Embedded

Chris and Elecia talk about photons, comets, patterns, other flying objects, and cameras. Chris uses PixInsight for processing  and has an Ioptron Sky Tracker. Apologies to our southern hemisphere listeners because Polaris is not visible there. There are (of course) other ways to align and even in the northern hemisphere more modern trackers don’t necessarily need Polaris. Star Exterminator: who cares what it does it has an awesome name. Though it does what it says (on photos, no real stars were harmed in the making of this podcast). Jupyter Notebooks on a Circuit Python board. Elecia’s Yoshimura sine pattern generating Python colab. Also, Rigidly foldable origami gadgets and tessellations is an excellent article about Miura-ori and other rigidly foldable patterns. You can see her patterns over on Instagram. (You can see some of Chris’ photos on his Instagram.) Transcript

Adafruit’s Liz Clark (BlitzCityDIY) spoke with us about MIDI, music, and tutorials.  Liz’s Adafruit Tutorials include MIDI for Makers CircuitPython Trombone Champ Controller Mini LED Matrix Audio Visualizer  CircuitPython MIDI to CV Skull Liz sometimes hosts the Adafruit Show and Tell which is Wednesdays 7:30pm ET. Speaking of Adafruit videos, we mentioned the Fusion 360 tutorial on Snap Fit Cases. Liz’s BlitzCityDIY YouTube channel shows her building instruments including her mentioned Melody Maker. She also has many 3D printables and github repositories under github.com/BlitzCityDIY Christopher notes that there are browser extensions that allow a person to stop auto-playing GIFs. VCVRack is a Eurorack simulator for synthesizer modules. Sadly, Mutable Instruments has shut down. Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk with Mark Smith (aka SmittyHalibut and N6MTS) about amateur radio, interconnect standards, and podcasting. Mark is a host of the Ham Radio Workbench podcast. His company is Halibut Electronics (electronics.halibut.com). He’s been working on Open Headset Interconnect Standard and Satellite Optimized Amateur Radio (SOAR). Find Mark as SmittyHalibut on YouTube, github, and Mastodon. Chris talked about getting into WSPR in 197: Smell the Transistor but we first talked about it in 76: Entropy is For Wimps Chris has spec’d out his intended project at QRP Labs, the QCX+ 5W CW Mini. Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk to Jeff Gable and Luca Ingianni of the Agile Embedded podcast, discussing the definition of Agile, agreeing about some things, and disagreeing about others. Agile Embedded can be found in your usual podcast locations or get it from the source: https://agileembeddedpodcast.com/ Jeff’s website is jeffgable.com and Luca’s is luca.engineer Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk about house maintenance, blinking LEDs, paper engineering and more.  Cutting Mobius Strips Video: Tadashi Tokieda cuts various combinations of loops and Mobius loops - with surprising results. festi.info/boxes.py generates boxes for laser cutting (or other SVG consuming device). Boxes.py is a python module that lets you programmatically generate the SVGs. (Github repo) Amanda Ghassaei’s Sugarcube is a MIDI instrument using this SparkFun button pad. We also talked about the Mikroe 8800 Retro Click. Elecia is taking Paper Engineering with Kelli Anderson. Chris is taking songwriting courses from School of Song. Transcript

We talked with John Taylor about his book, how to handle data, and the open/closed principle of software development. John’s book is Patterns in the Machine. It was mentioned on Embedded Artistry and is part of their Design for Change course. John also has a blog (PatternsInTheMachine.net) and a github repo that is a companion to his book, showing the PIM framework. Transcript

Daniel Situnayake joined us to talk about AI, embedded systems, his new book on the previously mentioned topics, and writing technical books.  Daniel’s book is AI at the Edge: Solving Real-World Problems with Embedded Machine Learning from O’Reilly Media. He is also the Head of Machine Learning at Edge Impulse, which makes machine learning on embedded devices simpler. They have a Responsible AI License which aims to keep our robot overlords from being too evil. We mentioned AI Dungeon as an amusing D&D style adventure with an AI. We also talked about ChatGPT. Daniel was previously on the show, Episode 327: A Little Bit of Human Knowledge, shortly after his first book came out: TinyML: Machine Learning with TensorFlow Lite on Arduino and Ultra-Low-Power Microcontrollers Transcript

Chris Svec joined us to talk about kids programming and how well the Joel Test has held up. Svec’s son (“The Kid”) developed an interest in programming by playing games. Most of his programming desires are around building games of his own.  Any time we talk about kids and programming, Scratch comes up. It really is that neat and is The Kid approved. Some resources to get you started (actually, getting started is easy, you may want a book to do more than the basics): The Everything Kids' Scratch Coding Book: Learn to Code and Create Your Own Cool Games! by Jason Rukman  Scratch 3 Programming Playground: Learn to Program by Making Cool Games by Al Sweigart (hey, we know that guy!) griffpatch on YouTube  Digipen.edu had two courses The Kid (and Svec) took. Both are free on YouTube: Introduction to Game Design Lessons DigiPen Basic Game Development Series Finally, in a shockingly unrelated twist, we talked about the Joel Test for determining the health of a software development organization. No determination was made on how good The Kid finds his current position. Transcript

Chris and Elecia take an in-studio vacation, chatting about what they’ve been doing. A few technical topics came up, entirely unintentionally. Shirts are on sale James Webb Space Telescope Pop-Up Card Spicy Honey Github Codespaces lets you try out some code bases  Some quirks of C How do breakpoints even work? (via Memfault’s Interrupt) Transcript

Thea Flowers creates open source and open hardware craft synthesizers that use Circuit Python for customization. She also writes about the internals of the SAMD21. Thea’s synthesizer modules are found at Winterbloom, including Castor & Pollux and the Big Honking Button. It is all open source hardware so you can find code and schematics on Thea’s github site: github.com/theacodes  Thea’s site is thea.codes. You can find her blog there with deeply technical and detailed posts such as The most thoroughly commented linker script (probably), The Design of the Roland Juno oscillators, and Understanding the SAMD21 Clocks. She’s on Twitter as Stargirl, @theavalkyrie. For more information about the Eurorack, listen to Embedded 356: Deceive and Manipulate You with Leonardo Laguna Ruiz of Vult.