Embedded

We spoke with Jackson Keating (@jacksonakeating) about Bluetooth Low Energy, going over GATTs layouts and the general BLE usage. While Jackson prefers the Bluetooth spec as the best reading explanation, Elecia liked the Adafruit BLE introduction. She wrote about some of her initial experiences with different chips and Chris Svec wrote about BLE roles. We all agreed that the examples and tutorials from your chip vendor is a good place to get experience. A random UUID generator is uuidgen on Mac or online on uuidgenerator.net. Elecia mentioned 108: Nebarious, an Embedded episode where we talked about how BLE lacks security. Jackson suggested looking at the Core Bluetooth API for IOS development as well as the Nordic and LightBlue apps for debugging.

Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) talks about economics, books, and the future. Check out Tim’s new book, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. And yes, this is Tim O’Reilly of  O’Reilly books. Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems has a great-eared nightjar, but she’s finally adjusted to a modern dinosaur on her cover.

Sunshine Jones (@Sunshine_Jones) spoke with us about synthesizers, electronics, and philosophy. Sunshine’s music is most easily found at TheUrgencyOfChange.com. His writing is at Sunshine-Jones.com. We talked about Sunshine’s User’s Guide to the Roland SE-02. That includes Ahmed, a track produced using only the SE-02. Sunshine also wrote about building a polysynth. The intro music is an excerpt from LELEK, released on Air Texture Vol. V. The exit music is Fall In Love Not In Line, released this year on vinyl only, TUOC01. See TheUrgencyOfChange.com for more. Sunshine was the host of SundaySoul.com, a live podcast about music and life.

Nick Kartsioukas (@ExplodingLemur) spoke with us about information security, melting down spectres, lemurs, and sensible resolutions. Nick recommends Aumasson’s Serious Cryptography (also available from NoStarch) as a good orientation. (Offline, he also recommended Shneier’s Secrets and Lies.)   When thinking about security, you need to develop your threat model (EFF) and not panic (Mickens). As a user of the internet, there are some getting started guides (Motherboard, EFF, Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy) along with Nick’s advice of using an antivirus program (comparison), an Adblocker (uBlock), a password manager, and 2-factor authentication. Data backups are also very useful (3-2-1 rule: 3 copies, 2 separate media, 1 offsite). For a professional infosec perspective, the CIS 20 are best practice guidelines for computer security. For Spectre and Meltdown, the best high-level explanation is in Twitter from @gsuberland though XKCD does its usual good job as well. For more detail, about speculative execution bugs, check out this github readme. For the history of the Stuxnet, check out Zetter’s Countdown to Zero Day and the Security Now podcast episode 291. Ham radio Field Days for 2018 are June 23-24 Last but not least: Depression lies so get help and if you want to know how to help someone else, look at MakeItOk.org

The Amp Hour and Embedded join up to send a holiday letter to listeners. Chris G is ever improving Contextual Electronics. Chris W has a new band: 12AX7. Elecia still has a book: Making Embedded Systems. Amp Hour episodes mentioned in this one: 372: Where Chris and Dave talk about 2017 304: Alexa jokes 281: The first Amp Hour / Embedded show, with call ins 256: The first time Chris W was on the Amp Hour 187: Elecia joined the Amp Hour for the first time Embedded episodes mentioned: 223: Where Chris talks about his new synth habit 227: Talking about Udacity and learning 203: EE Charlie talks about good design We talked about teaching which led to: Short mention of Dreyfus model of skill acquisition of which Chris G’s friend Mel did a great explanatory comic Daniel Spalding’s How to Teach Adults (pdf) Dan Luu’s Learning To Program post Udacity’s Self Driving Car courses Computer vision with Python OpenCV Article on how the difficulty is the point of teaching literature The new art and engineering Function Podcast Hilarious World of Depression podcast Books we are reading! Build Your Own Transistor Radio by Ron Quan The Hobbyist’s Guide to RTL-SDR by Carl Laufer Spineless by Juli Berwald about Jellyfish Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs by Tristan Gooley Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant (terrifying mermaids) Catseye by Andre Norton Teach Beyond Your Reach by Robin Neidorf Mastery by Robert Greene Understanding By Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe Making Learning Whole by David Perkins Elecia got a JTrace Pro Cortex-M for herself for Christmas. Chris W got a Moog Werkstatt and an assortment of Teenage Engineering small synths. Chris G mostly got sweaters because Chicago is very cold. BMW now sends YouTube ads via snail mail

Anthony Navarro (@avnavarro42) of Udacity (@udacity) spoke with us about learning. We talked about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (an education-oriented technical readiness level) and a little about on trunk skills vs. leaf skills. Elecia took Udacity’s term 1 of Self-Driving Car Nanodegree and is planning to take the free AI for Robotics course next. Anthony is enjoying soldering lessons via Boldport (hear #171: Perfectly Good Being Square and Green). Anthony noted there is a free Embedded course on Udacity.

Jay Carlson (@jaydcarlson), author of The Amazing $1 Microcontroller, joined us to talk about comparing microcontrollers and determining our biases. This was an in-depth comparison of different micro features. Jay is an electrical engineer specializing in electronics design and embedded programming (contact). His blog is new and interesting. We talked to SEGGER’s Dirk Akeman about JLink on #218: Neutron Star of Dev Boards. Please note that our Patreon model has shifted to monthly instead of per-episode.

Maria Gorlatova spoke with us about how the combination of devices and cloud computing will change the world as we know it. Maria’s bio, blog, and LinkedIn page. Other topics: Federated Learning from Google AWS Greengrass from Amazon Black Mirror from Netflix Note: we really should have talked about Amazon and FreeRTOS. I heard another podcastmight have mentioned it. We’ll try to get more info soon.

Windell Oskay (@Oskay) of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) told us about co-authoring a book: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory. Some great EMSL links: A signed copy of Windell's book Dis-integrated 555 timer kit Candle flicker LEDs Food in specimen jars EMSL blog post Spherical pen plotter (EggBot Pro!) The book Chris brought up was Thinking Physics. Windell is also on Google Plus. Contest to get Windell's signed book has already ended! 

Andrei Chichak joins Elecia and Christopher to do a deep dive into the world of interrupts. Andrei writes on our blog: Embedded Wednesdays. He has written specifically about interrupts in multiple ways: general introduction, buttons and debouncing, peripheral data transfer via DMA, and so on). The knock-knock joke comes from Chris Svec’s Embedded.fm blog post on interrupts. Jack Ganssle on debouncing buttons