Embedded

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.

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/ 

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.

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.

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

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: Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynshi Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie Hild by Nicola Griffith