Embedded

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) answer listener emails. Get your entries in for March Micro Madness, the matches start very soon. The short story Elecia finds most memorable is All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury. We mentioned Procopio who teaches microcontrollers at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education ITESM (site, wiki) Hector sent up the IEEE Code of Ethics, a good high-level set of rules.

Matt Godbolt (@mattgodbolt) spoke with us about settling arguments with Compiler Explorer. Compiler Explorer comes different flavors: https://rust.godbolt.org/ https://d.godbolt.org/ https://go.godbolt.org/ https://gcc.godbolt.org/ You can see the beta version by putting a beta on the end:  https://gcc.godbolt.org/beta/ This a fully open source project. You can read the code and/or run your own version: https://github.com/mattgodbolt/compiler-explorer https://github.com/mattgodbolt/compiler-explorer-image Matt works at DRW working on low latency software. Note that DRW is hiring for software engineers. You can read about the evolution of Compiler Explorer on their blog. Matt’s personal blog is xania.org. You might like parts about 6502 Timings. He also has several conference talks on YouTube including x86 Internals for Fun & Profit and Emulating a 6502 in Javascript. Matt was previously at Argonaut Games. Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and his C++17 Commodore 64 Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? paper (with a nod to Don’t Panic GeoCast’s Fun Paper Friday)

Kari Love (@ikyotochan) spoke with us about creating soft robotics. You can see her edible soft robots talk from 33c3. Kari works at Super-Releaser. Her personal site (and blog) is Kari Makes. Kari mentioned that the Super-Release intern Aidan had some picks for soft robotics on Instructables. Super-Releaser created the Glaucus soft robot and Adafruit has an in-depth tutorial for how to make it. Some videos of soft actuators and soft robots: Super-Releaser Playing with Heat-Sealed Actuators (including the spiral) Silicone gripper from a cardboard mold Voxel Soft Robotic Simulation Evolution Super Long Mylar Robot MIT Tangible Media Group AeroMorph Soft Exoskeletons http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/11/12/wearable-power-assist-device-goes-on-sale-in-japan/ http://biodesign.seas.harvard.edu/soft-exosuits http://www.roamrobotics.com/ Rat heart cell robot from Popular Mechanics First Autonomous Entirely Soft Robot (Harvard Octobot) VoxCad Tutorial for simulating soft robotics Also, if you haven’t seen Big Hero 6, you should. Consider it computer science homework. If you just want to see Baymax, here is a short video. Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate (Elecia’s latest octopus related reading, the previous one was called Kraken)

Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) of the Hanselminutes Podcast talks about technology podcasting and philosophy. You can find Scott's blog on Hanselman.com/blog and his other podcasts on Hanselman.com/podcasts. We talked about Hansleminutes' WebVR episode with Ada Rose Edwards and Alcohol and Tech with Victor Yocco. We also mentioned Scott's blog post from 2014 about what technologies he would learn if he had to start over.

Crossing machine intelligence, robotics, and medicine, Patrick Pilarski (@patrickpilarski) is working on smart prosthetic limbs. Build your own learning robot references: Weka Data Mining Software in Java for getting to know your data, OpenIA Gym for understanding reinforcement learning algorithms, Robotis Servos for the robot (AX is the lower priced line), and five lines of code: pred = numpy.dot(xt,w) delta = r + gamma*numpy.dot(xtp1,w) - pred e = gamma*lamda*e + xt w = w + alpha*delta*e xt = xtp1 Patrick even made us a file (with comments and everything!). Once done, you can enter the Cybathlon. (Or check out a look at Cybathlon 2016 coverage.) Machine Man by Max Barry Snow Country by Bokushi Suzuki Aimee Mullins and her many amazing legs (TED Talk) Patrick is a professor at University of Alberta, though a lot more than that: he is the Canada Research Chair in Machine Intelligence for Rehabilitation at the University of Alberta, and Assistant Professor in the Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and a principal investigator with both the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute  (Amii) and the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (RLAI). See his TED talk: Intelligent Artificial Limbs.

Indrek Rebane (@RebaneIndrek) spoke with us about the Garage48 Hardware and Arts hackathon, hardware incubators in Estonia, linguistics, hydrology, and startup investments. Garage48 Hardware & Arts hackathon is February 17-19, 2017 at the Institute of Physics, University of Tartu (Tartu, Estonia). The event is organized by Garage48, University of Tartu and the Estonian Academy of Arts. Indrek is CTO of Build It Hardware Accelerator and electronics engineer for Hedgehog Engineering. Recommended book: The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you Other resources Indrek mentioned after recording: Why to Not Not Start a Startup by Paul Graham (blog) Why not to do a startup by Marc Andreessen (blog) Don’t Follow Your Passion by Ben Horowitz (video) Why Not To Do a Startup by Dave McClure (video)

While we planned to ask Andrei Chichak to podcast when he was in town for the Embedded.fm party, we spent too much time goofing off. So we are replaying Andrei's first appearance on the show where he spoke with us about MISRA-C and ethics.  (Note that this is the same Andrei who writes the STM32 Embedded Wednesday posts for the Embedded.fm blog.) Linker post: It's dangerous to go alone! Take MISRA-C Andrei's has personal website (we failed to talk about his kite aerial photography, it is really neat though) and his company is CBF Systems. Plum Hall C Compiler Validation PC Lint JPL Coding Standards for C (and the mentioned video discussing Mars Code) ISO 26262 Automobile software standard Cortex-R for high reliability systems (ARM's description) National Society of Professional Engineers code of ethics and Canadian Engineering Guidelines on the Code of Ethics Offline, Andrei recommended two books and another podcast about MISRA: C Traps and Pitfalls Safer C MISRA with Johan Bezem (podcast)

Debby Meredith (@DebbyMe) stops by to tell us what it is like being a venture partner and interim VP of engineering. Debby is a venture partner at Icon Ventures. Her website is DebbyMeredith.com. She was on a new podcast: Women Who Code Radio. Computer History Museum's new exhibit is Make Software: Change the World. It opens on January 28, 2017.  After recording, Debby mentioned a book she likes: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP

Ben Krasnow (@BenKrasnow) spoke with us about prototyping, Patreon, and staying current. And a whole bunch of stuff. January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP Ben’s YouTube channel is Applied Science. His recent videos have been shot with the high speed Chronos camera (whose creator David Kronstein was on The Amp Hour #325). Ben has a Patreon page which funds randomness. (Embedded also has a Patreon page, for randomness and mics.) Ben was previously on the show: 119: Do Your Neighbors Have Any Idea? For BLE prototyping, Ben mentioned the OSH Chip by Philip Freidin (146: The Loyal Opposition) and using Processing for Android to make quick-n-dirty test applications. We mentioned the Wazer desktop waterjet. Chris brought up this video describing impedance with a mechanical model. One of Ben’s favorite videos that he did was the first one with an electron microscope, way back in 2011: DIY Scanning Electron Microscope - Overview. Ben gets a lot of his news from Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/ Ben’s Twitter criteria was that they didn’t post updates often too often for his one-a-day check and that they focus on tech: @bunniestudios @vk2zay @elonmusk  (for updates on my car's firmware) @LongHairNasaGuy @szczys @samykamkar @PaulStoffregen @mikelectricstuf @johndmcmaster @michaelossmann @macegr @Chris_Gammell @EMSL @mightyohm And some of his favorite YouTube channels (Ben said it was very difficult to distill as there are many great choices): mikeselectricstuff tesla500 Matthias Wandel NightHawkInLight The Signal Path Techmoan Cody's Lab This Old Tony Clickspring Nick Moore Gross Science Haas Automation Hackaday Reactions I Build It Alex Dainis bigclivedotcom We also mentioned architect Frank Howarth of the urbanTrash channel.

Philip Koopman (@BetterEmbSW) spoke with us about making better embedded software. His Better Embedded Systems Software blog has lots of great information including links to his growing video library. Two posts noted in the show: Recording Peer Reviews Spreadsheet Code Review Checklist His company, Edge Case Research, performs design and code reviews and teaches how to do them. You can find out more about his course and background on his Carnegie Mellon University staff page. That also leads to the pretty amazing Vintage Aero paper airplanes. Phil’s book is Better Embedded Software, available via koopman.us and (more expensively) Amazon. Fagan Inspection Videos of robots being stressed   Also: Embedded.fm Jan 28th Party RSVPs on Eventbrite