389: Blobs Are Not Stressful

Alpenglow’s Carrie Sundra spoke with us about frivolous circuits, solder live streaming, and yarn.

Alpenglow Industries sells frivolous circuits, some pre-built (like FUnicorn) and some are buildables such as the cute but evil heart soldering kits called PS-I Hate You.

Carrie’s YouTube channel is alpenglowindustries where she livecasts Wednesday afternoon Pacific Time. You can still watch the Blob Solder sesh with Debra of GeekMomProjects. Please send pictures of your blobs. One of the recent videos talked about Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators. Our favorite is Arcade.

Alpenglow Yarn sells electronic-based tools for dyers and yarn creators. 

On Twitter:@alpenglowind @alpenglowyarn @frivolous_circs

On Instagram:@alpenglowind @alpenglowyarn

Alpenglow also has a Tindie store: alpenglow/ 

275: Don’t Do What the Computer Tells You (Repeat)

Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) shared truly weird responses from AIs. Her website is AIWeirdness.com where you can find machine-learning-generated ideas for paint colors, ice cream, and cocktails (and many other things). We never said they were good ideas.

Janelle’s FAQ will help you get started trying out RNNs yourself. We recommend the Embedded show titles.

We talked about BigGAN which generates pictures based on input images.

Wikipedia list of animals by number of neurons

Janelle’s book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. Sign up for her newsletter to get the PG-13 versions of her hilarious AI outputs.


388: Brains Generate EMF

Alan Cohen joined us to talk about brain waves, medical product development, open source, and helpful engineering.

Alan has been working on VolksEEG (volkseeg.org, github.com/VolksEEG/VolksEEG). This is an EEG (wiki Electroencephalography) which detects brain waves. It uses the TI ADS1299 EEG monitoring chip and the Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense.

Alan wrote Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market, published by O’Reilly. He talked about it on a previous episode: 269: Ultra-Precise Death Ray You can find him on twitter as @proto2product  and on LinkedIn. 

Helpful Engineering (helpfulengineering.org) aims to deliver more open source solutions to society’s systemic challenges.

387: Bucket of Spiders

Chris and Elecia discuss civic duties, the CAN bus, fulfilling Kickstarter orders, and the answers to a series of questions about embedded systems.

Elecia was recently introduced to TRIZ inventive principles (wikipedia page) and started reading And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared: TRIZ: Theory of Inventive Problem Solving by Genrich Altshuller.

You can support the show by becoming a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/embedded 

Or your company can sponsor a show, see the Sponsor page of embedded.fm

235: Imagine That, Suckers! (Repeat)

We spoke to author Robin Sloan about his books and near-future science fiction.

Robin wrote Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

Find Robin on twitter as @robin_____sloan. Robin’s website is robinsloan.com. Go there for some short stories, sign up for his newsletter and check out his new ‘zine (also at wizard.limo). Oh! Don’t forget his blog, including a description of his neural net for audio generation and for writing.

Some books Robin suggested:

230: What the Hell Is Wrong with Unicorns? (Repeat)

Sunshine Jones spoke with us about synthesizers, electronics, and philosophy.

Find him on twitter @Sunshine_Jones and instagram at sunshine_jones_

Sunshine’s music is most easily found at TheUrgencyOfChange.com. His writing is at Sunshine-Jones.com.

We talked about Sunshine’s User’s Guide to the Roland SE-02. That includes Ahmed, a track produced using only the SE-02.

Sunshine also wrote about building a polysynth.

The intro music is an excerpt from LELEK, released on Air Texture Vol. V. The exit music is Fall In Love Not In Line, released this year on vinyl only, TUOC01. See TheUrgencyOfChange.com for more.

Sunshine was the host of SundaySoul.com, a live podcast about music and life.

386: Not Managing Robots

Ingo Muschenetz spoke with us about software, management, podcasts, and interacting with people. 

Ingo’s LinkedIn page

Ingo works for Axway, they are hiring: Axway Careers

Ingo keeps up with many podcasts, here are some of his favorites:

Podcasts that talk about a complex topic, provide insight

Podcasts with interviews and discussions about lives and careers

Podcasts that don’t fit into a category other than “interesting”:

Podcasts that Ingo didn’t mention but meant to:

385: I Just Wanted an Industrial Arm

Jeremy Fielding spoke with us about mechanical engineering, robotics, robot operating system, YouTube, and solving problems.

You can find all of Jeremy’s links on his main site: jeremyfielding.com but here are a few short cuts:

Jeremy’s Industrial arm punching video

Elecia’s typing robot

Jeremy had a neat way to go about solving a problem. He called it Dr. FARM:

  • D Define the problem

  • R Research other solutions, partial solutions, terminology

  • F Function: what do I want it to do?

  • A Appearance: what should it look like?

  • R Risk: is anyone going to get hurt in manufacture and function?

  • M Model: prototype the design

AR3 Open Source Control Software and a version with ROS MoveIt

384: What's a Board File?

Liam Cadigan joined us to talk about founding a successful startup from a college capstone project. Liam is a co-founder of InspectAR and worked on the board files the system uses.

Liam can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Check out InspectAR. They are also on Twitter and on Instagram.

The Inventor's Dilemma: The Remarkable Life of H. Joseph Gerber

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!

60b13a86c9696c5ab876d045_Blue Logo.png


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.