Elizabeth Wharton spoke to us about laws, computers, cybersecurity, and funding education in rural communities. She is a strong proponent of privacy by design and de-identification by default. Liz (@LawyerLiz) is the VP of Operations at Scythe.io (@scythe_io), a company that works in cybersecurity. She won the Cybersecurity or Privacy Woman Law Professional of the Year for 2022 at DefCon. Liz is on the advisory board of the Rural Tech Fund (@ruraltechfund) which strives to reduce the digital divide between rural and urban areas. We mentioned disclose.io and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA, wiki). Transcript

Elecia and Chris are back from vacation and catching up! Today’s topics include: last week’s burnout episode and what we learned, what is a PSoC and why would you want one, how to get up to speed as a junior engineer, and a few more side quests. The burnout episode with Keith Hildesheim was last week, we encourage you to check it out, we learned some things about ourselves and maybe you will too. Chris mentioned astrophotography and here’s the link to the reddit post that inspires him to keep going: astrounding Jupiter video. In case you missed it in the newsletter, which you should definitely sign up for, here’s Chris’ list of VSCode extensions: AutoScroll - Have a log file open that you're monitoring? This extension keeps the tab scrolled to the bottom at all times. Doxygen Documentation Generator - Quickly generate and pre-fill those tedious doxygen style comments. GitHub Pull Requests and Issues - Make pull-requests or do reviews for Github right in the editor. GitLens - Easily see revision history and "blame" for every line of code in a pretty unobtrusive way. Header source switch - Ever want to switch really quickly to a C file's header (or vice versa)? This adds a keyboard shortcut to do just that. TODO Highlight - Makes those millions of TODOs and FIXMEs light up in a nice neon color so you can't ignore them anymore. Transcript

Keith Hildesheim joined us in an excellent conversation about avoiding burnout at work (and dealing with the aftereffects).  Keith mentioned some useful books and articles: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle Mindset: The New Psychology of Success SCARF Model Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People 5 Ways to Boost Your Resilience at Work How to Make Stress Your Friend Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindfulness Exercises 3 Ways to Recharge When You're Burned Out.   Transcript Keith also sent over a few charts and checklists which you can see on the website episode notes.

Mike Harrison challenged us to a PIC fight on twitter. Surprisingly, no blood was shed and we mostly talked about LEDs and art installations. Mike’s YouTube Channel and his website electricstuff.co.uk. He's on twitter as @mikelectricstuf.  Here's a link to what prompted the show: PIC fight on Twitter. His professional hire-him-to-work-on-your-neat-stuff site is whitewing.co.uk For driving LEDs, Mike likes the TI TLC5971: 12-Channel, 16-Bit ES-PWM RGB LED Driver with 3.3V Linear Regulator.

Professor Barbara Liskov spoke with us about the Liskov substitution principle, data abstraction, software crisis, and winning a Turing Award. See Professor Liskov’s page at MIT, including her incredible CV.

Gustavo Pezzi spoke with us about using fun and simple systems to explain low-level concepts and how they work in higher-level engineering tasks. For example, teaching microprocessor concepts using Atari 2600 assembly and physics by creating a simple game engine. Gustavo’s site is Pikuma.com. He has a free taster course on bit-shifting. We also talked about Atari 2600 Programming with 6502 Assembly and Physics Game Engine Programming.  Stella, a multi-platform Atari 2600 emulator For examples of optimizing in different ways, check out this bit hacks page. Gustavo is mentoring for Classpert’s Building a Language course. (This is where Elecia teaches Making Embedded Systems.) The conjecture about a shortage of  electrical engineers was from The Register. Transcript

Phillip Johnston joined us to talk about how engineering approaches can change over time.  This conversation started with Phillip’s Embedded Artistry blog post How Our Approach to Abstract Interfaces Has Changed Over the Years. His new course is Designing Embedded Software for Change.  Embedded Artistry has a Design Pattern Catalogue (though Elecia was looking at Software design patterns on Wikipedia during the podcast). https://github.com/embvm  Phillip is working with Memfault on an ongoing embedded systems panel. The first topic they covered was observability metrics for IoT devices. There is a panel coming up on how to debug embedded devices in production. Some reading that Phillip mentioned: Toward a New Model of Abstraction in Software Engineering by Gregor Kiczales A Procedure for Designing Abstract Interfaces for Device Interface Modules by Kathryn Heninger Britton, R. Alan Parker, David L. Parnas Designing Software for Ease of Extension and Contraction by  David L. Parnas (1979) Design Patterns for Embedded Systems in C: An Embedded Software Engineering Toolkit by Bruce Powel Douglass Best Paper Awards in Computer Science from Jeff Huang  Creating a Circular Buffer in C and C++ - Embedded Artistry Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter - Total Phase    Transcript

Chris and Elecia chat about origami, learning, whether to future proof tools or buy the cheaper option, simulators, and classes. Elecia is gearing up to teach another Making Embedded Systems course. Sign up if you want to be in the Yellow Seahorses cohort! Sign up early and often. Sign up other people. Ask other people to sign themselves up and even more other people. Well, you get the idea. Check out Wokwi! While it looks like it is for Arduino from the front page, there is a lot of work going on to support C/C++ APIs such as the one for Raspberry Pi Pico or the Rust one for the ESP32. Please ask a professor what they’d need to use Wokwi in their class! In episode 158: Programming Is Too Difficult for Humans, we talked about the Ada language and using it on ARM cores. Learn Ada (at AdaCore). News Dead spiders are coming soon to a robot near you Continuous ultrasounds: probably not for swimming  Is CERN opening a portal to hell? Scientists claim not.   Transcript Thank you to our sponsor this week!

Chris Hobbs talks with Elecia about safety critical systems. Safety-critical systems keep humans alive. Writing software for these embedded systems carries a heavy responsibility. Engineers need to understand how to make code fail safely and how to reduce risks through good design and careful development.  The book discussed was Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems by Chris Hobbs. This discussion was originally for Classpert (where Elecia is teaching her Making Embedded Systems course) and the video is on Classpert’s YouTube if you want to see faces. There were many terms with letters and numbers, here is a guide: IEC 61508: Functional Safety of Electrical/Electronic/Programmable Electronic Safety-related Systems; relates to industrial systems and forms the foundation for many other standards  ISO 26262: Road vehicles - Functional Safety; extends and specializes IEC 61508 for systems within cards IEC 62304 specifies life cycle requirements for the development of medical software and software within medical devices. It has been adopted as national standards and therefore can be used as a benchmark to comply with regulatory requirements. MISRA C: a set of software development guidelines for the C programming language  DO178-C and DO178-B: Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification are the primary documents by which the certification authorities such as FAA, EASA and Transport Canada approve all commercial software-based aerospace systems ISO/IEC 29119: Software and systems engineering -- Software testing ISO 14971:2019 Medical devices — Application of risk management to medical devices IEC 62304:2006 Medical device software — Software life cycle processes Transcript

Dan White, CEO of Filament Games, spoke to us about educational games, how to make play part of learning, and simulating robots. We also discussed what makes a good (or bad) learning experience, the limits of games as educational tools, and the elements of fun. Roblox is a game platform and game creation system. Filament Games is developing a robot simulator called Roboco. Filament has many games out in the wild, check out their portfolio. If this sounds like fun, check out their careers page. Durf live streams game playing Transcript