Embedded

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

Mohit Bhoite makes functional electronic sculptures from components and brass wire. We spoke with him on the hows and whys of making art. Mohit’s sculptures, including the Tie Fighter. More on his instagram: mohitbhoite Jiri Prause has a wonderful tutorial on how to make simpler freeform electronics on Instructables. Peter Vogel is another artist making phenomenal freeform electronics. Leonardo Ulian uses electronic components in his art (his don’t function but wow). Advice from Mohit on trying this yourself from Bantam Tools. Mohit likes Xuron Pliers Mohit can be found on twitter as @MohitBhoite

Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay are the authors of Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components. We discussed the inner beauty of a number of electronic components as well as cameras, photography, writing, preparing samples, and terrible title puns. You can pre-order the physical book and get a digital early release copy at NoStarch.com/Open-Circuits Windell is co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory (@EMSL). He and Eric have collaborated before on several projects: The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer  The 555SE Discrete 555 Timer The XL741 Discrete Op-Amp Kit The 741SE Discrete 741 Op-Amp Eric is also known for the Monster 6502, a 6502 processor made up of individual transistors. Eric also writes on tubetime.us and is on Twitter as @TubeTimeUS Sign up for the Embedded newsletter by the end of July and be entered to win one of these lovely prizes: The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer (two) A copy of Open Circuits (one) Transcript A lovely reject from the book, this is the base of a neon bulb from GE.

Chris and Elecia question embedded systems then answer listener questions about embedded systems. They mostly agree except about one thing which, after some discussion, they agree upon. Mostly. Video of Cissy Strut cover where Chris plays all of the instruments Video where Elecia shows off some programmatic origami and simulation (not discussed but it seemed reasonable retaliation for talking about Chris’ video) Dynamic Linker for Cortex-M (github repo) Transcript

Alexandra Covor spoke with us about engineering, making, drawing, school, and what it means to be an artist.  Alex’s projects are on GitHub and Hackster.io. Her electronics comics can be found as PikaComics on Instagram. The 2022 Open Hardware Summit named Alex as part of the Ada Lovelace Fellowship. Her favorite talk from the summit was Anuradha Reddy talking about Knotty (Naughty) Hardware. Alex works for Zalmotek, a design services firm in Bucharest. We talked about Waylay.io, including their smart pet feeder built on that platform. For example projects for Edge Impulse, they built a tools organizer that uses ML. Transcript

John Catsoulis is the founder of Udamonic and creator of the Forth-based Scamp development board. He spoke with us about Forth, electrical engineering, and writing a technical book. Find out more about Udamonic’s Scamp at udamonic.com. There are some hardware projects under the Create menu. The Forth programming language is famous for its small size, portability, and post-fix (RPN) nature.  John wrote O’Reilly’s Designing Embedded Hardware. While some parts are out of date, the general theory is still good. CuriousMarc’s YouTube channel is full of retro-computer goodness. Long ago, Elecia read The Eudaemonic Pie and imagined a life of high tech crime. Please don’t tell her if it doesn’t hold up well. Transcript

Lead Solution Architect at Cymotive, Benny Meisels spoke with us about implementing embedded software security in cars. The discussion touches ECUs, IoT vehicles, threat and risk analysis, and how reverse engineering plays a role in security testing. Benny works at Cymotive (https://www.cymotive.com/). You can find him on LinkedIn benny-meisels or on Twitter @benny_meisels. Resources for automotive security: Automotive Security Research Group (ASRG) Upstream Security Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU - Part 1 – Willem Melshing's Blog  Instrument Cluster (ICM) Simulator: ICSim on github Program | escar USA conference | Embedded Security in Cars Car in a box, also on github and Arduino based: A lower cost approximation of the Toyota PASTA:Portable Automotive Testbed with Adaptability  Ghost Peak: Practical Distance Reduction Attacks Against HRP UWB Ranging Framework Laptop  Transcript

Laura Abbott of Oxide Computing spoke with us about a silicon bug in the ROM of the NXP LPC55, affecting the TrustZone.  More information about the two issues are in the Oxide blog: Another vulnerability in the LPC55S69 ROM Exploiting Undocumented Hardware Blocks in the LPC55S69  More about LPC55S6x and their LPC55Sxx Secure Boot Ghidra is a software reverse engineering framework… and it is one of the NSA’s github repositories. Laura will also be speaking about this at Hardwear.io in early June 2022 in Santa Clara.  Twitter handles: @hardwear_io, @oxidecomputer, @openlabbott, The vulnerability was filed with NIST: NVD - CVE-2021-31532 Transcript