405: Bacta Tank for Your Brain

Chris and Elecia talk about burnout, a SPI + RTOS bug, newsletters, receiving feedback, Elecia’s class, and listener projects.

Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course on Classpert is starting a new cohort on March 19th. She gave a live talk related to the class about looking beneath the surface of Arduino (YouTube version). She’s excited about the Wokwi Raspberry Pi Pico simulator with C.

Want more interesting email?

Chris Lott wrote a Hackaday article about episode 404: Uppercase A, Lowercase R M with Reinhard Keil.

Elecia enjoyed Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen.

Serial Wombat peripheral expander for Arduino will be on Kickstarter soon

Chris wanted machine readable datasheets, listener Nick responds with Cyanobyte on github.

Infineon (previously Cypress) PSoC (wiki) is a chip/FPGA thing. We talked with Patrick Kane about it in episode 32: Woo Woo Woo

Transcript

404: Uppercase A, Lowercase R M

Reinhard Keil joined us to talk about creating the Keil compiler, the 8051 processor, Arm’s CMSIS, and the new cloud-based Keil Studio IDE. 

MDK-Community is a new free-for-non-commercial use, not-code-size restricted version of the Keil compiler (+ everything else). 

CMSIS is a set of open source components for use with Arm processors. The signal processing and neural net components are optimized for speedy use. The SVD and DAP components are used by tool vendors so there may be components you care about more than others.

Keil Studio is Arm’s new cloud-based IDE with a debugger that connects to boards on your desk: keil.arm.com. Reinhard talks more about the advantages of cloud-based development in this white paper.

Arm Virtual Hardware has multiple integrations, the official product page is www.arm.com/virtual-hardware. The MDK integration and nifty examples are described in the press release.

Reinhard mentioned the Ethos-U65 processor for neural networks. 

The Dragon Book about compilers

Transcript

403: Engineers Are a Difficult People

Shawn Hymel spoke to us about creating education videos and written tutorials; marketing by and for engineers; and bowties.

You can find Shawn teaching FPGAs, RTOSs and other interesting topics on Digikey’s YouTube channel. Shawn also has two embedded Machine Learning courses on Coursera (free!). 

Or start at his personal site: shawnhymel.com where you can find written tutorials like How to Set Up Raspberry Pi Pico C/C++ Toolchain on Windows with VS Code.

Shawn talked about Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. Macmillan. He referenced  Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne

Elecia enjoyed The Visual Mba: Two Years of Business School Packed into One Priceless Book of Pure Awesomeness by Jason Barron

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Transcript

402: We Are a Lazy Species

Chris Svec of iRobot and Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry join Christopher and Elecia to talk about the hows and whys of estimating software schedules..

The article that started the discussion was Agile Otter’s Platitudes of Doom

You can participate in these sorts of discussions on the Embedded Slack Channel by supporting Embedded on Patreon

On Phillip’s Embedded Artistry Website you can find a library of courses, hundreds of free articles, and even more member's only content. Their current focus is developing two new courses: Designing Embedded Software for Change and Abstractions and Interfaces. There are also many great posts on planning and estimation.

Transcript

278: Bricks’ Batteries Last Forever (Repeat)

Matthew Liberty (@mliberty1) shared good advice for lowering power. We talk about different ways to measure current (Matt has a nice write-up) and things software can do to decrease power consumption.

Sleeping is critical, of course, as is choosing your clock speed and setting the GPIOs to good states. Everything is fine until you start getting into the microamps, then your multimeter measurements may start to fail you. (EEvblog explains why in his uCurrent intro.)

Eventually, you may want to measure nanoamp sleep states along with amp-consuming wake states. Matt’s Joulescope is a tool to do just that (Kickstarter goes live Feb 19, 2019!), automatically moving between 9 orders of magnitude of dynamic range and graphing the results on your computer.

Matthew’s consulting company is JetPerch.

We mentioned Colin O’Flynn’s ChipWhisperer which uses differential power analysis for security attacks. We also talked about Jacob Beningo’s post on protecting your tools.

Elecia is giving away a chapter of her O’Reilly book, Making Embedded Systems. It is Chapter 10: Reducing Power Consumption. Hit the contact link if you want a copy.


401: Oil and Water

Miro Samek joins us to discuss designing systems, state machines, and teaching courses.

Miro’s company is Quantum Leaps (state-machine.com) which provides commercial licensing for QP Real-Time Embedded Frameworks.  It is an open source project, the code can be found on github: github.com/QuantumLeaps/qpc 

One of the key concepts is an Active Object which aids in real-time system development, especially in the areas of state machines and concurrency. 

Miro’s (amazing) Modern Embedded System Programming series can be found on his YouTube channel

You can also find Miro on Twitter: @mirosamek

399: Hey, What's Going On?

Jen Costillo joined us to talk about voice acting, reverse engineering, podcasting, and dance.

Jen’s podcast is the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, found in all your usual podcast places. Jen and her co-host Alvaro were on an episode of Opposable Thumbs podcast.

Find Jen on Twitter at @RebelbotJen (also @unnamed_show and @catmachinesSF). Rebelbot.com has her blog and Cat Machines Dance is her site devoted to dance (including the mentioned video about dancers and the pandemic).

The Hardware Hacking Handbook: Breaking Embedded Security with Hardware Attacks by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn 

Jen is studying voice-overs at VoicetraxSF 

Jen has been on the show many times in the past. Some of our favorites include

398: Clocks Get Into Everything

Tom Anderson explains radio frequency electronics (RF). Elecia and Christopher try to keep up. We also took a detour into bass guitar electronics.

One confusing jargon part is that radio power (in dBm) is discussed as though it is voltage. For example, 10 dBM is 2V peak-to-peak; there is an implied 50 ohm resistor in the P=V*V/R calculation. The the wiki for more about decibel-milliwatts.

Tom talked about dollhouses, aka Smith charts (wiki). (We also talked about Bode plots (wiki).)

Light travels about 1 foot in 1 nanosecond (11.8 inches, 30 cm). Admiral Grace Hopper is well known for giving out nanoseconds.

The guitar company Tom mentioned working with is Alembic.

Find Tom’s writing on Medium and the Tempo Automation blog. He is on Twitter as @tomacorp and was previously on Embedded 379: Monstrous Cable Corporation.

290: Rule of Thumbs (Repeat)

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

What are condition variables?

397: Owl

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).

293: Skateboard Tricks (Repeat)

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. 


396: Untangle the Mess

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.

Susie Hansen - La Salsa Nunca Se Acaba

395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong

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 

Fitbit’s Tower of Terror Bug

394: Being Four-Year-Olds

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:

With Unblackboxing Computers, HyunJoo is exploring sensors that can be made with copper tape on paper. The introduction video: https://vimeo.com/637626404/f670dff03e 

393: Don’t Drive My Baby Off the Table

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.

286: Twenty Cans of Gas (Repeat)

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.

ChipWhisperer on Hackaday

ColinOFlynn.com

Some FPGA resource mentioned:

392: It Was C++ the Whole Time!

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.

391: The Lesser of Two Weevils

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.

390: Irresponsible At the Time

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.