by to tell us what it is like being a venture partner and interim VP of engineering. Debby is a venture partner at Icon Ventures. Her website is DebbyMeredith.com. She was on a new podcast: Women Who Code Radio.
Computer History Museum's new exhibit is Make Software: Change the World. It opens on January 28, 2017.
After recording, Debby mentioned a book she likes: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.
January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP
Ben Krasnow (@BenKrasnow) spoke with us about prototyping, Patreon, and staying current. And a whole bunch of stuff.
January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP
Ben’s YouTube channel is Applied Science. His recent videos have been shot with the high speed Chronos camera (whose creator David Kronstein was on The Amp Hour #325).
Ben has a Patreon page which funds randomness. (Embedded also has a Patreon page, for randomness and mics.)
Ben was previously on the show: 119: Do Your Neighbors Have Any Idea?
For BLE prototyping, Ben mentioned the OSH Chip by Philip Freidin (146: The Loyal Opposition) and using Processing for Android to make quick-n-dirty test applications.
We mentioned the Wazer desktop waterjet.
Chris brought up this video describing impedance with a mechanical model.
One of Ben’s favorite videos that he did was the first one with an electron microscope, way back in 2011: DIY Scanning Electron Microscope - Overview.
Ben gets a lot of his news from Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/
Ben’s Twitter criteria was that they didn’t post updates often too often for his one-a-day check and that they focus on tech:
And some of his favorite YouTube channels (Ben said it was very difficult to distill as there are many great choices):
We also mentioned architect Frank Howarth of the urbanTrash channel.
Philip Koopman (@BetterEmbSW) spoke with us about making better embedded software. His Better Embedded Systems Software blog has lots of great information including links to his growing video library. Two posts noted in the show:
His company, Edge Case Research, performs design and code reviews and teaches how to do them. You can find out more about his course and background on his Carnegie Mellon University staff page. That also leads to the pretty amazing Vintage Aero paper airplanes.
Phil’s book is Better Embedded Software, available via koopman.us and (more expensively) Amazon.
Videos of robots being stressed
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talk with each other about about a party, listener emails, and assorted questions.
RSVP for the Embedded.fm party!
The Embedded Blog is at embedded.fm/blog. Chris Svec wrote a post about picking a processor platform.
Don’t Panic Geocast episode with Elecia
Elecia’a book: Making Embedded Systems
Compiler explorer is GodBolt.org
Imposter Syndrome: episode #24 is all about. And you might find #78 with Chris Svec relevant. Also: Adam Savage talking about overcoming self-doubt.
The RSS feed for all of our shows (not only the most recent 100) is http://makingembeddedsystems.libsyn.com/rss
We have a Patreon fund that buys mics for guests (plus the occasional goodie for us and our blogging team).
RTL-SDR: Software defined radio
Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) of The Amp Hour and Contextual Electronics joined Elecia and Chris for a holiday special Ampbedded (EmbHour?) episode.
Embedded will be having a Hats and Hacks party in Aptos, CA. You can come! RSVP on Eventbrite.
Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
Embedded blog (with Andrei Chichak and Chris Svec) including a post on podcasts we listen to
Hemmingway App, useful for making writing clearer and simpler
Tweezer sets make excellent gifts
The Way Things Work Now is an update on a classic book
Flybrix is a LEGO drone platform for learning control systems and flight robotics. The founder was on Embedded #157.
makexyz: 3D printing in your neighborhood
Video of Tesla seeing two cars ahead, having an accident
The LDC1000 has never been attached to a Bluetooth sensor
Free calculus book online: Single Variable Calculus: Early Transcendentals. There are other online textbooks approved by the American Institute of Mathematics.
Raptitude’s Maybe You Don’t Have a Problem
Isaac Asimov is a great inspiration: Medium Post by Charles Chu
Have you ever wondered how your programming tool works? Piotr Esden-Tempski and Gareth McMullin have built the Black Magic Probe and joined the show to explain how it works.
Kickstarter for Black Magic and 1Bitsy ends December 29th. If you missed it (or need a Black Magic v2 instead of waiting for v2.1) go to the 1BitSquared Store. For more in-depth information about Black Magic, look at Gareth's github repo. For more information about the 1Bitsey dev board, look at 1bitsy.org.
Contest! Tweet to @1bitsquared.
The YouTube channel about electronic teardowns was Mike's Electric Stuff: youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff.
If you want to say other hellos to Piotr, try his personal account: @esden. Or you can contact Gareth via Black Magic's Gitter channel.
Embedded.fm Hats-n-Hacks party will be 2-5pm on Saturday, January 28, 2017 in Aptos, CA. More details soon, including how to RSVP.
Miro Samek (@mirosamek) of Quantum Leaps spoke with us about making better state machines through actor objects and hierarchical state machines.
Miro wrote a book: Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++: Event-Driven Programming for Embedded Systems. He has an excellent YouTube channel explaining embedded concepts. We discussed his video that describes how a stack overflow works and the related in-depth post on EmbeddedGurus.com.
Elecia enjoyed his object oriented programming in C PDF for both the OO and the UML refresher.
Miro mentioned the Software Engineering Radio podcast. We mentioned our favorite podcasts blog post. Also, we talk about Jean Labrosse's recent episode of Embedded.fm.
We spoke with Chris Maury (@CMaury) about using speech recognition to interact with devices.
Note: Please turn off your Echo and Dots as we invoke Alexa a lot.
Chris is the founder of Conversant Labs. They created TinCan.ai which can help you wireframe or prototype a conversational user interface. They can also help you build Alexa Skills, though if you are so inclined, you might try it for yourself: Alexa Skills Kit.
Chris will be speaking at the O'Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco, CA in March 2017, giving a tutorial on building voice based user interfaces. You can read more from Chris on his Medium posts medium.com/@CMaury.
Exponent Podcast (techno-biz nerdy one mentioned in lightning round)
Some of the embedded devices Elecia mentioned:
We haven't gotten embedded.fm (or any podcast) to work with Alexa but we aren't sure why. Have you?
After a few announcements, we replayed the episode where James Grenning told us about Test Driven Development.
Note: the contest mentioned in the show is over. However, the SparkFun TinkerKit contest ends December 9th so you still have time to win something!
Other announcements include:
Chris and Elecia answer listener emails on-air.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
Toni Klopfenstein (@ToniCorinne) joined us to talk about what it is like working at SparkFun (@SparkFun) and why open source hardware is important.
Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA.org) has a certification program for open source hardware projects and products.
Some of the SparkFun products and posts we talked about:
Open Source Hardware Summit was in Portland, OR in October.
Hackaday Superconference was in Pasadena, CA in November. Their site has the 2015 videos available. (There was an Embedded.fm show about it too!)
Jean Labrosse of Micrium (@Micrium) spoke with us about writing a real time operating system (uC/OS), building a business, and caring about code quality.
Take a look at the uC/OS operating systems (available for free to makers) and Jean's excellent and free RTOS books (it was the Kinetis one that talks about the medical process). Also, check out the uCProbe which integrates with your debugger to replace some logic analyzer and oscilloscope features.
Jean's blog about detecting stack overflows: part 1 and part 2.
Brother to Brother by Gino Vanelli
We spoke to Evan Shapiro, CTO and cofounder of Knit Health (@KnitHealth), about baby monitors, IoT security, neural nets, and professional poker.
The Knit Health Kickstarter ends November 17, 2016.
Evan recommended Google Tensor Flow and Python's Theano for an introduction to machine learning. (If those sound familiar it is because Kat Scott mentioned them as well.) Evan also suggested that if you'd like to know more about the history of neural nets, check out this post by Audrey Korenkov.
If you'd like a gentle introduction, check out a Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule.
Evan mentioned some videos he did about poker, they are on Card Runners (NOTE: it is a paid site with free tastes).
Final quote was from Neil Gaiman's excellent Graveyard Book.