Embedded

Alex Glow (@glowascii) filled our heads with project ideas. Alex is the Resident Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io. Her page is glowascii and you might want to see Archimedes the AI robot owl and the Hardware 101 channel. They have many sponsored contests including BadgeLove. Lightning round led us to many possibles: It you were building an IoT stuffed animal, what would you use? Mycroft and Snips are what is inside Archimedes. If you were building a camera to monitor a 3d printer, what would you use? For her M3D Micro Printer, Alex would use the Raspberry Pi based OctoPi to monitor it. If you were going to a classroom of 2nd graders, what boards would you take? The BBC Micro:bit (based on Code Bug) or some LittleBits kits (Star Wars Droid Inventor Kit and Korg Synth Kit are on Amazon (those are Embedded affiliate links, btw). If you were going to make a car-sized fighting robot, what dev system would you use? The Open Source Novena DIY Laptop initially designed Bunnie Huang There were more software and hardware kits to explore: Google DIY AI Arduino Maker1000 Raspberry Pi Chirp.io    For your amusement Floppotron plays Bohemian Rhapsody Alex gave a shout out to her first hackerspace All Hands Active Ableton is audio workstation and sequencer software. Alex recommends Women’s Audio Mission as a good way to learn audio production and recording if you are in the San Francisco area. There is an Interplanetary File System and Alex worked on a portable printer console for it. Elecia is always willing to talk about Ty the typing robot and/or narwhals teaching Bayes Rule. She recommended the book There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.

James Grenning (@jwgrenning) joined us to talk about Test Driven Development, dealing with legacy code, and cleaning out very large pipes. James is the author of Test Driven Development for Embedded C. If you want to take his live online course, check out the remote delivered TDD classes on Wingman Software. His blog has many great articles including TDD How-to: Get Your Legacy C into a Test Harness and TDD Guided by ZOMBIES. Book: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers James mentioned Given-When-Then, a testing design pattern (brief intro). Kent Beck also wrote about test && commit || revert style testing. James and Bob Martin present IoT implementation strategies in a series of videos on Clean Coders. James mentioned working with a Synapse Wireless radio.

Alan Cohen (@proto2product) wrote a great book about taking an idea and making it into a product. We spoke with him about the development process and the eleven deadly sins of product development. We did not talk about ultra-precise death rays. Books we discussed: Alan’s Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition: Essays On Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.   The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier Alan mentioned writing software graphically with Enterprise Architect

Christopher White resurrects an Apple ][+ with his brother Matthew White. This is a show about the software Christopher and Matthew wrote when they were kids and the hardware they wrote it on. Matthew's favorite fictional robot (we should have asked): Venus Probe from Six Million Dollar Man. We did ask about his favorite fictional computer and there is a video for that too. Apple ][+ Wiki Timex Sinclair Z81 Wiki  Eric Schlaepfer's Monster 6502 Grant's 6502 Computer Kerbal Space Program for the Apple ][ Elecia got to $42 in Lemonade Stand by the end of the show Matthew's Nebula Wars and Eye of Eternal Death BASIC games circa 1982 and 1981 respectively. If you feel like it, you can try out an Apple ][ in your web browser, with tons of disks available at the Internet Archive or in a Javascript Emulator. Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems.

After many bouts of lightning round, we finally got our lightning questions answered by Eric Brunning (@deeplycloudy). Eric is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech University specializing in storm electrification and lightning . You can hear some of Eric’s field adventures by listening to his episode of the Don’t Panic Geocast show. The Wikipedia page for lightning will lead you down many strange pathways. Though the Wikipedia Lightning Energy Harvesting page may convince you that it isn’t feasible (though some math might as well, as discussed on this show). For more about lightning interferometry, check out Michael Stock’s in-depth site. You can hear lightning on Jupiter if you listen to the right bands. Neat video of the Milky Way in radio waves reflecting off the moon Elecia really enjoyed The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney.

Lindsey Kuper (@lindsey) spoke with us about !!Con West, being a new professor, and reading technical journals. The call for speakers for !!Con West is open until November 30, 2018. The conference will be in Santa Cruz, CA on February 23-24. Lindsey’s blog is Composition.al and it has advice for !!Con proposals, advice for potential grad students, and updates on Lindsay’s work. The Banana Slug is the UCSC mascot. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System by Leslie Lamport, 1978

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talk about conferences, simulations, and future episodes. Simulation/Emulation: QEMU and Renode. Chris also noted there were QEMU for STM32 instances such as this one from beckus. For conferences, we named several but had no particularly useful advice. We did recommend classes such as James Grenning’s training on TDD in Embedded Systems and Jack Ganssle’s Better Firmware Faster. There are several (free) machine learning courses available from Udacity including Intro to Machine Learning which was part of the Self-Driving Car series that Elecia took. The future basics episodes were grouped into: Flow of program control (pre-RTOS) Design patterns RTOS information

Anita Pagin gave us an insider’s view of being a recruiter. Anita recently started at Carbon3D and is recruiting for software and hardware. Anita also does career coaching on the side. Given the advice she gave us for free, imagine what she could tell you if you paid her. Finally, Elecia’s favorite list of resume keywords.

Chris Svec (@christophersvec) returns to chat about recruiting for embedded jobs and to help us answer listener questions. Also, he’s looking for engineers to join him at iRobot. Want to get into embedded and don’t know how? We did a show about that: 211: 4 Weeks, 3 Days. Also, there is an EdX class that is popular and a Coursera course that may be useful. You can meet up with Chris at Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA on Nov 2-4. Fulgurites are cooled lightning.

James Grenning (@jwgrenning) returns to discuss TDD, Agile, and web courses.  James was on Embedded.fm episode 30: Eventually Lighting Strikes. James' new company is Wingman Software. His excellent book is TDD for Embedded C.  James suggested Training From the Back of the Room! as resource to people looking to put together a class. He uses and recommends CyberDojo as a coding instruction tool. Before Agile was Agile-for-business, it was Extreme Programming. James recommends Extreme Programming Explained. James will be the keynote speaker at AgileDC in October.