218: Neutron Star of Dev Boards

Dirk Akeman of SEGGER (@SEGGERMicro) joined us to talk about debugger specifics.

We recently did two other shows on debugging: a general intro with Alvaro Prieto and one with a focus on the development-system’s debugger software interface with Pierre-Marie de Rodat.

Herd immunity and find a flu shot

And, yes, we did bleep Dirk's answer for favorite processor because he later reconsidered the idea that he only had one favorite.

217: 10000 Pounds of Pressure

Bob Skala of Interactive Instruments spoke with us about very large servo motors, wind tunnels, and staying current in tech. 

Hydraulic Press YouTube channel (and our favorite video)

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

Other good tech podcasts included The Amp Hour and HamRadio 360 WorkBench

Chris talked about getting into WSPR in 197: Smell the Transistor but we first talked about it in 76: Entropy is For Wimps. The new WSPR mode he mentioned is called FT8 (google it).

And a note from Bob:

Below is a link to a type of servo system that tries to simplify the interface to be more like a stepper.  It integrates the driver and motor into a single package so you can treat it like a stepper with digital step and direction or serial commands.  You get the smoothness, speed, accuracy and low power (when idle) of a servo but the servo motor, driver, and cabling are integrated into one magic box.  You add a DC supply and simple control signals and you are all set.  They came out with this to replace stepper motors.  I haven’t used one yet but I hope to at some point.

https://www.teknic.com/products/clearpath-brushless-dc-servo-motors/

 

216: Bavarian Folk Metal

Carmen Parisi (@FakeEEQuips) joined us to talk about electronics and podcasts.

Carmen works on switching regulators. If you want to know more, he sent along some very basic application notes: How to Apply DC-DC Step Down Regulators (Analog Devices) and Switching Regulator Fundamentals (TI). The digital communication method with these switchers is the I2C-like PMBus. If all those make sense, dive a little deeper with chapter 9 of the online and free Linear Circuit Design Handbook. Carmen says the whole book is excellent for analog information. Also, the free chapter of the Art of Electronics is on power. If all that still makes sense, you may be Carmen if you can also write an app note like this one: Multiphase Buck Design From Start to Finish (Part 1).

Carmen is a host on The Engineering Commons (@TEC_Podcast). Some episodes you might enjoy are 93: Capacitors with James Lewis of KEMET (aka BaldEngineer) and 77: Remote Host Toast with Elecia White.

Some suggested books from Carmen:

Elecia mentioned How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic by Michael Jay Geier and promised a PID image from her book Making Embedded Systems. 

215: Heisenbugs

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) joined us to talk about the basics of debugging, from software to hardware.

Some of the programmer devices we talked about: SEGGER JLink and Black Magic Probe.

Chris mentioned a visual frontend for gdb called "Vulcan" but which is actually called Voltron. (He's got graphics on the brain).

How did we forget to mention the six stages of debugging?

Alvaro Prieto and Jen Costillo's new podcast on reverse engineering! And on Twitter as @unnamed_show.

Alvaro's Cheese Cave: making cheese and cheese-lapse photography of Brie aging.

Image uploaded from iOS (1).jpg

214: Tiny Sensor Problems

Kristen Dorsey explained MEMS sensors: how do they work, how they are made, and what new ones we expect to see in the future.

Kristen’s website is kristendorsey.com. She is a professor of engineering at Smith College and runs the MicroSmithie.

MEMS stands for microelectromechanical systems (Wiki). Used in some sensors, Galistan is a room-temp liquid with interesting properties (Wiki).

A few interesting MEMS applications:

One of Kristen's stretchy strain sensor, not MEMS (so you can see it)

One of Kristen's stretchy strain sensor, not MEMS (so you can see it)

212: You Are in Seaworld

Kwabena Agyeman joined us to talk about making OpenMV (@OpenMVCam), an easy-to-use camera and control module with built-in machine vision functions, all interfaced via MicroPython.

To learn more about computer vision, Kwabena suggested looking at PyImageSearch or reading the April tags code as it is a good introduction to image manipulation and matrix operations.

Some other interesting links:

211: 4 weeks, 3 days

Dennis Jackson spoke with us about making the career shift from software to embedded.

Dennis buys James Grenning’s Test Driven Development in Embedded C for his new hires and often recommends Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems. His tip that everyone should know was “Learn make!” and he has a reference for that: Why Use Make.

He suggested Joel Spolsky’s reading lists from Joel On Software, even the ones that don’t obviously apply.

Additional suggested-reading articles:

In his previous appearance on Embedded (#94: Don’t Be Clever), we talked about code complexity and measuring cyclomatic complexity. At that time he wanted a tool to monitor the code’s status. He has since found one: pmccabe.

Dennis currently works at Element Science.

 

209: Debuggerception

Pierre-Marie de Rodat (@pmderodat) joined us to talk about how debugger software works (and what compilers tell the debugger).

Pierre-Marie works for AdaCore on GNATcoverage (among other things). His github repo is pmderodat.

Note that the AdaCore sponsored Make with Ada competition is running right now but you still have time to enter! Last year’s winner, Stephane Carrez with EtherScope, made an Ethernet monitor for an STM32 board (github).

GDB supports Python scripting!?!!! 

DWARF is the most standard debugging data format. Before that it was stabs. To see this information in a Linux or Mac system, use objdump. (It is really interesting!)

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

208: What If You Had a Machine Do It

Elecia gave a talk about machine learning and robotics at the Hackaday July Meetup at SupplyFrame DesignLab (video!) and LA CrashSpace. She gives it again in the podcast while Chris narrates the demos. 

Embedded Patreon

Embedded show #187: Self Driving Arm is the interview with Professor Patrick Pilarski about machine learning and robotics applied to prosthetic limbs.

I have also written more about my machine learning + robot arm on this blog. My code is in github (TyPEpyt).

My machine learning board is Nvidia’s Jetson TX2. The Two Days to a Demo is a good starting point. However, if you are new to machine learning, a better and more thorough introduction is the Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course on Coursera. To try out machine learning, look at Weka Data Mining Software in Java for getting to know your data and OpenIA Gym for understanding reinforcement learning algorithms

I use the MeArm for my robot arm. For July 2017, the MeArm kit is on sale at the Hackaday store with the 30% off coupon given at the meetup (or in Embedded #207).

Inverse kinematics is a common robotics problem, it took both Wiki and this blog post to give me some understanding.

I wasn't sure about the Law of Cosines before starting to play with this so I made a drawing to imprint it into my brain.

Robot Operating System (ROS) is the publisher-subscriber architecture and simulation system. (I wrote about ROS on this blog.) To learn about ROS, I read O’Reilly’s Programming Robots with ROS and spent a fair about of time looking at the robots on the ROS wiki page.

I am using OpenCV in Python to track the laser. Their official tutorials are an excellent starting point. I recommend Adafruit’s PCA9685 I2C PWM/Servo controller for interfacing the Jetson (or RPi) to the MeArm.

Finally, my talk notes and the Hackaday Poster!

111: Potty Train Your Tamagotchi (Repeat)

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

 

 

78: Happy Cows (Repeat)

Chris Svec (@christophersvec) has an idea about adding empathy to software development. It is a good idea.

His blog is Said Svec. He works for iRobot and they are hiring. (Chris' email is given toward the end of the show but if you hit the contact link here, we'll pass along info to him.) 

Obligatory cat video

Embedded has an episode devoted to impostor syndrome. 

O'Reilly's Head First book series is pretty awesome.

Elecia is still talking about Thinking, Fast and Slow as a great way to understand brains. Chris Svec also recommends Make It Stick.

The Richard Hamming quote came from his address to the Naval Postgraduate School. The whole lecture is available on YouTube.

207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head

Professor Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech joins us to talk about robotics including how androids interact with humans.  Some of her favorite robot include the Darwin, the Nao, and, for home-hacking, the Darwin Mini.

Ayanna has a profile on EngineerGirl.org, a site that lets young women ask questions of women in the engineering profession.

Elecia has been working on a typing robot named Ty, documented on the Embedded.fm blog. It uses a MeArm, on sale in July 2017 at Hackaday.com, with coupon noted in show. (don't use PayPal to check out or you can't apply the coupon). 

Other robots for trying out robots: Lego Mindstorms (lots of books, project ideas, and incredible online tutorials!), Cozmobot, Dash and Dot. Some robotics competition leagues include Vex, Botball, and FIRST. 

206: Crushing Amounts of Snow

This week, we mix things up a bit. This is a joint show with the Don't Panic Geocast.  This episode explores what happens when electrical engineering meets geoscience in cold places. We’re joined by guest Dr. Sridhar Anandakrishnan of Penn State to talk about geopebbles, ice, climate, and more!

Fun Paper Friday: The Boring Company

205: Questions about Dumplings

This week we talked to Addie (@atdiy) and Whisker (@whixr), the Toymakers (@Tymkrs). They make electronics kits, videos, and conference badges.

Toymakers site (tymkrs.com) has a link to their IRC channel, videos, and Tindie store (including those amazing heart simulators, the easy to make Amplify Me, and Protosynth Midi).

Their reddit community is r/Tymkrs. It has a lot more information about the CypherCon 2017 badges. More about CypherCon at cyphercon.com.

Some of their ZombieTech podcast is available on YouTube (along with First Spin and Patch Bay, see the playlists to find grouped series). Note that Rabbithole is the name of their hackspace as well as the video series documenting project creation. Episode 200 has the violin we discussed.

We seem to have talked about a lot of other people on the show, especially shared friends and past Embedded.fm guests (some of whom were on ZombieTech).

Some fiction for you:

204: Abuse Electricity

Phoenix Perry (@phoenixperry) spoke with us about physical games. Phoenix is CTO of DoItKits (@DoItKits) and  

More about Phoenix:

Physical games are sometimes called Alt Ctrl such as at the Alt Ctrl Game Jam. 

Phoenix co-founded Code Liberation with Catt Small, Nina Freeman, and Jane Friedhoff. “Code Liberation catalyzes the creation of digital games and creative technologies by women, nonbinary, femme, and girl-identifying people to diversify STEAM fields.” There is an 8-part workshop in London in Summer 2017 (more info).

Some other interesting people:

How to Get What You Want wearables site

Yoga Pants

AutoDesk Fusion360

I know you only read the show notes because you wanted this link: Velastat LessEMF has the supplies for ghost hunting!

202: Flush and Your Inner Fish

Professor Alex Dean spoke with us about his ARM embedded systems books and @NCState courses.

Alex’s page in North Carolina State University’s department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

His book is Embedded Systems Fundamentals with Arm Cortex M Based Microcontrollers: A Practical Approach (ecopy available from the ARM Media site). It uses the FRDM-KL25Z as the example board throughout the text.

Alex also co-authored Embedded Systems, An Introduction Using the Renesas RX62N

His favorite RTOS is Keil RTX.  

We also mentioned about Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin and Flush by Carl Hiaasen

 

201: Accidentally Incredibly Dangerous

Shaun Meehan (@logiclow) joined us to talk about robot arms and stealth rocket companies. Shaun’s rocket startup is hiring; information about the job openings are below. 

Shaun’s robot arm is an ABB IRB-2000 (video of Fred). Elecia was reading How to Choose the Right Industrial Robot when Shaun emailed. He convinced her that the MeArm Pocket Size Robotic Arm is the likely best choice for her machine learning typer project (which needs a better name). 

All this led to a discussion of inverse kinematics, robot operating system (ROS), and OpenAI. SparkFun has a nice guide to selecting the right motor if the DC, servo, stepper section went by a bit fast. Elecia mentioned the TI Piccolo line as good motor controllers, assuming you aren't building an FPGA controller from scratch on your own.

Repair cafes are a thing.

Shaun was on The Amp Hour 220: Doctiloquent Dove Deployer where he talked a lot more about his robot pets. For more about Fred, the robot arm, check out LogicLow.com. Also, see Shaun's github repo, Fun with Flip-Dots (on hackaday.io), his intended page for big servos (Not Your Hobby Servo, also hackaday,io)  His personal site detailing new projects, motors, and fire-breathing dodo birds is ShaunAndKelly.com.  

Shaun recently enjoyed The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. 

Stealth Space Rocket Company Hiring Information

We are a small, highly entrepreneurial team of rocket engineers with deep technical expertise who love to build things and relish the idea of a grand challenge. 

Building on over a decade of technology development in rocket propulsion, structures, and avionics funded by NASA and DARPA, we are applying a fast-paced, hardware-focused, agile approach to space launch.

Are you an engineer, hacker, maker, or physicist who has always dreamed of building rockets? Come help us build the hardware and launch the services that will open the frontier of space to the next generation of entrepreneurs.

The company is in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. If you want to apply, email Shaun: space at logiclow dot com.