Embedded

Daniel Hienzsch (@rheingoldheavy) and Majenta Strongheart (majentastronghe_art) gave us suggestions on setting up a home shop and information on setting up a maker space. Daniel is the resident engineer at SupplyFrame's Pasadena Design Lab. He still the owns and runs RheingoldHeavy.com, a company devoted to educational boards, as we talked about on episode 115: Datasheeps. Majenta's web page is MajentaStrongheart.com. We talked more about School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Sarah Petkus in 142: New and Improved Appendages.

Chris and Elecia talk to each other about compiler optimizations, bit banging I2C, listener emails, and small-town parades. Games to learn/play with assembly languages include The Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation and TIS-100 by Zachtronics. We've been enjoying the Embedded Thoughts blog. And Chris is reading Practical Electronics for Inventors and liking it.  We talked a little about Interview.io's adventure in voice changing. Shirts are gone for awhile. New logo stickers are available at StickerMule if you'd like to support and share the show. 

Fabien Chouteau (@DesChips) of AdaCore (@AdaCoreCompany) spoke with us about theMake with Ada Programming Competition. Giveaway boards are GONE.  The Ada programming language (wiki) is interesting in that it was designed for safety critical embedded systems (actually designed, requirements doc and everything!). The Ada Information Clearinghouse has a nice list of tutorials and books as does the very helpful Make with Ada Getting Started page. Elecia's favorite was Inspirel's Ada on Cortex. Some neat projects in Ada that we mentioned on the show: Fabien's CNC Controller (with code in github) Tetris on a Smart Watch (with a formal proof via SPARK) Nano drone flight controller (with formal proof via SPARK) The platforms supported in the contest are on the Getting Started page but you can expand that by looking at the SVD files in the AdaCore drivers on github. (Also, SVD files are neat.) One of the platforms already supported is the Crazyflie nanodrone. 

Robb Walters of Flybrix (@flybrix) spoke with us about LEGO-based drones. We graciously let him leave with all his hardware. This time. For a limited time, you can get an Embedded.fm tshirt: teespring.com/embedded-fm. Order by the end of June or miss out. (More info about the shirts.) You can order your Flybrix kit and or read their controller code on github (or their controller app code). Robb mentioned a C++ book he liked, it was Effective Modern C++: 42 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of C++11 and C++14 by Scott Meyers. He also noted LEGO bricks resale sites: Brickowl and Bricklink. LEGO Digital Designer looks like a fun way to design builds. Cascade PID controllers are on Wikipedia (though I found this tutorial a little easier).  The congratulations offered at the top of the show were to Meshpoint.me for winning the Best Humanitarian Tech of the Year at the Europas Conference.

Jeri Ellsworth (@jeriellsworth) spoke with us about the latest developments at CastAR, hiring engineers, and her favorite engine. Embedded.fm T-Shirts are available until the end of June on Teespring (more info). CastAR is making an augmented reality system. They are in Palo Alto, CA, USA and they arehiring.  They work with Playground. Jeri was last on Embedded.fm episode 23: Go For Everything I Want.

Jonathan Bradshaw spoke with us about working with hardware engineers, schematic reviews, and FPGAs. At the end of the podcast, Jonathan made a pitch for folks to submit proposals for the IEEE Southern Power Electronics Conference in Auckland in December. The FPGA boards Elecia mentioned were the XLR8 board and the Papillio platform (more on the latter in show #66). By the way, The Amp Hour is our “enemy podcast” but we actually like their show quite a lot. It is a joke. But do feel free to tweet their shameless advertising tweet with the link replaced with one to our show.  And weta are neat! (Image, wiki)

Jeff Keyzer (@MightyOhm) joined us to talk about consumer manufacturing, how to solder, and having a full time job and a kit company. Jeff's blog is on MightyOhm.com. The Geiger Counter kit is available atMightyOhm.com/geiger. The really, really useful Soldering Is Easy comic book isMightyOhm.com/soldercomic. At Valve, Jeff worked on the Steam Controller (hardware specs at bottom of the Valve page or for sale on Amazon). There is also a neat video showing the manufacturing automation in action. We mentioned Glowforge, Dan Shapiro was on episode 125 (and if you are going to buy one, please consider using our referral link!) Elecia and Chris have a Hakko FX-888 soldering iron. Jeff suggests Kester 186 flux which you can get in smaller-than-giant containers on eBay. No, not the pen on Amazon. Or maybe the MG Chemicals 835 (which is in little bottles on Amazon). Flux seems like a very personal thing. 

Patrick Yeon of Planet Labs spoke with us about making satellites. We discussed a method of using orientation to control drag to control speed. While Patrick wasn't sure what he could say about GPS receivers on satellites, another site describes them as part of the flock. Sign up to get access to the huge Open California data set. Planet has many applications and their blog shows off some interesting finds, such as identifying illegal gold mines encroaching on rainforests, quantifying ports with computer vision, counting trees and classifying agriculture crops, fire mapping, and cloud detection. They are still hiring, apply using the email embeddedfm at planet.com will earn us (err, not you) more free tshirts.

Chris and Elecia chat about hobbies and respond to listener feedback and questions. Chris was on an episode of Let's Drone Out, you can listen to it here or search in your favorite podcast platform. It is recorded and broadcast live every Thursday at 8 P.M. (UTC+1) onPowering On. Chris' new quadcopter is a Vortex 285. It runs Clean Flight, an open source flight controller software package. While we had various opinions about RTOSs, we were both interested in the one Alvaro suggested to us: Zephyr Project. As for other embedded podcasts, of course you know about The Amp Hour. And we had Saron of CodeNewbie podcast on, that show is mostly software and people. How aboutMacrofab Engineering? Or O'Reilly's HW podcast?

Paul Sidenblad spoke to us about his engineering career, starting off with GE's work on theGambit spy satellite.   Google Protobufs Elecia read Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites a few years ago and remembers liking it, though this was the first time the information was useful.