317: What Do You Mean by Disintegrated?

We were joined in the studio by the Evil Mad Scientists Lenore Edman (@1lenore) and Windell Oskay (@oskay).

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) produces the disintegrated 555 Timer kit and 741 Op-Amp  kit. These were made in conjunction with Eric Schlaepfer, who also created the Monster 6502. 

EMSL also makes the Eggbot kit and AxiDraw not-kit (and mini-kit). For a history of the pen plotter, check out Sher Minn’s Plotter People talk on YouTube.

(They have too many neat things to list here, go look on their page: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/directory. Or stop into their Sunnyvale, California shop.)

We talked about the beauty of boards including Kong Money and ElectroCookie’s candy colored shields and Arduino Leonardo.

Jepson Herbarium has interesting workshops including one about seaweed. At one workshop, Lenore and Windell got to talk to Josie Iselin, author of The Curious World of Seaweed. 

Elecia enjoyed Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us by Ruth Kassinger.

Windell was previously on Embedded episode #124: Please Don’t Light Yourself on Fire, we mainly talked about the book he co-authored: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory.

Lenore was previously on Embedded episode #40: Mwahaha Session, we talked about EMSL.

Our post-show tidepooling was very successful with a variety of nudibranchs, shrimp, seaweed, sea birds, snails, and hermit crabs.

Transcript

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315: Trespassers William

Chris and Elecia talk with each other about non-work activities including music, office rearrangement, and origami.

The Solarbotics Squid Hunting CearouSol Kit

Samson S-patch plus 48-Point Balanced Patchbay

Waldorf Blofeld Synthesizer

EarthQuaker Devices Rainbow Machine V2 Polyphonic Pitch-shifting Modulator Pedal (with Magic knob)

Artelino is a Japanese print auction house


Thank you to the Embedded Patreon supporters!

314: Why Are Wings Needed in Space?

Mohit Bhoite (@MohitBhoite) makes functional electronic sculptures from components and brass wire. We spoke with him on the hows and whys of making art.

Mohit’s sculptures, including the Tie Fighter. More on his instagram: mohitbhoite

Jiri Prause has a wonderful tutorial on how to make simpler freeform electronics on Instructables.

Peter Vogel is another artist making phenomenal freeform electronics.

Leonardo Ulian uses electronic components in his art (his don’t function but wow).

Advice from Mohit on trying this yourself from Bantam Tools. Mohit likes Xuron Pliers

Donate to DigitalNest by the end of 2019 and get your donation matched! Thank you to the listener who is doing the match!

313: Where the Paper Knows It Needs to Fold

Robert J. Lang spoke with us about origami, art, math, and lasers.

Robert has many origami books, here is a subset:

Robert’s website langorigami.com is full of neat goodies:

Suggested other books:

Origamido has a number of books. Robert uses Origamido paper but it is unobtanium to most people. Unless you are in Maine.

(Note: book links are affiliate links, we get a little kickback if you buy from there.)

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!