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.

389: Blobs Are Not Stressful

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/ 

275: Don’t Do What the Computer Tells You (Repeat)

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.


388: Brains Generate EMF

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.

387: Bucket of Spiders

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

235: Imagine That, Suckers! (Repeat)

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:

230: What the Hell Is Wrong with Unicorns? (Repeat)

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.

386: Not Managing Robots

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

Podcasts with interviews and discussions about lives and careers

Podcasts that don’t fit into a category other than “interesting”:

Podcasts that Ingo didn’t mention but meant to:

385: I Just Wanted an Industrial Arm

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:

Jeremy’s Industrial arm punching video

Elecia’s typing robot

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

384: What's a Board File?

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

271: Shell Scripts for the Soul (Repeat)

Alex Glow filled our heads with project ideas.

Alex is the Resident Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io. Her page is glowascii and you might want to see Archimedes the AI robot owl and the Hardware 101 channel. They have many sponsored contests including BadgeLove. You can find her on Twitter at @glowascii.

Lightning round led us to many possibles:

There were more software and hardware kits to explore:

For your amusement Floppotron plays Bohemian Rhapsody

Alex gave a shout out to her first hackerspace All Hands Active

Ableton is audio workstation and sequencer software. Alex recommends Women’s Audio Mission as a good way to learn audio production and recording if you are in the San Francisco area.

There is an Interplanetary File System and Alex worked on a portable printer console for it.

Elecia is always willing to talk about Ty the typing robot and/or narwhals teaching Bayes Rule. She recommended the book There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.


383: The Monkey’s Not Gonna Work

Mario Marchese (aka Mario the Maker Magician) spoke with us about robots performing magic, humans performing magic, and writing a book about making magic. We also covered art, making, learning, Sesame Street, performance, design, humor, Piff the Magic Dragon [sic], magic secrets, and gracefully handling technological failure.

You can find Mario on:

His book is The Maker Magician's Handbook: A Beginner's Guide to Magic + Making.

We talked about Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, 19th century French watchmaker, magician and illusionist, and the amazing Aldo Colombini.

382: Playing In the Desert

Leah Buechley (@leahbuechley) spoke with us about the intersection of computer science and art. She is an associate professor in the computer science department of the University of New Mexico where she directs the Hand and Machine research group.

Her website is leahbuechley.com, her research group website is handandmachine.cs.unm.edu.

She wrote the book Textile Messages: Dispatches From the World of E-Textiles and Education and developed the LilyPad Arduino for wearable electronics.

We talked about Chibitronics, paper circuits, developed by Jie Qi  (who was on Embedded 277: The Sport of Kings talking about patents as well as Chibitronics)

We talked about Nettrice Gaskins’ Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom

An example of a tiny stepper motor on eBay

Introduction to VQGAN + CLIP to generate art

381: Mass Sponge Migration

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) discuss Blender, Make, TCP/IP, and listener questions (mostly about the podcast itself).

Lightweight IP: an open source TCP/IP stack for embedded systems

Look for Lazy Tutorials for Blender in Ian Hubert’s YouTube Channel or if you want something a little simpler, try the Blender Beginner Tutorial (donut!).

Ukulele and acoustic guitar kits are at StewMac.com

Book with sponge sneeze information: Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales

This episode was sponsored by InspectAR. If you design, debug, or just need to use PCBs, InspectAR can give you superpowers. It’s an augmented reality app and platform that allows you to visualize every layer, every connection, every aspect of your actual physical board in real time

InspectAR is free for trial and home use. With a subscription you get powerful collaboration and debugging features including annotating the AR view, sharing comments, setting up test and calibration procedures. Check it out!

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