Embedded

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? ThePrepared is a weekly email about engineering, infrastructure, and manufacturing news Elecia was interviewed by TheAnalog.io newsletter which is a weekly email about manufacturing and engineering Embedded.fm has a weekly newsletter about topics related to the engineering focused podcast (and transcript) 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

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 Transcript

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 Embedded has: A Patreon page where you can support us and get into the Slack community A newsletter that sends you a weekly email about the show and little notes Transcripts that you can use to look things up or follow along if the speakers are unclear 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

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.

Matthew Liberty 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. Find Matt on Twitter as @mliberty1. 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.

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

Christopher and Elecia celebrate their 400th episode by discussing what has (and hasn’t) changed in embedded systems over the last 9 years

Jen Costillo joined us to talk about voice acting, reverse engineering, podcasting, and dance. Jen’s podcast is the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, found in all your usual podcast places. Jen and her co-host Alvaro were on an episode of Opposable Thumbs podcast. Find Jen on Twitter at @RebelbotJen (also @unnamed_show and @catmachinesSF). Rebelbot.com has her blog and Cat Machines Dance is her site devoted to dance (including the mentioned video about dancers and the pandemic). The Hardware Hacking Handbook: Breaking Embedded Security with Hardware Attacks by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn  Jen is studying voice-overs at VoicetraxSF  Jen has been on the show many times in the past. Some of our favorites include 108: Nebarious about security and privacy 82: I Was a Chewbacca Person about movies that influenced their path to engineering 51: There Is No Crying in Strcpy about interviewing 25: Thunderdome for Antennas about RF and manufacturing consumer products 10: Hands Off, Baby about C keywords

Tom Anderson explains radio frequency electronics (RF). Elecia and Christopher try to keep up. We also took a detour into bass guitar electronics. One confusing jargon part is that radio power (in dBm) is discussed as though it is voltage. For example, 10 dBM is 2V peak-to-peak; there is an implied 50 ohm resistor in the P=V*V/R calculation. The the wiki for more about decibel-milliwatts. Tom talked about dollhouses, aka Smith charts (wiki). (We also talked about Bode plots (wiki).) Light travels about 1 foot in 1 nanosecond (11.8 inches, 30 cm). Admiral Grace Hopper is well known for giving out nanoseconds. The guitar company Tom mentioned working with is Alembic. Find Tom’s writing on Medium and the Tempo Automation blog. He is on Twitter as @tomacorp and was previously on Embedded 379: Monstrous Cable Corporation.

We spoke with Phillip Johnston (@mbeddedartistry) of Embedded Artistry about consulting, writing, and learning. In the Embedded Artistry welcome page, there is a list of Phillip’s favorite articles as well as his most popular articles. Some of Phillip’s favorites include: Embedded Rules of Thumb Improving SW with 5 LW Processes Learning from the Boeing 737 MAX saga We also talked about code reviews and some best practices. The Embedded Artistry newsletter is a good way to keep up with embedded topics. You can subscribe to it at embeddedartistry.com/newsletter What are condition variables?