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I am Elecia White alongside Christopher White. We’re here to chat about the interests, careers, and lives of engineers, artists, educators and makers. Our diverse guest list includes names you may have heard and engineers working quietly in the trenches. Either way, they are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and inspiring.
We’d love to share our enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM).
Latest episodes

Oct 1, 2015 • 1h 4min
120: Boll Weevil Eradication
Kathleen Sidenblad discusses her career through Silicon Valley, from engineer at Systems Control Inc in 1976 to VP of Engineering today. For more about Kathy, check out this Storehouse interview.

Sep 24, 2015 • 1h 17min
119: Do Your Neighbors Have Any Idea?
Ben Krasnow of the Applied Science YouTube channel talks with us about scanning electron microscopes, generating liquid nitrogen, and cookies. Hackaday Conference is Nov 14-15, 2015 in SF, CA! Call for proposals. (Ben and Elecia are Hackaday Prize Judges.) Contact Ben through twitter: @BenKrasnow Applied Science YouTube channel (and don't forget the associated Patreon). Some specific videos we talked about: Cookie machine Electron microscope scanning vinyl record Faraday effect (control light with magnets!) LED contact lens (not for the squeamish) Other people's videos and projects: Brady Haran's Periodic Videos Veritassium channel Build your own waterjet Amscope microscope and low cost hot air rework soldering station

Sep 16, 2015 • 57min
118: Awesome and Frequently Useless
Morgan Allen (@captain_morgan) spoke with us about Sphero and Node.JS. This is all not-so-secretly a discussion of the BB8 robot. Correction: Despite Elecia's repeated insistence that these are steppers, she's just wrong. The motors are DC which only makes sense in a consumer product. More details on this in a later episode. BB8s from Amazon (probably won't arrive until next year) More info on Elecia's teardown and talk: embedded.fm/hddg The BB8 toy is based on Sphero (buy). They have an open SDK and a wonderful education program. Check out the clear SPRK (buy). It also has a teach-your-kids-to-program app that is pretty neat (but doesn't seem to work with BB8 yet). Morgan has been involved with NodeBots (@nodebotsSF). They use Node.js (wiki) to send Bluetooth serial commands to Spheros. Their issues list is where new meetups are posted. Johnny-Five is also a popular way to do computer based robotics with an Arduino (or other dev board) as a hardware intermediary. IPFS: Distributed file system ESPruino is a Javascript board. People's Open: Free Wireless Internet and Local Network in Oakland, California. Also in Oakland, check out Sudo Room hackerspace.

Sep 9, 2015 • 58min
117: In as Much as Which
Chris and Elecia discuss listener emails and other assorted topics. Preprocessor fun BLE 4.2 writeup from EETimes and the FAQ from Bluetooth.org Drones should follow existing aviation keep out standards (Nick links us to some wiki pages) Automatic dependent surveillance NOTAM Federal Aviation Regulations: Temporary flight restrictions NYT Amazon culture article Cake under a microscope

Sep 2, 2015 • 1h 22min
116: You Have to Care
Glenn Scott (@GlennCScott) spoke with us about API design and techniques for writing good software. Glenn glossed over his bio but it is quite impressive. You can reach him via his PARC page. PARC's Content Centric Networking home: ccnx.org which we talked about in 75: End Up in a Puppy Fight. Literate Programming by Knuth And the more recommended Bob Martin's books While latest source code requires licensing, the binary version of CCN includes the LongBow tools (in user/local/parc/bin). Description of tools and doxygen docs. The LongBow getting started guide should be part of the mid-September binary release. PARC's C Style Guide and C Function Naming Guide

Aug 26, 2015 • 1h 21min
115: Datasheeps
Daniel Hienzsch (@rheingoldheavy) spoke with us about reverse engineering a board, bypass capacitors, and serial protocols. Rheingold Heavy is Dan's company for educational boards. The one he started with was the I2C and SPI education board (its fulfilled kickstarter page). He brought us the theGraphic Equalizer Kit and Bubble Display Experimentation Pack. Dan's Arduino from Scratch blog series looks at the Arduino hardware in great detail. Contextual Electronics course for learning to build boards Chris wrote about his Photon based garage door opener on the Linker blog TinEye for searching schematic snippets

Aug 19, 2015 • 1h 28min
114: Wild While Loops
Andrei Chichak rejoins us to discuss error handling. Andrei's website says how to reach him or email embedded 'at' chichak.ca Windows 10 "Something Happened" error Hitchbot Book Elecia mentioned: Kindness of Strangers by Mike McIntyre Elecia's book covers logging module in Creating a System Architecture (pp 21-25) Robots and children

Aug 13, 2015 • 1h 27min
113: A Noddy Little Program
Clive Turvey (Clive1), master of the ST Forums, talks with us about ARM cores and answering difficult technical questions for fun. Some answers: NVIC Interrupts on the same pin number STM32F4 PWM channel 3 ST's Cortex-M7 Books (though we talked more about these being good authors, these are the ones Chris and Elecia have or want): The Definitive Guide to ARM Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 Processors, 3rd Edition (Joseph Yiu, 2013) The Definitive Guide to ARM Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M0+ Processors, 2nd Edition (Joseph Yiu, 2015) Z80 Assembly Language Programming Paperback (Lance A Leventhal, 1979) Programming the 6502 (Rodnay Zaks, 1979) A bare metal Scheme interpreter for ARM.

Aug 4, 2015 • 1h 20min
112: My Brain Is My Resource
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) chat with each other about drones, listener emails, conferences, fighting robots, and moonlighting. Elecia's Solid talk, an Introduction to Inertial Sensors is on youtube. Washington Post article about Amazon's good drone behavior Apple's IOS security guide (Elecia's security checklist) Photon WiFi Module (Chris' Linker articles part one and part two) DAB+ FM Digital Radio Development Board Sad autonomous fighting robot video and lightning fast autonomous sumo bots video OpenSCAD- CAD tool suggested by a listener Elecia's conference apology Light painting pictures (500px)

Jul 29, 2015 • 50min
111: Potty Train Your Tamagotchi
Natalie Silvanovich (@natashenka) discussed reverse engineering hardware, working on security software, and the fantastic world of Tamagotchis. Natalie's site and blog Hardware Excuse Generator Original CCC 2012 talk: Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation CCC 2013 talk: Even More Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation Natalie's upcoming BlackHat talk: Attacking ECMAScript Engines with Redefinition Flash exploit article for Project Zero: One Perfect Bug: Exploiting Type Confusion in Flash Tamagotchis are still available as are the works of Shel Silverstein (Snowball is in Falling Up).