Ramiro Montes De Oca spoke with us about modular electronics, chiplets, and his company aThing.io athing.io Chiplets Project Tinkertoy (movie) is a 1953 US Navy project on automated manufacturing of modular electronics. Ramiro mentioned his accelerator: CoFoundersLab Accelerator

Jason Derleth of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program spoke with us about what it takes to win a NIAC award. NIAC program homepage  Some of the accepted NIAC studies Key dates: Note: Solicitations open in June 2020!  Apply to NIAC A guide for NSPIRES, the payment system  We first heard about NIAC talking to Ariel Waldman. Her niacfellows.org site has some advice and encouragement for applying. Ariel was on Episode 255 of the show. Elecia’s one-page overview of Curved-Crease Origami and Flex Circuitry for In-situ Planetary Science Sensor Arrays.

Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) of The Amp Hour and Contextual Electronics joined Christopher and Elecia to talk about firmware, learning, and books. Chris is the host of The Amp Hour, a podcast about electronics and electrical engineering. Chris is also the founder of Contextual Electronics, where you can go to learn how to create electronics. Chris has a long running blog called Analog Life, found on his webpage chrisgammell.com, Chris is learning firmware as part of his consulting business. He likes Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems book. KiCon is happening at CERN in September 2020. More information at 2020.kicad-kicon.com. We talked about Jay Carlson who was on Embedded talking about his Amazing $1 Microcontroller project (#226) and about teaching embedded systems (#303) We talked about book club books: The Practicing Mind Draft No 4 Drift into Failure The Science of Self-Learning And a fun book series called Bobiverse (the Audible version is especially good). (The outro music is Chris W.’s attempt to troll Chris G. with his “lightning” round answer)

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) chat about the year 2038, their projects, their new finds, and future shows. The year 2038 problem is real. Elecia read some of this tweet thread about it. Single file libraries list on github: (https://github.com/nothings/single_file_libs), including the STB image handling library Chris was originally looking for. Chris is working on a MIDI project with a NUCLEO-144 (STM32F303ZE) board and various breakout boards from Adafruit and Sparkfun. Elecia talked about the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (NIAC) and curved crease origami. She also talked about PID controllers and Tiny ML. We are now soliciting sponsorship!

Dennis Jackson spoke with us about making the career shift from software to embedded. Dennis buys James Grenning’s Test Driven Development in Embedded C for his new hires and often recommends Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems. His tip that everyone should know was “Learn make!” and he has a reference for that: Why Use Make. He suggested Joel Spolsky’s reading lists from Joel On Software, even the ones that don’t obviously apply. Additional suggested-reading articles: 30 Pitfalls for Real Time Systems (part 1 and part 2) Rules for defensive C programming Why are you still using C What every computer scientist should know about floating point arithmetic The Power of Ten -- 10 Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code In his previous appearance on Embedded (#94: Don’t Be Clever), we talked about code complexity and measuring cyclomatic complexity. At that time he wanted a tool to monitor the code’s status. He has since found one: pmccabe.

Darryl Yong (@dyong) is a mathematics professor at Harvey Mudd College (and former classmate of ours, also at HMC). He is working with HMC’s Clinic Program, putting real industry projects in front of teams of college students. He’s also teaching number theory to prison inmates and helping teachers in the chronically underfunded Los Angeles Unified School District. Darryl writes about his career in education at Adventures in Teaching (profteacher.com). You can read about his experiences with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. If you dig into the archives a bit (2009) you can read about teaching at a high school, for example adapting teaching to different students. What he took away led him to create Math for America Los Angeles, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of secondary school mathematics and computer science teacher leaders in the greater Los Angeles Area. Darryl’s personal page (darrylyong.com) and his HMC page (math.hmc.edu/~dyong). Also, check out HMC’s Clinic Program page.  

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.

Professor Barbara Liskov spoke with us about the Liskov substitution principle, data abstraction, software crisis, and winning a Turing Award. See Professor Liskov’s page at MIT, including her incredible CV.

Chris and Elecia talk with each other about non-work activities including music, office rearrangement, and origami. The Solarbotics Squid Hunting CearouSol Kit Samson S-patch plus 48-Point Balanced Patchbay Waldorf Blofeld Synthesizer EarthQuaker Devices Rainbow Machine V2 Polyphonic Pitch-shifting Modulator Pedal (with Magic knob) Artelino is a Japanese print auction house

Mohit Bhoite (@MohitBhoite) 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 Donate to DigitalNest by the end of 2019 and get your donation matched! Thank you to the listener who is doing the match!