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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Thank you to our sponsor this week!

317: What Do You Mean by Disintegrated? (Repeat)

We were joined in the studio by the Evil Mad Scientists Lenore Edman (@1lenore) and Windell Oskay (@oskay).

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) produces the disintegrated 555 Timer kit and 741 Op-Amp  kit. These were made in conjunction with Eric Schlaepfer, who also created the Monster 6502. 

EMSL also makes the Eggbot kit and AxiDraw not-kit (and mini-kit). For a history of the pen plotter, check out Sher Minn’s Plotter People talk on YouTube.

(They have too many neat things to list here, go look on their page: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/directory. Or stop into their Sunnyvale, California shop.)

We talked about the beauty of boards including Kong Money and ElectroCookie’s candy colored shields and Arduino Leonardo.

Jepson Herbarium has interesting workshops including one about seaweed. At one workshop, Lenore and Windell got to talk to Josie Iselin, author of The Curious World of Seaweed. 

Elecia enjoyed Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us by Ruth Kassinger.

Windell was previously on Embedded episode #124: Please Don’t Light Yourself on Fire, we mainly talked about the book he co-authored: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory.

Lenore was previously on Embedded episode #40: Mwahaha Session, we talked about EMSL.

Our post-show tidepooling was very successful with a variety of nudibranchs, shrimp, seaweed, sea birds, snails, and hermit crabs.

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429: Start With Zero Trust

We spoke with Duncan Haldane about creating hardware schematics by writing software code, three dimensional circuits, and bio-inspired jumping robots.  

Duncan is the CEO of JitX (jitx.com). They recently received Series A funding and are currently hiring engineers. Please mention that you heard about JitX here on Embedded.

While earning a PhD at UC Berkeley, Duncan (@DuncanHaldane) also worked on Salto (video) and OpenRoach (github).

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428: Sprinkling a Little IoT

Jonathan Beri spoke with us about the different IoT development tools and how to categorize them. 

Jonathan (@beriberikix) is the CEO of Golioth (@golioth_iot). He wrote a blog post called An Introduction to The Five Clouds of IoT, breaking the clouds into individual clouds: device, connectivity, data, application, and development.

Jonathan was previously on Embedded 222: Virtual Bunnie when he worked for Particle.io.

A partial list of the IoT tools we mentioned:


See also A list of IoT platforms – Systev post mentioned in the show (also Building The Infinite Matrix Of Tamagotchis | Hackaday).

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427: No Fisticuffs or Casting of Spells

Elizabeth Wharton spoke to us about laws, computers, cybersecurity, and funding education in rural communities. She is a strong proponent of privacy by design and de-identification by default.

Liz (@LawyerLiz) is the VP of Operations at Scythe.io (@scythe_io), a company that works in cybersecurity. She won the Cybersecurity or Privacy Woman Law Professional of the Year for 2022 at DefCon.

Liz is on the advisory board of the Rural Tech Fund (@ruraltechfund) which strives to reduce the digital divide between rural and urban areas.

We mentioned disclose.io and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA, wiki).

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426: Equivalently Annoying

Elecia and Chris are back from vacation and catching up! Today’s topics include: last week’s burnout episode and what we learned, what is a PSoC and why would you want one, how to get up to speed as a junior engineer, and a few more side quests.

The burnout episode with Keith Hildesheim was last week, we encourage you to check it out, we learned some things about ourselves and maybe you will too.

Chris mentioned astrophotography and here’s the link to the reddit post that inspires him to keep going: astrounding Jupiter video.

In case you missed it in the newsletter, which you should definitely sign up for, here’s Chris’ list of VSCode extensions:

  • AutoScroll - Have a log file open that you're monitoring? This extension keeps the tab scrolled to the bottom at all times.

  • Doxygen Documentation Generator - Quickly generate and pre-fill those tedious doxygen style comments.

  • GitHub Pull Requests and Issues - Make pull-requests or do reviews for Github right in the editor.

  • GitLens - Easily see revision history and "blame" for every line of code in a pretty unobtrusive way.

  • Header source switch - Ever want to switch really quickly to a C file's header (or vice versa)? This adds a keyboard shortcut to do just that.

  • TODO Highlight - Makes those millions of TODOs and FIXMEs light up in a nice neon color so you can't ignore them anymore.

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425: Burnout Leads to the Dark Side

Keith Hildesheim joined us in an excellent conversation about avoiding burnout at work (and dealing with the aftereffects). 

Keith mentioned some useful books and articles:

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Keith also sent over a few charts and checklists!

Performance Curve

294: Ludicrous Numbers of LEDs (Repeat)

Mike Harrison (@mikelectricstuf) challenged us to a PIC fight on Twitter. Surprisingly, no blood was shed and we mostly talked about LEDs and art installations.

Mike’s YouTube Channel and his website electricstuff.co.uk

His professional hire-him-to-work-on-your-neat-stuff site is whitewing.co.uk

For driving LEDs, Mike likes the TI TLC5971: 12-Channel, 16-Bit ES-PWM RGB LED Driver with 3.3V Linear Regulator.

424: Between Midnight and 6am

Gustavo Pezzi spoke with us about using fun and simple systems to explain low-level concepts and how they work in higher-level engineering tasks. For example, teaching microprocessor concepts using Atari 2600 assembly and physics by creating a simple game engine.

Gustavo’s site is Pikuma.com. He has a free taster course on bit-shifting. We also talked about Atari 2600 Programming with 6502 Assembly and Physics Game Engine Programming. 

Stella, a multi-platform Atari 2600 emulator

For examples of optimizing in different ways, check out this bit hacks page.

Gustavo is mentoring for Classpert’s Building a Language course. (This is where Elecia teaches Making Embedded Systems.)

The conjecture about a shortage of  electrical engineers was from The Register.

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423: Speaking of Aardvarks

Phillip Johnston joined us to talk about how engineering approaches can change over time. 

This conversation started with Phillip’s Embedded Artistry blog post How Our Approach to Abstract Interfaces Has Changed Over the Years. His new course is Designing Embedded Software for Change. 

Embedded Artistry has a Design Pattern Catalogue (though Elecia was looking at Software design patterns on Wikipedia during the podcast). https://github.com/embvm 

Phillip is working with Memfault on an ongoing embedded systems panel. The first topic they covered was observability metrics for IoT devices. There is a panel coming up on how to debug embedded devices in production.

Some reading that Phillip mentioned:

Creating a Circular Buffer in C and C++ - Embedded Artistry

Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter - Total Phase 

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422: It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature

Chris and Elecia chat about origami, learning, whether to future proof tools or buy the cheaper option, simulators, and classes.

Elecia is gearing up to teach another Making Embedded Systems course. Sign up if you want to be in the Yellow Seahorses cohort! Sign up early and often. Sign up other people. Ask other people to sign themselves up and even more other people. Well, you get the idea.

Check out Wokwi! While it looks like it is for Arduino from the front page, there is a lot of work going on to support C/C++ APIs such as the one for Raspberry Pi Pico or the Rust one for the ESP32. Please ask a professor what they’d need to use Wokwi in their class!

In episode 158: Programming Is Too Difficult for Humans, we talked about the Ada language and using it on ARM cores. Learn Ada (at AdaCore).

News

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Thank you to our sponsor this week!

421: Paint the Iceberg Yellow

Chris Hobbs talks with Elecia about safety critical systems. Safety-critical systems keep humans alive. Writing software for these embedded systems carries a heavy responsibility. Engineers need to understand how to make code fail safely and how to reduce risks through good design and careful development. 

The book discussed was Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems by Chris Hobbs.

This discussion was originally for Classpert (where Elecia is teaching her Making Embedded Systems course) and the video is on Classpert’s YouTube if you want to see faces.

There were many terms with letters and numbers, here is a guide:

  • IEC 61508: Functional Safety of Electrical/Electronic/Programmable Electronic Safety-related Systems; relates to industrial systems and forms the foundation for many other standards 

  • ISO 26262: Road vehicles - Functional Safety; extends and specializes IEC 61508 for systems within cards

  • IEC 62304 specifies life cycle requirements for the development of medical software and software within medical devices. It has been adopted as national standards and therefore can be used as a benchmark to comply with regulatory requirements.

  • MISRA C: a set of software development guidelines for the C programming language 

  • DO178-C and DO178-B: Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification are the primary documents by which the certification authorities such as FAA, EASA and Transport Canada approve all commercial software-based aerospace systems

  • ISO/IEC 29119: Software and systems engineering -- Software testing

  • ISO 14971:2019 Medical devices — Application of risk management to medical devices (this is the on that was mentioned as a set of useful guidelines for identifying and mitigating hazards during brainstorming)

  • IEC 62304:2006 Medical device software — Software life cycle processes

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420: Googly Eyes and Top Hats

Dan White, CEO of Filament Games, spoke to us about educational games, how to make play part of learning, and simulating robots. We also discussed what makes a good (or bad) learning experience, the limits of games as educational tools, and the elements of fun.

Roblox is a game platform and game creation system. Filament Games is developing a robot simulator called Roboco.

Filament has many games out in the wild, check out their portfolio. If this sounds like fun, check out their careers page.

Durf live streams game playing

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314: Why Are Wings Needed in Space? (Repeat)

Mohit Bhoite makes functional electronic sculptures from components and brass wire. We spoke with him on the hows and whys of making art.

Mohit’s sculptures, including the Tie Fighter. More on his instagram: mohitbhoite

Jiri Prause has a wonderful tutorial on how to make simpler freeform electronics on Instructables.

Peter Vogel is another artist making phenomenal freeform electronics.

Leonardo Ulian uses electronic components in his art (his don’t function but wow).

Advice from Mohit on trying this yourself from Bantam Tools. Mohit likes Xuron Pliers

Mohit can be found on twitter as @MohitBhoite

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419: Fission Chips

Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay are the authors of Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components. We discussed the inner beauty of a number of electronic components as well as cameras, photography, writing, preparing samples, and terrible title puns.

You can pre-order the physical book and get a digital early release copy at NoStarch.com/Open-Circuits

Windell is co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory (@EMSL). He and Eric have collaborated before on several projects:

Eric is also known for the Monster 6502, a 6502 processor made up of individual transistors. Eric also writes on tubetime.us and is on Twitter as @TubeTimeUS

Sign up for the Embedded newsletter by the end of July and be entered to win one of these lovely prizes:

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A lovely reject from the book, this is the base of a neon bulb from GE.


418: Answer Me These Questions Three

Chris and Elecia question embedded systems then answer listener questions about embedded systems. They mostly agree except about one thing which, after some discussion, they agree upon. Mostly.

Video of Cissy Strut cover where Chris plays all of the instruments

Video where Elecia shows off some programmatic origami and simulation (not discussed but it seemed reasonable retaliation for talking about Chris’ video)

Dynamic Linker for Cortex-M (github repo)

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Thank you to our sponsor this week!

417: I Don’t Know How My Brain Works

Alexandra Covor spoke with us about engineering, making, drawing, school, and what it means to be an artist. 

Alex’s projects are on GitHub and Hackster.io. Her electronics comics can be found as PikaComics on Instagram.

The 2022 Open Hardware Summit named Alex as part of the Ada Lovelace Fellowship. Her favorite talk from the summit was Anuradha Reddy talking about Knotty (Naughty) Hardware.

Alex works for Zalmotek, a design services firm in Bucharest. We talked about Waylay.io, including their smart pet feeder built on that platform. For example projects for Edge Impulse, they built a tools organizer that uses ML.

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