Embedded

John Saunders (@NYCCNC) spoke with us about building a Johnny Five robot on his NYC CNC YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/saunixcomp).  You can find all of the Johnny Five build videos on a playlist or check out the NYC CNC page. As mentioned, Input Inc did a lot of the preliminary work. John recommends books: How to Win Friends and Influence People The E-Myth Revisited John is also the founder of Saunders Machine Works (they have a contact page). How Johnny Five got his name  

Adam Wolf (@adamwwolf) of Wayne and Layne (www.wayneandlayne.com) spoke with us about making kits, museum exhibit engineering, working on KiCad, and extraterrestrial art philosophy. Adam has a personal blog on www.feelslikeburning.com/blog/ as well as a website adamwolf.org. Adam co-wrote Make: Lego and Arduino Projects If you want to know how to contribute to KiCad libraries, check out their instruction page: kicad-pcb.org/libraries/contribute/ We also mentioned: Evil Mad Scientist’s Guide to Improving Open Source Hardware Visual Diffs KiCad Automation Tools: tools to autogenerate KiCad artifacts when committing to git Kivy: open source Python library for making displays Cedux: application framework OKGo Upside Down and Inside Out video and Art in Space project

Professor Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech joins us to talk about robotics including how androids interact with humans.  Some of her favorite robot include the Darwin, the Nao, and, for home-hacking, the Darwin Mini. Ayanna has a profile on EngineerGirl.org, a site that lets young women ask questions of women in the engineering profession. Elecia has been working on a typing robot named Ty, documented on the Embedded.fm blog. It uses a MeArm, on sale in July 2017 at Hackaday.com, with coupon noted in show. (don't use PayPal to check out or you can't apply the coupon).  Other robots for trying out robots: Lego Mindstorms (lots of books, project ideas, and incredible online tutorials!), Cozmobot, Dash and Dot. Some robotics competition leagues include Vex, Botball, and FIRST. 

Carmen Parisi spoke with us about changing jobs from a semiconductor specialist at TI to an electrical engineering generalist at Wasatch Photonics.  Carmen was previously on Embedded 216: Bavarian Folk Metal and formerly was the host of  The Engineering Commons podcast  Carmen works at Wasatch Photonics making Ramen Spectrometers. Spudger

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.