416: EEs Are From PIC, SWEs Are From Arm

John Catsoulis is the founder of Udamonic and creator of the Forth-based Scamp development board. He spoke with us about Forth, electrical engineering, and writing a technical book.

Find out more about Udamonic’s Scamp at udamonic.com. There are some hardware projects under the Create menu.

The Forth programming language is famous for its small size, portability, and post-fix (RPN) nature. 

John wrote O’Reilly’s Designing Embedded Hardware. While some parts are out of date, the general theory is still good.

CuriousMarc’s YouTube channel is full of retro-computer goodness.

Long ago, Elecia read The Eudaemonic Pie and imagined a life of high tech crime. Please don’t tell her if it doesn’t hold up well.

Transcript

415: Rolling Computers

Lead Solution Architect at Cymotive, Benny Meisels spoke with us about implementing embedded software security in cars. The discussion touches ECUs, IoT vehicles, threat and risk analysis, and how reverse engineering plays a role in security testing.

Benny works at Cymotive (https://www.cymotive.com/). You can find him on LinkedIn benny-meisels or on Twitter @benny_meisels.

Resources for automotive security:

Framework Laptop 

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414: Puff, the Magically Secure Dragon

Laura Abbott of Oxide Computer spoke with us about a silicon bug in the ROM of the NXP LPC55, affecting the TrustZone. 

More information about the two issues are in the Oxide blog:

More about LPC55S6x and their LPC55Sxx Secure Boot

Ghidra is a software reverse engineering framework… and it is one of the NSA’s github repositories.

Laura will also be speaking about this at Hardwear.io in early June 2022 in Santa Clara. 

Twitter handles: @hardwear_io, @oxidecomputer, @openlabbott,

The vulnerability was filed with NIST: NVD - CVE-2021-31532

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413: Puppy-Like Glee

Chris and Elecia chat about practice, software quality, and empathy for seemingly unmotivated team members. 

Elecia is teaching another cohort of Making Embedded Systems in the fall, starting late August. There will be reminders between now and then but if you want to sign up, here is the page. The funny and odd music instruction video with the copy-and-paste method of composition.

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412: Inductors Don't Have Feelings

Tom Anderson returned to the show to describe how transistors and passives work. We discuss everything from vacuum tubes to diodes to transistors (PNP and NPN) to resistors and capacitors. We search for synonyms among the confusing terminology of cathodes, plates, emitters, anodes, grids, bases, and collectors. 

This was a tech heavy episode so little bit of brushing up on terms may be useful before (or after):

Transcript.

411: Batteries Get Upset

Ethan Slattery joined us to talk about animals, animal trackers, and how they work.

Ethan works for Wildlife Computers. They use the Argos Network for data transfer. He was previously at MBARI and worked with Engineers for Exploration as an undergraduate.

Ethan is also known as CrustyAuklet on Twitter and Github. He also has an Instagram page. 

Things mentioned in the show you might want to know more about:

Two of the big tracking databases :

Also, the Cornell Lab of ornithology also maintains a bird specific database that is pretty neat:


Transcript

305: Humans Have a Terrible Spec Sheet (Repeat)

Amanda “w0z” Wozniak spoke with us about her career through biomedical engineering and startups. 

Amanda contributed a chapter to Building Open Source Hardware: DIY Manufacturing. (A book we spoke with Alicia Gibb about in #289.) Amanda’s chapter was titled Design Process: How to Get from Nothing to Something.

For more information about the companies we discussed, check out Amanda’s LinkedIn page. 

Transcript

Thank you to our sponsors!

410: Emacs From the Future

Chris and Elecia chat about tools, interrupts, and general happenings. 

Thank you to Newark for supporting the show! The part that was not guessed was an RF FET: MRF1K50HR5.

Elecia found MCU on Eclipse (Eric Styger)’s tutorials on Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M (Part 1).

Embedded has a Patreon page where you can get access to the Slack group. The book club is starting Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market by Alan Cohen.

Wokwi Raspberry Pi Pico projects from Elecia: Command Line Interface and PWM Experiments with Logic Analyzer

Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry and Tyler Hoffman from Memfault are kicking off a quarterly embedded discussion panel. This month is about building embedded systems at scale using device metrics: Embedded Device Observability Metrics Panel 

Jonathan Beri from Golioth created instructions on how to use USB from WSL2.

Copy-editing game.

Transcript.

Newark Logo, An AVNET Company

Thank you to Newark for sponsoring this episode of Embedded!

409: A Better World

Dr. Shirley Davis spoke with us about her book: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion For Dummies.

Dr. Davis is a speaker and consultant on diversity, equity, and inclusion topics; her website is drshirleydavis.com. 

Dr. Davis’ books include:

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295: In the Key of Lime (Repeat)

This week we talk about CircuitPython (@CircuitPython) with @adafruit’s Kattni Rembor (@kattni) and Scott Shawcroft (@tannewt). 

The suggested first board is CircuitPlayground Express with LEDs, sensors, and buttons. CircuitPython is also available for many other boards including the BLE Feather (NRF52832).

For a basic introduction take a look at What is CircuitPython and see some example scripts. To dig a little deeper, check out the many resources in Awesome CircuitPython. The whole thing is open source so you can see their code. If you are thinking about contributing (or just want some fun chats), get in touch on the CircuitPython channel of the Adafruit Discord server: adafru.it/discord

Many of the language’s design choices favor ease-of-use over ready-for-production. Imagine teaching an intro to programming class without worrying what computers will be used or how to get compilers installed on everyone’s machines before time runs out. 

One final note: Kattni did a project that gave us the show title: Piano in the Key of Lime. After we finished recording, Chris asked her why she didn’t add a kiwi fruit to her mix… Kattni explained she had limes and they were small. Chris only wanted a different fruit so she could rename it Piano in the Kiwi of Lime. It is always sad when we stop recording too early.

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408: Room In Your Heart for Your Robot

Machine learning engineer and science fiction author S. B. Divya joined us to talk about artificial intelligence, robotics, and humanity.

Divya’s first full-length book is Machinehood which has been nominated for a Nebula (as was her novella Runtime).

You can find more about Divya on her website (sbdivya.com) or on her Wikipedia page.

Divya also co-hosted EscapePod, a podcast of science fiction stories. 

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407: Boards Are Like Sandwiches

Mihir Shah of Royal Circuits joined us to talk about how PCBs are fabricated and how companies are funded. Mihir was CEO of InspectAR before they were acquired by Cadence.

Mihir works for Royal Circuits and runs a newsletter called TheAnalog.io

We talked about InspectAR on Embedded 384: What Is a Board File? with Liam Cadigan.

Transcript for this show

This episode is sponsored by Newark, a leading international distributor of industrial and electronic components. From design and testing to production and maintenance, discover why so many choose to partner with Newark!


406: R2D2 Is a Trash Can

Jorvon Moss (Odd Jayy) joined us to talk about making robots, steampunk aesthetics, uploading consciousness to AIs, and the importance of drawing.

You can find Jay on Twitter (@Odd_Jayy) and Instagram (@odd_jayy). He’s been moving his Hackster projects over to Digikey’s Maker.io space: www.digikey.com/en/maker. Jay’s projects are collected here.

Elecia brought up the science fiction book Machinehood by S. B. Divya. Jay returned with Martha Well’s Murderbot Diaries.  

Jay mentioned Mycroft.ai, open source voice assistant. Jay was interviewed by Make Magazine (article). He was on the cover of the magazine; the YouTube video where he was informed was heartwarming.

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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

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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

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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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If you’d like to help the show grow, please write a review. Or share it with a friend. Or send it to your school’s Dean of Computer Science and/or Engineering and tell them it should be part of the curriculum to see what engineering lives and careers are like. Or send it to your company’s Director of New Hires and say it is important for techy folks to stay current and engaged in embedded systems.

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