Embedded

Chris and Elecia ring in the new year with a discussion of projects, hobbies, origami, DMA, music, and the new-and-improved Embedded.fm newsletter... Pepto Bismol can be converted to metal bismuth (YouTube) which can be turned into lovely sculptures. Chris liked his new book, Art of NASA: The Illustrations That Sold the Missions by Piers Bizony.  Elecia liked hers, Curved Origami: Unlocking the Secrets of Curved Folding in Easy Steps by Ekaterina Lukasheva  Guitar Fart Pedal (Kickstarter) Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course will have a second cohort starting in March 2022.  Sign up for the newsletter if you want an announcement (at the bottom of the Embedded.fm Subscribe page).

Limor Fried of Adafruit spoke with us about engineering, education, and business.  Some new boards we talked about include the PyGamer and PyBadge (which also has a lower cost version). TinyUSB, an open and tiny USB stack from Hathach. In addition to the many excellent tutorials there are some interesting business related posts on Adafruit Learn: How to Build a Hardware Startup and How to Start a Hackerspace Want to get more involved with the extensive, wonderful, and supportive Adafruit community? Join their Discord chat server or Show and Tell on Wednesdays 7:30pm (ET) followed by Ask an Engineer at 8pm. 

Uri Shaked shows us Wokwi, his board and processor simulator. We checked out Arduino code in GDB and then looked at his simulator for the Cortex-M0 Raspberry Pi Pico.  First, you should totally  look at Wokwi.com. As Christopher noted, signing up for an account shows you many other things. Then you can go look at the processors written in TypeScript in Uri’s Github repos: github.com/urish. Find Wokwi on Twitter (@WokwiMakes, Uri is @UriShaked). You can also find Wokwi on Facebook. Uri live-coded development of the Pico’s RP2040, it is on Wokwi’s YouTube channel. You can find out more about the RP2040 or the AVR core in the ATMega family by taking his free courses on Hackaday: hackaday.io/urishaked  (Scroll down for courses.) Uri’s homepage is urish.org. You can find The Salsa Beat Machine there as well as some of his other projects. He has a blog there as well as at Wokwi. Susie Hansen - La Salsa Nunca Se Acaba

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

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: The 507 Mechanical Movements book as a way to explore more mechanical movements Paper Automata: Four Working Models to Cut Out and Glue Together by Rob Ives  With Unblackboxing Computers, HyunJoo is exploring sensors that can be made with copper tape on paper. The introduction video: https://vimeo.com/637626404/f670dff03e 

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.

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: Fpga4fun.com TinyFpga.com MyHdl.org (Python!)

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.

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.

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.