Embedded

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

Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) chat about listener questions and things they’ve been up to. A listener turned Chris on to Ray Wilson and his Music From Outer Space website on DIY analog synths and book Make: Analog Synthesizers. After collecting parts for a total DIY, he found and built a neat kit: Kastle Synth (as heard on the show) and has connected it to his Roland SE-02 Analog Synthesizer (on Amazon). BTW, his ham radio WSPR kit is the Ultimate 3 in case you are behind on hobbies. You can hear more about it in 197: Smell the Transistor. Elecia has been working through Udacity’s Self-Driving Engineer nanodegree. She completed term 1 with its computer vision and machine learning and is on to term 2 with sensor fusion, localization, and control. She blissfully is unaware of the cost because she got to be an industry expert for the Intro to Self-Driving Cars course. Listener Simon asked about non-fiction books. Elecia gets many of hers by looking at what is on discount at BookBub’s science section which lead to two books she highly recommends Spirals in Time (snail facts) and Tristan Gooley’s How to Read Water (beach explainer). Chris has been reading Scott Wolley’s The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age and How Music Works by David Byrne. Some show-related recommendations include Gretchen Bakke’s The Grid (hear Gretchen on episode 213: Electricity Doesn’t Behave Like an Apple) and Jimmy Soni’s Mind at Play (hear Jimmy on episode 221: Hiding in Plain Sight). She’s reading Tim O’Reilly’s WTF book about the future in anticipation of an upcoming episode. That's a good reminder: we, of course, also recommend Making Embedded Systems. Zach asked about Michael Barr’s Embedded Software Training in a Box. Apologies if we weren’t specific enough, it would likely make a better blog post. Also: $1 Microcontrollers!

Jonathan Beri (@beriberikix) spoke with us about his double life: Particle.io product manager by day, maker by night (and weekends). Jonathan wrote a chapter about piDuino5 Mobile Robot Platform in JavaScript Robotics. Product manager resources from product.careers and Ken Norton's Newsletter. For an alternate take, there is a good cartoon about effective product management from Henrik Kniberg. For getting into open source, see the guide from Github. Also, there is a newi-sh consortium, the TODO group, with guides and resources about running open source projects. There is also the often useful Google's developer documentation style guide. NerdRage’s video on the chemistry of etching The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen by Bunnie Huang Speaking of Robot Operating System (we did, briefly), IEEE Spectrum had a nice history of ROS.

Author Jimmy Soni (@jimmyasoni) spoke with us about his biography of Claude Shannon,  founder of information theory and digital circuit theory. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. For an introduction to the book, read their post 10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives. Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner Mark Levinson’s Particle Fever is a documentary film about the Large Hadron Collider. He is also directing a film about Claude Shannon Scientific Aspects of Juggling by Claude Shannon

Ben Hencke (@im889) spoke with us about OHWS, Tindie, and blinking lights. Ben sells his Pixelblaze WiFi LED controller on his ElectroMage store on Tindie. It is based on the ESP8266 and uses the DotStar (APA102) lights. To hear John Leeman’s trip report on the Open Hardware Summit (OHWS), listen to Don’t Panic Geocast, Episode 140 – “Juicero of Tractors” Ben’s websites are bhencke.com and electromage.com. Go there if you want to see some of Ben’s projects, including Synthia. You can also find Ben on Hackaday, Github, and YouTube. We talked with Charles Lohr about ESP8266 WiFi controlled lights and ColorChord on Embedded.fm episode 102: The Deadly Fluffy Bunny (With WiFi). Laser cut mandalas OSHPark Small Batch Assembly More about the 4-bit Radio Shack computer (and an Arduino-based emulator for it!) Santa Cruz Idea Fab Lab Ben Hencke (@im889) spoke with us about OHWS, Tindie, and blinking lights. Ben sells his Pixelblaze WiFi LED controller on his ElectroMage store on Tindie. It is based on the ESP8266 and uses the DotStar (APA102) lights. To hear John Leeman’s trip report on the Open Hardware Summit (OHWS), listen to Don’t Panic Geocast, Episode 140 – “Juicero of Tractors” Ben’s websites are bhencke.com and electromage.com. Go there if you want to see some of Ben’s projects, including Synthia. You can also find Ben on Hackaday, Github, and YouTube. We talked with Charles Lohr about ESP8266 WiFi controlled lights and ColorChord on Embedded.fm episode 102: The Deadly Fluffy Bunny (With WiFi). Laser cut mandalas OSHPark Small Batch Assembly More about the 4-bit Radio Shack computer (and an Arduino-based emulator for it!) Santa Cruz Idea Fab Lab Talia's nightlight

Josh Bleecher Snyder (@offbymany) joined us to talk about PayPal's Beacon, being acquired, the Go programming language, BTLE, computer vision, and working at a large company after founding small ones. Bluetooth Low Energy: A Developer's Handbook by Robin Heydon TI CC2540 BTLE module Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision by Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler Gatt is a Go package for building Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals (video description by Josh from GopherCon 2014) Card.io Machine learning's Theano Eigen Library for matrix math