368: Amazing That Any of This Works

Al Sweigart (@AlSweigart) spoke with us about getting better at Python programming. 

Al’s book site is InventWithPython.com. You can find his books there as well as No Starch Press and Amazon. 

  • Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

  • Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python

  • Cracking Codes with Python

  • Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

Al’s personal site (alsweigart.com) has talks, videos, and a lot of code to look at. Or check out his github repo including the small text based games: https://github.com/asweigart/pythonstdiogames

Al’s YouTube Channel, including his Calm Programming series.

We also talked about:

367: Data of Our Lives

Dr. Ayanna Howard (@robotsmarts, wiki) spoke with us about sex, race, and robots. 

Ayanna’s Audible book is Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI. You can see more of her research from her Google Scholar page.

Find some best practices and tools for reducing bias AI:

Ayanna has recently moved from being Professor and Department Chair at Georgia Tech to be Dean of Engineering at The Ohio State University. Her current favorite robot is Pepper.

Ayanna spoke more about her robotics and trust research on Embedded 207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head (transcript). 

366: All the Wrong Tools

Laurel Cummings (@justblamelaurel) teaches people how to build what is required with the material on hand. We talked with her about how to engineer survival solutions on-the-fly, often while performing disaster relief. Also: what could be made with chewing gum and paper clips.

Laurel works at Building Momentum (buildmo.com). They are currently hiring.

Laurel spoke at SuperCon 2019 about Austere Engineering.

365: Barbed Wire Fence and Great WiFi

Cy Keener spoke with us about sensors, Arduinos, ice, and the crossover between art and science.

You can see some of his field work and gallery installations at his site: cykeener.com and on his vimeo channel. Cy is an art professor at the University of Maryland (bio, youtube)

Cy’s advisor at Stanford was Paul DeMarinis (pauldemarinis.org, Stanford page).

Arduiniana: a blog of useful Arduino libraries

We also talked about some custom sensors by Lovro Valcic of Bruncin (bruncin.com).


364: All the Abstractions

Jacob Beningo spoke with us about embedded systems, conference talks, writing articles and books, and best practices in development. Jacob is a consultant and instructor, see his website for more details (beningo.com).

Jacob is one of the organizers of the Embedded Online Conference, May 18,19, and 20. Session times is generally noted in Eastern Time (Americas). A coupon code for a discount on registration is in the show. Jacob will be giving a talk called Best Practices for RTOS Application Design.

He likes the full visibility of tracing, using the Segger J-Trace with SystemView or Precipio.

Jacob has written three books:

He’s also written many articles for Embedded.com as well as his own blog.

He recommends the IEEE Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). The SWEBOK is a free download from IEEE, which covers the best practices that engineers should be following when they develop software along with processes and strategies.

Jacob also recommends Renesas’ Synergy Software Quality Handbook that describes the processes that they used to develop and validate their software.

363: Squishy Nature

Alana Sherman of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI, @MBARI_News) spoke with us about engineering for deep sea environments and jelly creatures.

Alana’s MBARI page notes that she worked on DeepPIV and the Benthic Rover. She is also a part of the BioInspiration Lab.

Larvaceans: image search, short video, or (my favorite!) the long video.

It is probably too late to purchase tshirts but… in case it isn’t, here is the link.

362: Permutations of Underscores

Chris and Elecia chat about their projects, Python, choosing boards, social media, tshirts, and self care.

T Shirts are on sale until the end of February! To decode the titles check out the giant list of all embedded episodes.

Our social media empire is growing. Please follow us on any of these sites:

2021 Embedded Online Conference is May 18-19 & 20, 2021

Raspberry Pi Pico

Meaning of underscores in Python and Python CTypes

255: Jellyfish Are Pretty Badass (Repeat)

Ariel Waldman (@arielwaldman) spoke with us about how science, art, and all of the other disciplines can build a better world.

Ariel does many amazing things, it is hard to list them all.

Ariel fell in love with NASA while watching the When We Left Earth miniseries.

360: Cats Love It!

Ben Hest (@bombledmonk) of Digikey (@digikey) answered questions about finding parts, warehouses, packaging orders, and sweeping components off the floor.

The Digikey website: digikey.com. It is ok to click around, looking for a ton of information (as well as parts). 

Want to see someone search for parts? Limor at Adafruit does this every week in The Great Search videos!

Ben’s favorite new parts are the Raspberry Pi Pico and the Parallax Propeller 2.

Embedded T-shirts are available!

You could also have your own waffle paper maker: Geami Wrap.

Digikey is hiring for IT and Software Engineering positions! Check out their open jobs here.

359: You Can Never Have Too Many Socks

Thea Flowers (Stargirl, @theavalkyrie) creates open source and open hardware craft synthesizers that use Circuit Python for customization. She also writes about the internals of the SAMD21.

Thea’s synthesizer modules are found at Winterbloom, including Castor & Pollux and the Big Honking Button. It is all open source hardware so you can find code and schematics on Thea’s github site: github.com/theacodes 

Thea’s site is thea.codes. You can find her blog there with deeply technical and detailed posts such as The most thoroughly commented linker script (probably), The Design of the Roland Juno oscillators, and Understanding the SAMD21 Clocks. 

For more information about the Eurorack, listen to Embedded 356: Deceive and Manipulate You with Leonardo Laguna Ruiz of Vult.

358: Woodturning Influencer

Emily Velasco (@MLE_Online) spoke with us about artistic projects, retro-future aesthetics, and scientific communication. 

She shows and describes the projects on YouTube: Emily’s Electric Oddities including the Optical Sound Decoder, Port-A-Vid, Hairy Cacti, and the Lissajukebox.

Many of Emily’s professional writings can be found on Wevolver, usually redirected to sites where they are published.

357: How Do You Think Waffles Work?

Chris and Elecia talk about making albums, making progress, DIY shot reporting, getting credit, and project management.

Check out the Embedded transcripts (now with older shows appearing weekly!).  The Embedded Patreon provides the funds for guest mics, transcripts (new and old), and new shirt designs. Thank you very much to the supporters.

Thank you to our listeners for raising over $5000 for DigitalNest!

Books and articles mentioned:

Thank you to 2020 sponsors including Qt and Triplebyte as well as InterWorking Labs for their early patreon-business-level support.

253: We’ll Pay Them in Fun (Repeat)

We spoke with Kathleen Tuite (@kaflurbaleen) about augmented reality, computer vision, games with a purpose, and meetups.

Kathleen’s personal site (filled with many interesting projects we didn’t talk about) is SuperFireTruck.com. Her graduate work was in using photogrammetry to build models.

Kathleen works for GrokStyle, a company that lets you find furniture you like based on what you see. GrokStyle is used in the Augmented Reality try-it-at-home IKEA Place app.

356: Deceive and Manipulate You

Leonardo Laguna Ruiz of Vult spoke with us about modelling electronics, modular synthesizers, and modulating sound. We talked in detail about applied digital signal processing.

Leonardo’s website is www.vult-dsp.com. Check out the Freak Filter, the user manual alone is a course in signal processing. You can buy finished or DIY versions on vult-dsp.com/store. 

The physical hardware is a Eurorack module (wiki) but the Vult modules are also available for the VCV Rack, a Eurorack simulator that you can use to build your own modular synthesizer. 

Leonardo has a YouTube channel where he goes in depth on signal processing: youtube.com/c/LeonardoLagunaRuiz. He’s also written about modeling vintage analog sound on the Wolfram blog.

For more information about the Vult programming language (or an example for how to build your own, check out the github repository: http://modlfo.github.io/vult/overview/

This episode was sponsored by Qt, a cross platform application framework for desktop, mobile and embedded devices. That means you get a full set of libraries for nearly everything you can think of, plus a world-class GUI that will give you a native look wherever your code runs.

Try Qt for free at www.qt.io/download (qt.io/embeddedfm ! And check out Qt for MCUs!)

QT logo.png

355: Favorite Ways to Make Noises

Helen Leigh (@helenleigh) joined us to talk about music, electronics, books, and starting a new job at CrowdSupply (@crowd_supply).

Helen was previously on Embedded #261: Blowing Their Fragile Little Minds where we talked about subversive geography, her book The Crafty Kid's Guide to DIY Electronics, and the mini.mu musical gloves.

Helen has a book coming out in 2021 about DIY Music Tech including a soft version of the Michel Waisvisz' CrackleBox (Kraakdos). Check out some of the projects in HackSpace magazine issue 36 and 37 (the book will be serialised in HackSpace). Or look on YouTube for some examples of Helen’s purring tentacle and her circuit sculpture harp.

Helen mentioned Bunnie Huang’s Precursor, an open mobile phone, on CrowdSupply (campaign ending shortly).

The Giant German Congress mentioned is the CCC Congress Festival

Helen’s preferred thread (the one you can actually get) is Madiera’s conductive threads. Hit the contact link for purchasing. (Helen notes you can use it for both sides in a sewing machine!)


354: Better Snowmen in Finland

Becky Worledge of the Qt Company (@qtproject) spoke with us about application frameworks, organizing large code bases, and automotive regulations.

The best place to get started with Qt is the getting started page: doc.qt.io/qt-5/gettingstarted.html 

Or skip that and head straight for the code: github.com/qt

Maybe backtrack to see what is available: qt.io/product/features

Hmm, was there talk of Qt and Python? PySide was it? qt.io/qt-for-python

But wait, Qt for MCU? What platforms are supported? QtForMCUs/qtul-supported-platforms.html

Finally, don’t get eaten by a Grue, sense when they are coming: doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtsensors-grue-example.html

Qt6 is coming out Dec 2020. So maybe replace all the qt-5 in the links with qt-6 to see if it is ready yet!

Oh, and Qt is hiring: qt.io/careers

The quote at the end is not from Abraham Lincoln. (Quote Investigator). Still a good thought.

352: Baby's First Hydrofluoric Acid

John McMaster (@johndmcmaster) told us about the process of opening up chips to see how the processors are structured and what the firmware says. 

See John’s website for information on getting started (as well as digging much deeper).

John has given some interesting Hardwear.io talks including Capturing Mask ROMs and Taming Hydrofluoric Acid to Extract Firmware. His talks and many others are available on the Hardwear.io archive. Or sign up for the Hardwear.io Online Hardware Security Training, Berlin Jan 2021.

As mentioned in the show:


351: Dextral or Sinistral

Chris and Elecia discuss transcripts, lightsabers, seashells, python, numpy, matlab and how to get into embedded systems development.

Embedded show transcripts are available at embedded.fm/transcripts 

Elecia’s origami github repository includes a python script for generating origami shell folding patterns. The paper described was Analysis of Shell Coiling: General Problems by David M. Raup from the Journal of Paleontology , Sep., 1966, Vol. 40, No. 5.

Chris used this model to print his lightsaber: Star Wars Lightsaber (Normal version) from YouMagine

The episode was sponsored by Triplebyte. If you are looking to prove your skills, develop your knowledge, or find a job you love, check out Triplebyte.

TripleByteLogo.jpg