454: Printf Hello

Uri Shaked surprises us with a chat about silicon design when we were expecting to talk about a web-based board simulator. 

If you want to try your hand at silicon design, check out Tiny Tapeout, a way to possibly get your design on to real silicon. The digital design guide is a great way to start looking at how chips work.

If you aren’t quite ready for silicon, Wokwi has a Verilog simulator where you can learn to do the digital design. The Verilog Simon Game on Wokwi is amazing. 

Wokwi is a web-Based simulator, simulating processors, boards, and peripherals. You can build a whole system there, from Dancing Servos to 7-Segment display from 30  LCDs and Arduino Mega to Raspberry Pi Pico boards you can program in C when you click More Options on the front page. You can also create your own peripheral using the Chip API. Or learn to use Zephyr on Wokwi.

And now there is Wokwi for VS Code. 

All that and Wokwi is open source: github.com/urish

Uri recommends reading Relax for the same result by Derek Sivers

Previously on Embedded 396: Untangle the Mess

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453: Too Dumb to Quit

Nathan Jones has been talking about building command line interfaces, good design practices in C, creating MCU boards, wielding the PIC of destiny, and going beyond Arduino. As we are too lazy to attend the conferences, we asked him to give us the highlights. 

Nathan is giving two conference talks at Crowd Supply’s Teardown 2023 June 23-24 in Portland, Oregon:

He spoke recently at the Embedded Online Conference about Object Oriented Programming (well, really good design practices). He has a related github repository so you can look at the examples for yourself. He also gave a workshop on creating a simple command line interface (another excellent github repo full of examples).

Probably the best place to start is his Embedded for Everyone Wiki where he collects all the bits and pieces you might want to know about getting into embedded systems.

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452: Numbers on Computers Are Weird

Julia Evans spoke with us about how computers compute. We discussed number representation including floating point as well as Julia’s extensive collection of ‘zines and comics.

Julia’s zines about debugging, managers, Linux commands, and more are available on WizardZines.com. If you want samples, check out the comics section. Also, the experiments (aka playgrounds) are great additions to the zines (and fun on their own), letting you explore without changing your own DNS or removing all the files from your root directory. If you want to check out numbers, look at memory-spy (or from other sites like https://float.exposed/ and https://integer.exposed/)

Julia also has a detailed blog on jvns.ca and active github repositories. She was on Embedded 141: Malevolent and Trying to Trick You.

Sponsorship of this episode by Volta Labs, an MIT spin-off that is developing a novel lab automation platform for genome sequencing. We raised $20 million as part of our Series-A funding and are hiring for several roles related to embedded software. All roles are full-time, 100% onsite in Boston, MA, and require the ability to thrive in an early-stage startup.

  • Senior Firmware Engineer - Design/develop/debug firmware for our instrument platform. Requires strong experience with RTOS, C/C++, ARM-based microcontrollers

  • Tech Lead, Instrument Software - Lead design/development of instrument control software. Requires prior experience as a tech lead and strong experience programming control systems in Python on Linux.

  • Tech Lead, Electrical and Embedded Systems - Lead design/development of electrical subsystems and firmware. Prior experience as a tech lead, strong experience with electrical design / bring-up, and integration between firmware and electromechanical systems.

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451: From Concept to Launch

Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry, Tyler Hoffman of Memfault, and Elecia White discuss the software tasks that tend to fall through the cracks after the device has all its features but before it is in customers' hands. Noah Pendleton of Memfault was the moderator. 

You can see the video on the Embedded YouTube channel or directly from memfault (also see their other panels and webinars).

Memfault’s Slack Channel and Interrupt Blog are both excellent resources for embedded information of all kinds.

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Information about the panelists


450: Swimming Through Nutritious Slurry

Kari Love joined us to talk about soft robotics, robots in religion, and squishiness.

Kari co-authored Soft Robotics: A DIY Introduction to Squishy, Stretchy, and Flexible Robots. Her website is karimakes.com. She was previously on Embedded 189: The Squishiness Factor

One of the pneumatic drives that we mentioned was a Hackaday Prize Winner: FlowIO. Another was the Soft Robotics Toolkit. However, Kari recommended Amitabh Shrivastava’s Programmable Air (Crowd Supply page for Programmable Air).

Some search terms for getting started with soft robotics: “DIY Jamming gripper”,  “Positive pressure gripper”, and “bendy straw robot joints”. (That last one leads you to the delightful video Make a Robotic Hand with Straws.)

Polysense conductive dye for making sensors out of found objects. (On Hackaday.)

Simulation of Soft Bodies in Real World Applications (for squish and stretch) include SOFA, Abaqus, and DiffPD.

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An incomplete list of power systems people have used for generating soft robotic motion:

  • Pneumatic - air and vacuum

  • Hydraulic - using liquid

  • Electrical - using currents

  • Thermal - using temperatures

  • Cable control - using motor control

  • Magnetic - using magnets

  • Chemical - using reactions

  • Photonic - using light

  • Biological - using living cells

  • Hybrid systems - multiple sources in tandem

An incomplete list of things people have used to make soft robots:

  • Fabric

  • Silicone or other rubbers

  • Flexible plastic

  • Plastic films

  • Metallic films

  • Paper

  • Carbon fiber

  • Silly Putty

  • Shape-changing alloys

  • Electroactive polymers

  • Liquid metals

  • Gelatin or Gluten

  • Cell tissue


449: Soldering the Ukulele

Chris and Elecia talk about internetting your thing, motivating yourself with cheese, a pile of scrabble letters, an electric ouija board, and a supervillain origin story.

Elecia will be on a Memfault Panel on June 1, 2023: From Concept to Launch: What It Takes to Build and Ship a New Device 

Elecia was on Alpenglow’s Industries Solder Sesh #60 with Carrie Sundra. See the highlights (or the whole thing) on YouTube.

Chris has been working on building a baritone ukulele from a StewMac kit.

The conversation about uninteresting projects reminded Elecia of one of her favorite blog posts: Resilience Is a Skill 

Classpert will be offering a self-paced version of Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course. Sign up on Classpert to be notified about the details.

The O’Reilly Learning System will have the first looks of the second edition of Making Embedded Systems. The full book should be out in the fall.

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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