We spoke with Chris Maury (@CMaury) about using speech recognition to interact with devices.  Note: Please turn off your Echo and Dots as we invoke Alexa a lot.  Chris is the founder of Conversant Labs. They created TinCan.ai which can help you wireframe or prototype a conversational user interface.  They can also help you build Alexa Skills, though if you are so inclined, you might try it for yourself: Alexa Skills Kit.  Chris will be speaking at the O'Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco, CA in March 2017, giving a tutorial on building voice based user interfaces. You can read more from Chris on his Medium posts medium.com/@CMaury. CMU PocketSphinx Some of the embedded devices Elecia mentioned: Audeme (as heard on The Amp Hour #258) Grove Speech Recognizer from Seeed EasyVR  We haven't gotten embedded.fm (or any podcast) to work with Alexa but we aren't sure why. Have you?  

After a few announcements, we replayed the episode where James Grenning told us about Test Driven Development.  Note: the contest mentioned in the show is over. However, the SparkFun TinkerKit contest ends December 9th so you still have time to win something! Other announcements include: Elecia was on the Don't Panic GeoCast (#97) You can send us email by hitting the contact link on embedded.fm This does not count for our Patreon because it is a repeat

Chris and Elecia answer listener emails on-air. Patreon Embedded.fm blog SparkFun Tinker Kit BB8 Sphero Jewelbots (from #173) Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner  The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

Toni Klopfenstein (@ToniCorinne) joined us to talk about what it is like working at SparkFun(@SparkFun) and why open source hardware is important. Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA.org) has a certification program for open source hardware projects and products. Some of the SparkFun products and posts we talked about: Tinker Kit SparkPunk Sound Kit FLiR Dev Kit with its hookup guide and neat video Digital handpan (electronic drum) blog post Inflatable Friends (balloon robot) blog post Open Source Hardware Summit was in Portland, OR in October. Hackaday Superconference was in Pasadena, CA in November. Their site has the 2015 videos available. (There was an Embedded.fm show about it too!)  

Jean Labrosse of Micrium (@Micrium) spoke with us about writing a real time operating system (uC/OS), building a business, and caring about code quality. Take a look at the uC/OS operating systems (available for free to makers) and Jean's excellent and free RTOS books (it was the Kinetis one that talks about the medical process). Also, check out the uCProbe which integrates with your debugger to replace some logic analyzer and oscilloscope features.  Jean's blog about detecting stack overflows: part 1 and part 2. Brother to Brother by Gino Vanelli

We spoke to Evan Shapiro, CTO and cofounder of Knit Health (@KnitHealth), about baby monitors, IoT security, neural nets, and professional poker. The Knit Health Kickstarter ends November 17, 2016. Evan recommended Google Tensor Flow and Python's Theano for an introduction to machine learning. (If those sound familiar it is because Kat Scott mentioned them as well.) Evan also suggested that if you'd like to know more about the history of neural nets, check out this post by Audrey Korenkov.  If you'd like a gentle introduction, check out a Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule. Evan mentioned some videos he did about poker, they are on Card Runners (NOTE: it is a paid site with free tastes). Final quote was from Neil Gaiman's excellent Graveyard Book.

George Stocker (@gortok) spoke with us about software, Jewelbots (@Jewelbots) and learning embedded systems to ship the product.  Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems. George also recommended Getting Started with BLE and Programming Pearls. The processor we talked about was the Nordic nRF51, a BLE system on a chip.

James Cameron of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) tells us about Forth, science fiction, and laptops. We have some tickets for ARM's mbed Connect conference is Oct 24, 2016 in Santa Clara. Will you be in the area? Want to go? Contact us if you want one of our free tickets! (There are still some tickets remaining.)  One Laptop Per Child is one.laptop.org.  Some getting started information on Forth: Mitch Bradley's Forth and Open Firmware Lessons James has been writing about putting C Forth on a Teensy (more on the Teensy from the creator's site). He also has a post on using Forth to snoop the Milo Champions Band's BLE.  James is Quozl on most sites that require a unique ID (such as Github:  https://github.com/quozl). This is from a book called Quozl by Alan Dean Foster. The other older-sci-fi reference was to the Pern books by Anne McCaffery, specifically to the White Dragon. 

Saar Drimer of Boldport (@boldport) spoke with us about the crossover of art to electronics and building a business around it.  Monthly, the Boldport Club ships aesthetically-pleasing electronics kits. We discussed past projects include The Lady and Touchy on the show. The seahorse board is on the blog. Micah Scott (@scanlime) has entrancing videos of putting together the first club project (Pease) and second one (Superhero). Saar uses PCBMode to create his circuits. He also wrote the tool. It is open source. Cratejoy is used for the sales and shipping logistics. 

Elecia tries to get Chris to do her homework in preparation for her "Embedded Software: The Tricky Parts" presentation at IEEE-Computer Society meeting in San Jose, CA on Oct 11, 2016. If you register, you can attend, in person or online! And for free!  We have some tickets for ARM's mbed Connect conference is Oct 24, 2016 in Santa Clara. Will you be in the area? Want to go? Contact us if you want one of our free tickets! (There are still some tickets remaining.) Also: their unit test framework is GreenTea (not whatever Elecia said).