We spoke with Phillip Johnston (@mbeddedartistry) of Embedded Artistry about consulting, writing, and learning.
In the Embedded Artistry welcome page, there is a list of Phillip’s favorite articles as well as his most popular articles. Some of Phillip’s favorites include:
We also talked about code reviews and some best practices.
The Embedded Artistry newsletter is a good way to keep up with embedded topics. You can subscribe to it at embeddedartistry.com/newsletter
Chris and Elecia ring in the new year with a discussion of projects, hobbies, origami, DMA, music, and the new-and-improved Embedded.fm newsletter…
Pepto Bismol can be converted to metal bismuth (YouTube) which can be turned into lovely sculptures.
Chris liked his new book, Art of NASA: The Illustrations That Sold the Missions by Piers Bizony.
Elecia liked hers, Curved Origami: Unlocking the Secrets of Curved Folding in Easy Steps by Ekaterina Lukasheva
Guitar Fart Pedal (Kickstarter)
Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course will have a second cohort starting in March 2022.
Sign up for the newsletter if you want an announcement (at the bottom of the Embedded.fm Subscribe page).
Limor Fried of Adafruit spoke with us about engineering, education, and business.
Some new boards we talked about include the PyGamer and PyBadge (which also has a lower cost version).
TinyUSB, an open and tiny USB stack from Hathach.
In addition to the many excellent tutorials there are some interesting business related posts on Adafruit Learn: How to Build a Hardware Startup and How to Start a Hackerspace
Want to get more involved with the extensive, wonderful, and supportive Adafruit community? Join their Discord chat server or Show and Tell on Wednesdays 7:30pm (ET) followed by Ask an Engineer at 8pm.
Uri Shaked shows us Wokwi, his board and processor simulator. We checked out Arduino code in GDB and then looked at his simulator for the Cortex-M0 Raspberry Pi Pico.
First, you should totally look at Wokwi.com. As Christopher noted, signing up for an account shows you many other things. Then you can go look at the processors written in TypeScript in Uri’s Github repos: github.com/urish. Find Wokwi on Twitter (@WokwiMakes, Uri is @UriShaked). You can also find Wokwi on Facebook.
Uri live-coded development of the Pico’s RP2040, it is on Wokwi’s YouTube channel. You can find out more about the RP2040 or the AVR core in the ATMega family by taking his free courses on Hackaday: hackaday.io/urishaked (Scroll down for courses.)
Uri’s homepage is urish.org. You can find The Salsa Beat Machine there as well as some of his other projects. He has a blog there as well as at Wokwi.
Tyler Hoffman joined us to talk about developing developer tools and how to drag your organization out of the stone age.
You can use GDB and Python together? Yes, yes you can. And it will change your debugging habits. (You can find many other great posts from Memfault’s Interrupt blog including one about Unit Testing Basics.)
Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault (memfault.com), a company that works on IoT dashboards and embedded tools. On Twitter, Tyler is @ty_hoff and Memfault is @Memfault.
Control-R is a history search in shell commands (magical!). The fuzzy search tool discussed is FZF (probably even more magical!).
XKCD comic referenced: xkcd.com/1319
Professor HyunJoo Oh of GeorgiaTech spoke to us about paper machines, paper mechanical movements, paper sensors, paper tiny Jansen Strandbeests, and paper art.
HyunJoo is a professor at GeorgiaTech. She is the director of the CoDe Craft group. Some of the projects we spoke about can be found on the CoDe Craft Projects page.
PaperMech.net has demonstrations of different mechanical movements as well as FoldMecha which shows you what cardboard you need to cut out to make your own mechanical movement, including making a cardboard walker using Jansen mechanism (Theo Jansen (wikipedia) made the Strandbeest). HyunJoo recommends two books for exploring further:
The 507 Mechanical Movements book as a way to explore more mechanical movements
Paper Automata: Four Working Models to Cut Out and Glue Together by Rob Ives
With Unblackboxing Computers, HyunJoo is exploring sensors that can be made with copper tape on paper. The introduction video: https://vimeo.com/637626404/f670dff03e
Professor Carlotta Berry from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology joined us to talk about robotics, PID tuning, engineering education, ethics, her book, and standing up in front of a classroom.
Carlotta’s book is Mobile Robotics for Multidisciplinary Study (Synthesis Lectures on Control and Mechatronics).
She has a page at Rose-Hulman as well as a personal blog and a consulting site (NoireSTEMinist.com). She is an advocate for BlackInRobotics.org.
On Twitter, Carlotta Berry has a personal account (@DrCarlottaBerry) and a professional account (@NoireSTEMinist). She is also the @BlackInRobotics coordinator.
An explanation of Zeigler-Nichols PID tuning with pros and cons.
Colin O’Flynn (@colinoflynn) spoke with us about security research, power analysis, and hotdogs.
Colin’s company is NewAE and you can see his Introduction to Side-Channel Power Analysis video as an intro to his training course. Or you can buy your own ChipWhisperer and go through his extensive tutorials on the wiki pages.
Some FPGA resource mentioned:
MyHdl.org (Python!)
Debra Ansell joined us to talk about making light up accessories, patenting ideas, and sharing projects.
Debra’s project website is geekmomprojects.com, she’s @geekmomprojects on Twitter and Instagram. Her github repo uses the same ID: github.com/geekmomprojects/.
We talked about using coin cell batteries as switches. Many other accessories do this but one of our favorites was the Tiny Edge Lit Sphere.
Debra’s company is brightwearables.com. She holds patents US10813428B1 and US11092329B2.
Chris and Elecia chat about their current projects and ideas.
Elecia is teaching Making Embedded Systems at Classpert. The course is based on her book with lectures to extend the information, quizzes, homework, mentors, synchronous classes, and a final project. Starting Nov 13th, the first cohort is full but you can join the waiting list. The second cohort starts in February.
Elecia is also giving a keynote at Hackaday’s Remoticon! It is Friday Nov 19 and Saturday Nov 20. Tickets are free, get yours now! Jeremy Fielding will be the keynote speaker on Saturday. Hopefully, she’ll have figured out how to use spaghetti sharing as a metaphor for stacks and heaps by then.
The EP for Chris’ 12AX7 album is coming out soon: #ihateeverything. The cover art is generated with a GAN from this Reddit post.
Terrible Halloween jokes are collected on Twitter under the tag #EmboodedSystems.
If you’d like to support Embedded, check out our Patreon. If you’d like to sponsor a show, click the Sponsor link.
Tyler Hoffman joined us to discuss the issues associated with embedded devices at consumer scale. We talked about firmware update, device management, and remote diagnostics for millions of devices.
Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault (memfault.com), a company that works on IoT dashboards and embedded tools. (We will invite Tyler back to talk about embedded tools but someone was preparing a lecture on firmware update and device management.)
Tyler writes for Memfault’s Interrupt blog which has excellent advice including the mentioned article about Defensive Programming. You can also find him and Memfault on Twitter: @ty_hoff, @Memfault.
Elecia is teaching Making Embedded Systems at ClasspertX, a high-quality MOOC with video lectures, quizzes, exercises, synchronous discussions classes, and a portfolio-worthy final project. The alpha cohort starts in early November and the course will run again in Q1 2022.
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/
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.
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.
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
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:
Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynshi
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Hild by Nicola Griffith
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.
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
Throughline
Planet Money
Indicator https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money
Freakonomics
Podcasts with interviews and discussions about lives and careers
Conan OBrian https://www.earwolf.com/show/conan-obrien
Andy Richter https://www.earwolf.com/show/the-three-questions-with-andy-richter/
Fresh Air
Podcasts that don’t fit into a category other than “interesting”:
99% invisible
20000 Hz
Podcasts that Ingo didn’t mention but meant to:
The Daily: https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-daily
Software Engineering Daily: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/
The Bugle: https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/
Switched on Pop: https://switchedonpop.com/
Gastropod: https://gastropod.com/
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:
YouTube channel: Jeremy Fielding
Twitter: @jeremy_fielding
Instagram: @jeremy_fielding
Patreon: jeremyfieldingsr
Jeremy’s Industrial arm punching video
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
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