312: Two Meter Exhaust Port

Chris and Elecia talked through how security holes can get explored on a fictional product.

Thanks to an Embedded listener who enjoyed hearing from Jacob Martinez about helping young adults have access to technology, we have a grant to match donations to DigitalNEST up to $2500. Donate here: give.digitalnest.org/embeddedfm

We talked through OWASP Top 10 Embedded Application Best Practices but OWASP Internet of Things and OWASP Mobile Security are also very useful.

GREAT explanation of buffer overflow attacks by Coen Goedegebure

XKCD Little Bobby Tables


204: Abuse Electricity (Repeat)

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

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!

311: Attack Other People's Refrigerators

Rick Altherr (@kc8apf) spoke with us about firmware security and mentoring.

Rick is a security researcher at Eclypsium. His personal website is kc8apf.net.

Rick’s deeply technical dive into reverse engineering car ECUs and FPGA bitstreams was on the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, episode 24. He also spoke with Chris Gammell The Amp Hour 357 about monitoring servers, many many servers.

Firmware security links:

Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters, particularly to our corporate patron, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).


310: While Loops Dressed up for Halloween

Aimee Lucido (@AimeeLucido) is a software engineer and children’s book author. Her first book is Emmy in the Key of Code about music, learning to code, and fitting in. We spoke with Aimee about writing, programming, publishing, and putting beautiful words together.

You can get a copy of Emmy in the Key of Code from Booksmith, IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Target, or Amazon. The music playlist can be found in Google Play or Spotify.

Aimee’s website is aimeelucido.com. She also writes crossword puzzles for American Values Club and New Yorker.

Some other authors and books we talked about:

After the show, I asked Aimee about resources for learning to read as a writer, she suggested looking at the KidLit Craft Blog.

Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters, particularly to our corporate patreon, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).

309: Nature's Engineers

Pete Staples of Blue Clover Devices (bcdevices.com, @theiotodm) spoke with us about tools for manufacturing hardware. 

Some posts and products from Blue Clover Devices:

Behind the scenes at factories:

Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters, particularly to our corporate patron, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).

308: More Energy

Jacob Martinez (@jacobotech) spoke with Elecia about DigitalNEST (@DigiNEST), a non-profit devoted to giving high school and college age students access to technology, job training, and career development. DigialNEST is based in the agricultural communities of Salinas and Watsonville, CA.

Students who work through the course tracks at DigitalNEST can be invited to join the BizzNEST consulting group.

The conference we spoke of was NEST Flight (nestflight.org), held in September in Watsonville.

DigitalNEST is a non-profit and is accepting individual and corporate donations: digitalnest.org/donate/.

306: What Is in the Magic Box?

Dr. Loretta Cheeks (@loretta_cheeks) spoke with us about implicit bias in text, machine learning, getting a PhD, and STEAM outreach via Strong Ties (strongtiesaz.org).

Also see:

Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters for Loretta’s mic, particularly to our corporate patron, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).

305: Humans Have a Terrible Spec Sheet

Amanda “w0z” Wozniak (@kainzowa) spoke with us about her career through biomedical engineering and startups. 

Amanda contributed a chapter to Building Open Source Hardware: DIY Manufacturing. (A book we spoke with Alicia Gibb about in #289.) Amanda’s chapter was titled Design Process: How to Get from Nothing to Something.

For more information about the companies we discussed, check out Amanda’s LinkedIn page. 

304: ADC Channel Six

What do you get when you connect the open-source reverse engineer of Valve’s Steam Controller and the main electrical engineer of said device?

Jeff Keyzer (@mightyohm) and Gregory Gluszek (@greggersaurus) join us to talk about building and taking apart devices.

Greg’s project is on github as the OpenSteamController. He used pinkySim, an ARM simulator.

Jeff has left Valve and is now a freelance engineer as well as selling kits on mightyohm.com. The incredibly useful comic on how to solder lives there: mightyohm.com/soldercomic

I-Opener was the computer discussed.

303: Kids, Turn in Your Chips

Jay Carlson (@jaydcarlson) is back on the show to discuss education and the techniques he’s using to teach embedded systems.

Jay has some great posts on his jaycarlson.net blog. The one related to this show was entitled “How I Teach Embedded Systems.” Jay was also on Embedded 226: Camp AVR Vs. Camp Microchip where we discussed his fantastic survey of micros in The Amazing $1 Microcontroller. We also mentioned one of his recent posts about 3 cent micros.

Teaching has many different approaches. We talked about Bloom’s taxonomy and mentioned the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. 

51: There Is No Crying in Strcpy (Repeat)

Jen Costillo (@rebelbotjen) joins Elecia and Christopher to discuss their experiences interviewing (both as interviewer and interviewee).

Elecia did an hour long webinar on how to conduct technical interviews. In this show, she mentions a good post-interview ratings system.

Google discovered that their brainteasers are not a very effective way to interview.

Despite the news that swearing is good for you, we tried to bleep everything.

Also, it is minesweeper, not minefield. What were we thinking? It was obviously all Christopher’s fault. Though we should have stood up to him. 

Elecia's book has more interview questions but from the perspective of how do you ask a question and what do you look for in a response.

PartsOfAnISRBingo.jpg


301: Giant Novelty Check

Carter Frost spoke with us about the Cabrillo College Robotics club and winning the 2019 NASA Swarmathon.

Cabrillo has many student clubs. Cabrillo Robotics has a Facebook page and is @CabrilloRobotic on Twitter.

The club gets its funding from the Cabrillo Foundation (to donate, make sure to note “Cabrillo Robotics Club” in your contribution).

Please RSVP for the Embedded 300 party on Eventbrite.com.


300: Introverts Disperse!

Christopher and Elecia talk about the upcoming Embedded 300 party (Sept 7th!), podcasting, and listener emails.

Please RSVP for the party. If you didn’t hear the link in the show or don’t recall it, contact us. Thank you to iRobot for sending us Root Robots as prizes!

Embedded Patreon

Merchandise!

We send the Samson Meteor as our guest mic.

Thank you for listening!

299: Reasonably Foreseeable Misuse

Monk Eastman (@MonkFunkster) joined us for an enlightening conversation about hardware compliance engineering. We covered the basics of CE, FCC, UL, and battery certification. 

We mentioned that Alan Cohen’s Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market has a good overview of certification. Alan was on Embedded 269: Ultra-Precise Death Ray.

For a deeper view of compliance engineer, Monk suggested this book: Electrical Product Compliance and Safety Engineering.

Listener Skippy wrote about his experience with CE certification.

Monk plays bass saxophone in the East Bay Brass Band.

Details on registering for the Embedded 300 party on Eventbrite.com are in the show itself.

298: In the Cow Case

Eric Brunning (@deeplycloudy) returns to talk about doing science in the field in this crossover episode with the Don’t Panic GeoCast’s John Leeman (@geo_leeman). 

Eric is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech University specializing in storm electrification and lightning. We spoke with Eric on 268: Cakepan Interferometry about lightning and using baking goods as measurement devices. Eric was also on GeoCast 134: Launching Balloons out of a UHaul.

We spoke with John about his Phd research in 169: Sit on Top of a Volcano. The previous Don’t Panic GeoCast crossover was with John and Sridhar Anandakrishnan in 206: Crushing Amounts of Snow. John’s company is Leeman Geophysical.

The paper was Reconstructing David Huffman’s Legacy in Curved-Crease Folding by Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine and Duks Koschitz. Elecia is working her way through Erik Demaine’s Phd thesis on the same topic as well as Jun Mitani’s excellent book Curved-Folding Origami Design. Geology also has folds.

For 3D printed origami, Eric mentioned Henny Seggerman’s twitter @henryseg.


297: Mice to Do My Bidding

Chris Svec (@christophersvec) spoke to us about how hope can improve our software and work environments. 

Chris is the author of Embedded Software Engineering 101 blog and has been on the show several times since his first appearance in 78: Happy Cows.

He mentioned Seth Godin’s Three Wishes post. We talked attentional focus and passing basketballs.

Details for the Embedded Cats and Hacks party are in the show. If you can’t attend, well, maybe you can still get a mug (zazzle). If you can attend, iRobot has graciously given us a couple Root robots that we’ll be giving away.

296: Train Me Later

Shruthi Jaganathan spoke with us about recycling, machine learning, and the Jetson Nano (@NVIDIAEmbedded).

More about the Green Machine, the computer vision, machine learning, augmented reality way to sort your lunch leavings. The code is available. The system was on a Jetson TX2 developer kit and Shruthi has been moving it to the physically smaller and only $99 Jetson Nano developer kit (buy). 

Shruthi has been getting into AI with the Jetson Two Days to a Demo as well as NVIDIA’s free Getting Started with AI on the Jetson Nano online course.

For more information about FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), we talked about it with Derek Fronek on Embedded 257: Small Parts Flew Everywhere.


295: In the Key of Lime

This week we talk about CircuitPython (@CircuitPython) with @adafruit’s Kattni Rembor (@kattni) and Scott Shawcroft (@tannewt). 

The suggested first board is CircuitPlayground Express with LEDs, sensors, and buttons. CircuitPython is also available for many other boards including the BLE Feather (NRF52832).

For a basic introduction take a look at What is CircuitPython and see some example scripts. To dig a little deeper, check out the many resources in Awesome CircuitPython. The whole thing is open source so you can see their code. If you are thinking about contributing (or just want some fun chats), get in touch on the CircuitPython channel of the Adafruit Discord server: adafru.it/discord

Many of the language’s design choices favor ease-of-use over ready-for-production. Imagine teaching an intro to programming class without worrying what computers will be used or how to get compilers installed on everyone’s machines before time runs out. 

One final note: Kattni did a project that gave us the show title: Piano in the Key of Lime. After we finished recording, Chris asked her why she didn’t add a kiwi fruit to her mix… Kattni explained she had limes and they were small. Chris only wanted a different fruit so she could rename it Piano in the Kiwi of Lime. It is always sad when we stop recording too early.