Embedded

We were joined in the studio by the Evil Mad Scientists Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay. Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) produces the disintegrated 555 Timer kit and 741 Op-Amp  kit. These were made in conjunction with Eric Schlaepfer, who also created the Monster 6502.  EMSL also makes the Eggbot kit and AxiDraw not-kit (and mini-kit). For a history of the pen plotter, check out Sher Minn’s Plotter People talk on YouTube. (They have too many neat things to list here, go look on their page: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/directory. Or stop into their Sunnyvale, California shop.) We talked about the beauty of boards including Kong Money and ElectroCookie’s candy colored shields and Arduino Leonardo. Jepson Herbarium has interesting workshops including one about seaweed. At one workshop, Lenore and Windell got to talk to Josie Iselin, author of The Curious World of Seaweed.  Elecia enjoyed Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us by Ruth Kassinger. Windell was previously on Embedded episode #124: Please Don’t Light Yourself on Fire, we mainly talked about the book he co-authored: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory. Lenore was previously on Embedded episode #40: Mwahaha Session, we talked about EMSL. Our post-show tidepooling was very successful with a variety of nudibranchs, shrimp, seaweed, sea birds, snails, and hermit crabs.

We spoke with Duncan Haldane about creating hardware schematics by writing software code, three dimensional circuits, and bio-inspired jumping robots.   Duncan is the CEO of JitX (jitx.com). They recently received Series A funding and are currently hiring engineers. Please mention that you heard about JitX here on Embedded. While earning a PhD at UC Berkeley, Duncan (@DuncanHaldane) also worked on Salto (video) and OpenRoach (github). Transcript

Jonathan Beri spoke with us about the different IoT development tools and how to categorize them.  Jonathan (@beriberikix) is the CEO of Golioth (@golioth_iot). He wrote a blog post called An Introduction to The Five Clouds of IoT, breaking the clouds into individual clouds: device, connectivity, data, application, and development. Jonathan was previously on Embedded 222: Virtual Bunnie when he worked for Particle.io. A partial list of the IoT tools we mentioned: ThingsBoard Freeboard Grafana Ubidots  Renode Memfault Golioth Particle.io  Node-RED Soracom Hologram.io   See also A list of IoT platforms – Systev post mentioned in the show (also Building The Infinite Matrix Of Tamagotchis | Hackaday).   Transcript

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