Embedded

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

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.