448: Little Squiggles All Around

Carl Bugeja makes actuators out of PCBs, puts them to work flapping origami bird wings (or moving robot rovers), and takes videos of the whole process. Oh, and get this, self-soldering circuits. 

First, origami: flap actuators video. Your source for the PCB actuators: flexar.io

Carl’s YouTube channel is filled with hardware, software, successes, and misses. Check out his tiny foldable rover and the self-soldering circuit. His projects are open source so you can find the information on github.com/CarlBugeja

Carl has a site (carlbugeja.com) and shows his projects on Instagram instagram.com/carl_bugeja

Elecia worked on a zero-heat-flux, deep tissue temperature measurement system.

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447: All Sorts of Weird Problems

We spoke with Chris Gammell about IoT, podcasting, relaxing, and learning. Chris works at Golioth.io. They have a neat blog that talks about reference designs, Zephyr RTOS, and making products.

We talked about ESP chips which are made by Espressif. The ESP32 line is RISC-V.

Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)

Some YouTube channels we discussed:

Want to know more about self-paced Making Embedded Systems? Sign up for the waitlist at Classpert.
Want to learn electronics? Check out Chris Gammell’s Contextual Electronics.

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446: World’s Best PB&J

Chris and Elecia talk about ChatGPT, conferences, online compilers, and Ardupilot.

Compiler Explorer: godbolt.org (and function pointer example)

Jupyter Notebooks with colab: colab.research.google.com/ (and one of Elecia’s origami pattern generator collabs)

Sign up for the Embedded newsletter! Support us on Patreon.

Conferences and happenings:


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445: I Do Not Like Blinking

We spoke with Charlyn Gonda about making things glow, dealing with imposter syndrome, and using origami.

Charlyn’s website is charlyn.codes, the projects we talked about are documented there. You can find her on Instagram (@chardane) and Mastodon (https://leds.social/@charlyn).

Adafruit came up a lot in this episode. 

Jason Coon’s Fibonacci displays are mesmerizing. Check them out on Jason’s website www.evilgeniuslabs.org or acquire them on Tindie. It can be controlled with the Pixelblaze.

Sonobe modules in origami

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444: It Is If You Do It Wrong

Peter Griffin spoke with us about operant boxes, juggling many projects, getting into embedded systems, and bottle rockets. 

When we talked about 3D printing, Peter mentioned the Maker Muse Clearance and Tolerance 3D Printer Gauge.

The book we mentioned was Hot Seat by Dan Shapiro (Embedded 125: I Like Cheat Codes).

Peter on Github

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Please note that Peter Griffin spoke with Embedded.fm as an individual and not as representative of Slalom Consulting or any other organization.  All views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are his own and not necessarily those of his employer or any other organization.

443: Vexing Machines

Chris and Elecia talk about photons, comets, patterns, other flying objects, and cameras.

Chris uses PixInsight for processing  and has an Ioptron Sky Tracker. Apologies to our southern hemisphere listeners because Polaris is not visible there. There are (of course) other ways to align and even in the northern hemisphere more modern trackers don’t necessarily need Polaris.

Star Exterminator: who cares what it does it has an awesome name. Though it does what it says (on photos, no real stars were harmed in the making of this podcast).

Jupyter Notebooks on a Circuit Python board.

Elecia’s Yoshimura sine pattern generating Python colab. Also, Rigidly foldable origami gadgets and tessellations is an excellent article about Miura-ori and other rigidly foldable patterns. You can see her patterns over on Instagram. (You can see some of Chris’ photos on his Instagram.)

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442: I Do Like Musical Robots

Adafruit’s Liz Clark (BlitzCityDIY) spoke with us about MIDI, music, and tutorials. 

Liz’s Adafruit Tutorials include

Liz sometimes hosts the Adafruit Show and Tell which is Wednesdays 7:30pm ET. Speaking of Adafruit videos, we mentioned the Fusion 360 tutorial on Snap Fit Cases.

Liz’s BlitzCityDIY YouTube channel shows her building instruments including her mentioned Melody Maker. She also has many 3D printables and github repositories under github.com/BlitzCityDIY

Christopher notes that there are browser extensions that allow a person to stop auto-playing GIFs.

VCVRack is a Eurorack simulator for synthesizer modules.

Sadly, Mutable Instruments has shut down.

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441: Ear Goobers

Chris and Elecia talk with Mark Smith (aka SmittyHalibut and N6MTS) about amateur radio, interconnect standards, and podcasting.

Mark is a host of the Ham Radio Workbench podcast. His company is Halibut Electronics (electronics.halibut.com). He’s been working on Open Headset Interconnect Standard and Satellite Optimized Amateur Radio (SOAR).

Find Mark as SmittyHalibut on YouTube, github, and Mastodon.

Chris talked about getting into WSPR in 197: Smell the Transistor but we first talked about it in 76: Entropy is For Wimps

Chris has spec’d out his intended project at QRP Labs, the QCX+ 5W CW Mini.

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440: Condemned to Being Perfect

Chris and Elecia talk to Jeff Gable and Luca Ingianni of the Agile Embedded podcast, discussing the definition of Agile, agreeing about some things, and disagreeing about others.

Agile Embedded can be found in your usual podcast locations or get it from the source: https://agileembeddedpodcast.com/

Jeff’s website is jeffgable.com and Luca’s is luca.engineer

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439: Ditches and Psychology

Chris and Elecia talk about house maintenance, blinking LEDs, paper engineering and more. 

Cutting Mobius Strips Video: Tadashi Tokieda cuts various combinations of loops and Mobius loops - with surprising results.

festi.info/boxes.py generates boxes for laser cutting (or other SVG consuming device). Boxes.py is a python module that lets you programmatically generate the SVGs. (Github repo)

Amanda Ghassaei’s Sugarcube is a MIDI instrument using this SparkFun button pad. We also talked about the Mikroe 8800 Retro Click.

Elecia is taking Paper Engineering with Kelli Anderson. Chris is taking songwriting courses from School of Song.

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Jellyfish and snail shells designed by Elecia. Purple coral is based on Vincent Floderer’s crumpling method (via Eric Gjerde instruction). All folded by Elecia White.

438: There Is Nothing That Is True

We talked with John Taylor about his book, how to handle data, and the open/closed principle of software development.

John’s book is Patterns in the Machine. It was mentioned on Embedded Artistry and is part of their Design for Change course.

John also has a blog (PatternsInTheMachine.net) and a github repo that is a companion to his book, showing the PIM framework.

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437: Chirping With the Experts

Daniel Situnayake joined us to talk about AI, embedded systems, his new book on the previously mentioned topics, and writing technical books. 

Daniel’s book is AI at the Edge: Solving Real-World Problems with Embedded Machine Learning from O’Reilly Media.

He is also the Head of Machine Learning at Edge Impulse, which makes machine learning on embedded devices simpler. They have a Responsible AI License which aims to keep our robot overlords from being too evil.

We mentioned AI Dungeon as an amusing D&D style adventure with an AI. We also talked about ChatGPT.

Daniel was previously on the show, Episode 327: A Little Bit of Human Knowledge, shortly after his first book came out: TinyML: Machine Learning with TensorFlow Lite on Arduino and Ultra-Low-Power Microcontrollers

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DALL·E 2022-12-08 15.37.51 - artificially intelligent robotic cricket planning the singularity


436: 20 GOTO 10

Chris Svec joined us to talk about kids programming and how well the Joel Test has held up.

Svec’s son (“The Kid”) developed an interest in programming by playing games. Most of his programming desires are around building games of his own. 

Any time we talk about kids and programming, Scratch comes up. It really is that neat and is The Kid approved. Some resources to get you started (actually, getting started is easy, you may want a book to do more than the basics):

Digipen.edu had two courses The Kid (and Svec) took. Both are free on YouTube:

Finally, in a shockingly unrelated twist, we talked about the Joel Test for determining the health of a software development organization. No determination was made on how good The Kid finds his current position.

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435: Sad Lack of Gnomes

Chris and Elecia take an in-studio vacation, chatting about what they’ve been doing. A few technical topics came up, entirely unintentionally.

Shirts are on sale

James Webb Space Telescope Pop-Up Card

Spicy Honey

Github Codespaces lets you try out some code bases 

Some quirks of C

How do breakpoints even work? (via Memfault’s Interrupt)

Our Mastodon handles are currently @logicalelegance@mastodon.online and @stoneymonster@mastodon.social.

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Thank you to Newark for sponsoring the show

359: You Can Never Have Too Many Socks (Repeat)

Thea Flowers 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. She’s on Twitter as Stargirl, @theavalkyrie.

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

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434: I Love It, It’s Exhausting

Sarah Withee spoke with us about using an artificial pancreas, learning many programming languages, and FIRST robotics.

More about the Open Artificial Pancreas System can be found at OpenAPS.org or in their documentation. Some other pieces we talked about include:

 To get involved with FIRST robotics, the place to start is FIRSTInspires.org

Sarah’s website is GeekyGirlSarah.com. Her programming language comparison tool is Code Thesaurus: codethesaur.us/

If you want to see small algorithms written in different languages, check out Rosetta Code

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433: Getting Mad About Capes

Michael Gielda spoke with us about Renode, an open source embedded systems simulator. It also simulates large distributed systems and network communications. 

Check out Renode.io and the boards supported by Renode and Zephyr on Renodepedia. Elecia played with the Nucleo F401 tutorial on colab.

Michael is the co-founder of Antmicro.

The ESP32-C3 is a commercial RISC-V core with WiFi and BLE.

We also mentioned Wokwi on the show. (And we had its creator Uri Shaked as a guest on episode 396: Untangle the Mess

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432: Robot Bechdel Test

Martha Wells is a science fiction and fantasy author. She spoke with us about her books (including Murderbot Diaries!), writing, and creating fantastical worlds.

Marth (@marthawells1) has won Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards for her work. We mostly talked about the Murderbot Diaries and the Books of the Raksura. Oh, and the Star Wars tie-in about Leia, Razor's Edge. And The Witch King is coming out next year, a brand new world. Heck, just look at her full catalog. Martha also has a blog and a website.

As often happens when book dragons get together, we talked about our hoards. Some books and authors that came up:

Tor.com is a fantastic site with lots of free fiction. Murderbot started there and has a few short stories that are otherwise hard to find.

There is a rare and sold out Subterranean Press edition of the Murderbot Diaries with illustrations from Tommy Arnold. See some of the illustrations.

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431: Becoming More of a Smurf

Jasper van Woudenberg spoke with us about hacking hardware, writing a technical book, and ethics.

The Hardware Hacking Handbook was written by Jasper and Colin O’Flynn (ChipWhisperer and episode 286: Twenty Cans of Gas). The site related to the book is hardwarehacking.io, you don’t need the book to play with some of the examples.

Jasper (@jzvw) is also the CTO of Riscure North America, a company that specializes in hardware security. They are hiring.  

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430: Broken Toys All Around Me

Chris and Elecia bounce from topic to topic, discussing life and work and occasionally answering listener emails.

Python can format code into equations in Latex with Latexify (as noted in this tweet) 

Interesting sensor: Sensing deep-tissue physiology via wearable ultrasonic phased arrays  

Turing Complete - a listener-recommended logic gate puzzle game for Steam. In the past, we’ve also talked about Zachtronics’ TIS-100 which is similar and Shenzhen IO which is at the circuit level. Oh, and there is The Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation.

A listener recommended the Agile Embedded Podcast, particularly the episode on technical debt.

News that Rollercoasters are triggering iPhone 14 and Apple Watch Crash Detection led to a mentions of a blog post about debugging Fitbit’s issues with rollercoasters and accelerometers.

Visual Studio Code for embedded systems development:

Don’t forget the VSCode Code Spell Checker extension.

From the notes for Elecia’s class:

Where to buy small quantity prototyping components

Having looked for an OLED display part in Live Class, I wanted to put together a list of where you might want to look for components, especially for the prototype stage. 

  • Adafruit and Sparkfun (and EMSL and a lot of other maker stores). If you are using their code as template or test code, look for their boards to see if you can use them.

  • Worldwide and large components distributors with local distribution:

    • Digikey is worldwide and they resell Adafruit and Sparkfun so if you don’t want to start with an “OLED” search on Digikey and sort through the results, well, you can start with easier prototype parts.

    • Farnell is a UK company though they have other names in other locations (Newark in the US and Element14 in Asia and Oceania). If they have your flag, you can probably get cheap shipping. Farnell is usually good for all of Europe.

    • RS Components is also new to me though they seem to stock Adafruit parts as well as general electronics. They have lots of distributors all over the world (including more in Africa than I usually see).

    • AliExpress is huge and worldwide, shipping from Asia. It is hard to find things but searching “Adafruit [part]” or “Sparkfun [part]” and you might find what you want… or a cheaper knockoff. Usually you want results in the Electronic Components and Supplies. Note: if it seems too good to be true it probably is.

  • UK has Pimoroni and Cool Components and OkDo resell Adafruit and Sparkfun as well as other pieces like BBC micro:bit and Raspberry Pi. These may work for European countries.

  • Seeed Studio has a wide variety of parts, the Grove and Components categories have parts that might be interesting. They deliver quickly and cheaply to Oceania and Asia. 

  • DFRobot is new to me but looks great. It was recommended for folks in Asia and Oceania. Their parts are resold through Digikey, Arrow, Farnell (Newark).  

  • Australia: Little Bird Electronics, Core Electronics, and Altronics

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