271: Shell Scripts for the Soul (Repeat)

Alex Glow filled our heads with project ideas.

Alex is the Resident Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io. Her page is glowascii and you might want to see Archimedes the AI robot owl and the Hardware 101 channel. They have many sponsored contests including BadgeLove. You can find her on Twitter at @glowascii.

Lightning round led us to many possibles:

There were more software and hardware kits to explore:

For your amusement Floppotron plays Bohemian Rhapsody

Alex gave a shout out to her first hackerspace All Hands Active

Ableton is audio workstation and sequencer software. Alex recommends Women’s Audio Mission as a good way to learn audio production and recording if you are in the San Francisco area.

There is an Interplanetary File System and Alex worked on a portable printer console for it.

Elecia is always willing to talk about Ty the typing robot and/or narwhals teaching Bayes Rule. She recommended the book There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.


383: The Monkey’s Not Gonna Work

Mario Marchese (aka Mario the Maker Magician) spoke with us about robots performing magic, humans performing magic, and writing a book about making magic. We also covered art, making, learning, Sesame Street, performance, design, humor, Piff the Magic Dragon [sic], magic secrets, and gracefully handling technological failure.

You can find Mario on:

His book is The Maker Magician's Handbook: A Beginner's Guide to Magic + Making.

We talked about Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, 19th century French watchmaker, magician and illusionist, and the amazing Aldo Colombini.

382: Playing In the Desert

Leah Buechley (@leahbuechley) spoke with us about the intersection of computer science and art. She is an associate professor in the computer science department of the University of New Mexico where she directs the Hand and Machine research group.

Her website is leahbuechley.com, her research group website is handandmachine.cs.unm.edu.

She wrote the book Textile Messages: Dispatches From the World of E-Textiles and Education and developed the LilyPad Arduino for wearable electronics.

We talked about Chibitronics, paper circuits, developed by Jie Qi  (who was on Embedded 277: The Sport of Kings talking about patents as well as Chibitronics)

We talked about Nettrice Gaskins’ Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom

An example of a tiny stepper motor on eBay

Introduction to VQGAN + CLIP to generate art

381: Mass Sponge Migration

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) discuss Blender, Make, TCP/IP, and listener questions (mostly about the podcast itself).

Lightweight IP: an open source TCP/IP stack for embedded systems

Look for Lazy Tutorials for Blender in Ian Hubert’s YouTube Channel or if you want something a little simpler, try the Blender Beginner Tutorial (donut!).

Ukulele and acoustic guitar kits are at StewMac.com

Book with sponge sneeze information: Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales

This episode was sponsored by InspectAR. If you design, debug, or just need to use PCBs, InspectAR can give you superpowers. It’s an augmented reality app and platform that allows you to visualize every layer, every connection, every aspect of your actual physical board in real time

InspectAR is free for trial and home use. With a subscription you get powerful collaboration and debugging features including annotating the AR view, sharing comments, setting up test and calibration procedures. Check it out!

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380: Trending Toward Telepathy

Adelle Lin (@Adellelin) spoke with us about wearables, art, playfulness, and getting together in virtual reality. Adelle’s website is touchtech.io.

For some VR get togethers, Adelle recommends AltSpace (altvr.com) and Mozilla Hubs (hubs.mozilla.com). Some other remote get togethers:

We mentioned the Nautilus jigsaw puzzle from Nervous Systems but actually have the smaller Ammonite one.

379: Monstrous Cable Corporation

Tom Anderson (@tomacorp) joined us to talk about floating pins, ADCs, and teaching and learning things. Tom mentioned Horowitz and Hill’s Art of Electronics and the vintage books on TubeBooks.org.

Tom wrote about  JFETs and vacuum tubes and Power Supply Filter Design for PCBs. He recommended the TI app note on floating inputs and a power supply book: Modern DC-to-DC Switchmode Power Converter Circuits.

You can find more of Tom’s writing on Medium and the Tempo Automation blog.

Other books:

Other Vintage Books:

269: Ultra-Precise Death Ray (Repeat)

Alan Cohen (@proto2product) wrote a great book about taking an idea and making it into a product. We spoke with him about the development process and the eleven deadly sins of product development. We did not talk about ultra-precise death rays.

Books we discussed:

Alan mentioned writing software graphically with Enterprise Architect


378: Pair-enting Programming

Nitya Narasimhan (@nitya) spoke with us about visualizing learning, visual storytelling, sketchnotes, and finding a job that satisfies.

Nitya’s sketchnotes are all available on the @sketchthedocs Twitter stream that includes links to the hi-res drawing, a time-lapse of the drawing being created, and a blog post describing the information in more detail. The hi-res images are also on github, or if you have fast internet to download them all: cloud-skills.dev. 

If you’d like to create your own visual notes, sketchthedocs.dev has resources for talks and books you might find helpful. More talks can be found from #VisualieIT 2020.

In July (links are not live until July 1, 2021), Microsoft and Nitya will be celebrating IoT with JulyOT including an introduction for beginners.

Nitya’s personal site is nitya.dev

BONUS: Your Cat's Not Part of the Band

On this quick bonus episode, Elecia and Christopher chat about their various recent projects, some of which have just been released into the wild.

Christopher’s band 12AX7 just launched their album Kickstarter, which was selected as one of Kickstarter’s "Projects We Love”. Check it out here if you are interested in finding out more or backing it. It’ll run through July 16th at 10am Pacific Time.

Elecia’s Embedded Online Conference talk on map files will be posted publicly on June 22nd, so be on the lookout for that. In the meantime, the slides and examples are available here at embedded.fm/blog/MapFiles (and on Github). If you’d like the map in poster form, it is on Society6.

If you’d like other Embedded merchandise such as a mug (many different options), Memory Map Land mousepad (or different poster), we have a Zazzle store.

Elecia’s lightning talk about origami, Snails, Paper, and Programming: A Computational Approach to Mollusc Morphology in Origami, is already on Youtube and you can watch it now! Elecia’s origami github can be found here.

Finally if you are interested in having your cat or cats appear in 12AX7’s upcoming music video, send Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud/whatever links to your clips, along with how you’d like to be credited, to show@embedded.fm. Use the subject line “Cats for 12AX7”.

377: Robot at the Park

Erin Kennedy (@RobotGrrl) spoke with us about learning new things, nice robots at the beach, lighting up fog voxels, and being part of the maker community.

Erin’s Robot Missions (@RobotMissions) was founded to develop robots to clean shorelines of plastic. Her personal website is robotgrrl.xyz (check out the project showcase). 

Erin also worked on a Hackaday Dream Team that worked on innovations to reduce the environmental impact of lost or abandoned fishing equipment.

375: Hiding in Your Roomba

Brittany Postnikoff (@Straithe) spoke with us about scary robots, neat stickers, and contributing to open source projects.

Brittany’s website is straithe.com and her sticker channel is twitch.tv/str41the. Her github repo has curated reading lists on technical topics.

She’s working at Great Scott Gadgets, maker of a variety of hardware tools including Luna, a toolkit for working with USB. (This was mentioned on a previous Embedded show, 337: Not Completely Explode with Kate Tempkin.)

And if you want Embedded merchandise like mugs, mousepads, and wall art, we have a store for you.

374: Getting Rafty

Tenaya Hurst Conklin (@TenayaHurst) discussed STEAM teaching tools and kits from RAFT (@RAFTBayArea). 

RAFT is at raft.net. The Abiotic Dissection activity is pretty amusing (from the STEAM Learning Sheets) as are the games in the idea sheets. They also have a summer camp and a Youtube channel.

Tenaya’s website is roguemaking.com. She was previously on Embedded 49: Is that an Arduino in your pocket?

142: New and Improved Appendages (Repeat)

Sarah Petkus offers to let her robot lick Christopher's leg. Christopher agrees reluctantly once we determine the saliva will be anti-bacterial hand sanitizer.

Sarah is a kinetic artist and some of her projects include a robot army (built your own from parts printed out or purchased at robot-army.com), Noodlefeet, and Carl (the flamingo of pendulum inversion). Her Zoness.com site is an umbrella for her drawn and robotic art. Specifically, you may enjoy her webcomic Gravity Road, her YouTube channel, and/or her Robotic Arts blog.

Some other topics we discussed:

Also, please check out our new embedded.fm/blog or if you prefer email updates, sign up at embedded.fm/subscribe.

373: Docker! Docker! Docker!

It’s another Elecia and Chris episode and this time we cover handling hourly work when the task doesn’t neatly divide into hours, using Docker (and Conda and Virtualenv) for development, growing the podcast, overdoing conference talks, and trying to find a new laptop. Phew!

The Embedded Online Conference is coming up the week of May 17th 2021, and Elecia’s talk will be Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code is still valid and mentioned early in the episode. Elecia will also put up a copy of her talk on YouTube after some time.)

372: The Motivation of Creativity

Anne Barela (@anne_engineer) spoke with us about working as an engineer in the US Foreign Service and writing tutorials for Adafruit. Anne has also written two books: Getting Started with Adafruit Trinket and Getting Started with Adafruit Circuit Playground Express.

To see Anne’s writing on Adafruit, check out her page: learn.adafruit.com/users/AnneBarela

We also looked at Adafruit’s Home Automation board.

370: This Is the Whey

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) spoke with us about cheese, making, work, the reverse engineering podcast, weather, and motivation.

Alvaro is a host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast. Some of his favorite episodes include #41 with Samy Kamkar, #14 with Joe Grand, and #23 with Major Malfunction. (Jen Costillo co-hosts the show and has been on Embedded several times.)

Alvaro works at Sofar Ocean, making oceanic sensing platforms. He has a personal website linking to his other exploits.

We talked about some Embedded episodes as well:

Also, we’ve all really enjoyed the Disney’s Mandolorian.

369: More Pirate Jokes

Chris and Elecia talk with each other about contracting, architecture, origami research, Digilent’s new oscilloscope, TensorFlow, map files, conference talks, art and the upcoming 12AX7 album.

Digilent sent us a pre-production Analog Discovery Pro ADP3450.

Elecia’s Origami Github.

Embedded Patreon

Embedded Online Conference talk Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code from Jacob’s show is still valid and Elecia will put up a copy of her talk on YouTube.)

12XA7, we’ll let you know when the Kickstarter goes live.

250: Yolo Snarf (Repeat)

Finally! An episode with version control! And D&D! Chris Svec (@christophersvec) joins us to discuss why version control is critical to professional software development and what the most important concepts are.

T-Shirts are on sale for a limited time: US distributor and EU distributor.

You can read more from Chris on the Embedded Blog. He writes the ESE101 column (new posts soon!).

If you are new to version control or learning git, Atlassian has a great set of posts and tutorials from high level “what is version control?” to helping you figure out good usage models (Svec mentioned gitflow). Atlassian has an interactive tutorial that lets you try out the repository commands (or try the Github interactive tutorials). Of course, there is a good O’Reilly book about git.

If you are using SVN (aka Subversion), the Red Bean book from O’Reilly is a good resource.

(Elecia's shirt said You Obviously Like Owls from topatoco.com.)

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