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.

375: Hiding in Your Roomba

Brittany Postnikoff (@Straithe) spoke with us about scary robots, neat stickers, and contributing to open source projects.

Brittany’s website is straithe.com and her sticker channel is twitch.tv/str41the. Her github repo has curated reading lists on technical topics.

She’s working at Great Scott Gadgets, maker of a variety of hardware tools including Luna, a toolkit for working with USB. (This was mentioned on a previous Embedded show, 337: Not Completely Explode with Kate Tempkin.)

And if you want Embedded merchandise like mugs, mousepads, and wall art, we have a store for you.

374: Getting Rafty

Tenaya Hurst Conklin (@TenayaHurst) discussed STEAM teaching tools and kits from RAFT (@RAFTBayArea). 

RAFT is at raft.net. The Abiotic Dissection activity is pretty amusing (from the STEAM Learning Sheets) as are the games in the idea sheets. They also have a summer camp and a Youtube channel.

Tenaya’s website is roguemaking.com. She was previously on Embedded 49: Is that an Arduino in your pocket?

142: New and Improved Appendages (Repeat)

Sarah Petkus offers to let her robot lick Christopher's leg. Christopher agrees reluctantly once we determine the saliva will be anti-bacterial hand sanitizer.

Sarah is a kinetic artist and some of her projects include a robot army (built your own from parts printed out or purchased at robot-army.com), Noodlefeet, and Carl (the flamingo of pendulum inversion). Her Zoness.com site is an umbrella for her drawn and robotic art. Specifically, you may enjoy her webcomic Gravity Road, her YouTube channel, and/or her Robotic Arts blog.

Some other topics we discussed:

Also, please check out our new embedded.fm/blog or if you prefer email updates, sign up at embedded.fm/subscribe.

373: Docker! Docker! Docker!

It’s another Elecia and Chris episode and this time we cover handling hourly work when the task doesn’t neatly divide into hours, using Docker (and Conda and Virtualenv) for development, growing the podcast, overdoing conference talks, and trying to find a new laptop. Phew!

The Embedded Online Conference is coming up the week of May 17th 2021, and Elecia’s talk will be Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code is still valid and mentioned early in the episode. Elecia will also put up a copy of her talk on YouTube after some time.)

372: The Motivation of Creativity

Anne Barela (@anne_engineer) spoke with us about working as an engineer in the US Foreign Service and writing tutorials for Adafruit. Anne has also written two books: Getting Started with Adafruit Trinket and Getting Started with Adafruit Circuit Playground Express.

To see Anne’s writing on Adafruit, check out her page: learn.adafruit.com/users/AnneBarela

We also looked at Adafruit’s Home Automation board.

370: This Is the Whey

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) spoke with us about cheese, making, work, the reverse engineering podcast, weather, and motivation.

Alvaro is a host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast. Some of his favorite episodes include #41 with Samy Kamkar, #14 with Joe Grand, and #23 with Major Malfunction. (Jen Costillo co-hosts the show and has been on Embedded several times.)

Alvaro works at Sofar Ocean, making oceanic sensing platforms. He has a personal website linking to his other exploits.

We talked about some Embedded episodes as well:

Also, we’ve all really enjoyed the Disney’s Mandolorian.

369: More Pirate Jokes

Chris and Elecia talk with each other about contracting, architecture, origami research, Digilent’s new oscilloscope, TensorFlow, map files, conference talks, art and the upcoming 12AX7 album.

Digilent sent us a pre-production Analog Discovery Pro ADP3450.

Elecia’s Origami Github.

Embedded Patreon

Embedded Online Conference talk Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code from Jacob’s show is still valid and Elecia will put up a copy of her talk on YouTube.)

12XA7, we’ll let you know when the Kickstarter goes live.

250: Yolo Snarf (Repeat)

Finally! An episode with version control! And D&D! Chris Svec (@christophersvec) joins us to discuss why version control is critical to professional software development and what the most important concepts are.

T-Shirts are on sale for a limited time: US distributor and EU distributor.

You can read more from Chris on the Embedded Blog. He writes the ESE101 column (new posts soon!).

If you are new to version control or learning git, Atlassian has a great set of posts and tutorials from high level “what is version control?” to helping you figure out good usage models (Svec mentioned gitflow). Atlassian has an interactive tutorial that lets you try out the repository commands (or try the Github interactive tutorials). Of course, there is a good O’Reilly book about git.

If you are using SVN (aka Subversion), the Red Bean book from O’Reilly is a good resource.

(Elecia's shirt said You Obviously Like Owls from topatoco.com.)

qc-yolo-art_compact.png

368: Amazing That Any of This Works

Al Sweigart (@AlSweigart) spoke with us about getting better at Python programming. 

Al’s book site is InventWithPython.com. You can find his books there as well as No Starch Press and Amazon

  • Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

  • Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python

  • Cracking Codes with Python

  • Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

Al’s personal site (alsweigart.com) has talks, videos, and a lot of code to look at. Or check out his github repo including the small text based games: https://github.com/asweigart/pythonstdiogames

Al’s YouTube Channel, including his Calm Programming series.

We also talked about:

367: Data of Our Lives

Dr. Ayanna Howard (@robotsmarts, wiki) spoke with us about sex, race, and robots. 

Ayanna’s Audible book is Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI. You can see more of her research from her Google Scholar page.

Find some best practices and tools for reducing bias AI:

Ayanna has recently moved from being Professor and Department Chair at Georgia Tech to be Dean of Engineering at The Ohio State University. Her current favorite robot is Pepper.

Ayanna spoke more about her robotics and trust research on Embedded 207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head (transcript). 

366: All the Wrong Tools

Laurel Cummings (@justblamelaurel) teaches people how to build what is required with the material on hand. We talked with her about how to engineer survival solutions on-the-fly, often while performing disaster relief. Also: what could be made with chewing gum and paper clips.

Laurel works at Building Momentum (buildmo.com). They are currently hiring.

Laurel spoke at SuperCon 2019 about Austere Engineering.

365: Barbed Wire Fence and Great WiFi

Cy Keener spoke with us about sensors, Arduinos, ice, and the crossover between art and science.

You can see some of his field work and gallery installations at his site: cykeener.com and on his vimeo channel. Cy is an art professor at the University of Maryland (bio, youtube)

Cy’s advisor at Stanford was Paul DeMarinis (pauldemarinis.org, Stanford page).

Arduiniana: a blog of useful Arduino libraries

We also talked about some custom sensors by Lovro Valcic of Bruncin (bruncin.com).