Embedded

Christina Cyr spoke with us about building cell phones, entrepreneurship, social purpose corporations, awards, lithium recycling, and her interesting career path.  We talked about Christina's Cyrcle Phone, the related kit from dTOOR, and her CES Innovation Award. We also mentioned Fairphone in the section about social purpose corporation. There is a great paper from Nature about lithium-ion battery recycling: The evolution of lithium-ion battery recycling | Nature Reviews Clean Technology Christina Cyr Personal Website  Wellfound (formerly AngelList) is a startup focused job site that may lead to non-fulltime positions. Crunchbase may help yo...

Steve Hinch wrote a book about engineering, innovation, and business. He shares decades of wisdom gleaned from his career at Hewlett-Packard and Agilent as an engineer, manager, marketing director, and general manager.  Steve's book is Winning through Innovation: Lessons from the Front Lines of Business. While mostly retired, Steve is an executive consultant, see his website to get in touch: Stephen W. Hinch.   We also touched on some of Steve's nature and hiking volumes as well.  While Elecia is reading My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir | Project Gutenberg, Steve suggested works by Edwa...

William Griffin spoke to us about hardware-in-the-loop testing, simulation, terminology, learning complex topics, and books. We don't usually expand upon the show title but Wikipedia has a rabbit hole called Evil demon so there you go. Books mentioned: Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos CMOS Cookbook How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Adventures of a Curious Character Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Leadership BS...

Chris and Elecia chat about books, courses, alternate podcasts, electronics, statistics, kidnapping Roo, and journaling failures.  The Embedded Patreon book club is reading Data-Driven Science and Engineering: Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control by Steven L. Brunton, J. Nathan Kutz. PDF book and links to lectures are at databookuw.com. Some recent links of interest: Datasaurus dozen: a collection of different small data sets that have the same summary statistics. You can see all the graphs here. From Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors.  The I Saved a PNG Image To A Bi...

Dmitry Grinberg joined us to talk about running Linux on small microprocessors (physically small and/or 4-bit). Dmitry does this by emulating a MIPS processor. Boot times vary between minutes and days, depending on the processor.  Dmitry's projects are on his website (dmitry.gr) including: 8-pin Linux (Cortex-M0+!) Linux on an 8-bit micro? Linux/4004 Dmitry recommended NandGame, an online game about building up a processor. We mentioned Eric Schlaepfer of TubeTime. He was on the show on 419: Fission Chips, with EMSL's Windell Oskay, talking about their book O...

We spoke with Peter Griffin about Jumperless Breadboards, no-install GUI development, Excel, and puppies. Jumperless Breadboard at CrowdSupply Colab GUI for Jumperless Breadboard Website GUI for Jumperless Breadboard Excel GUI for Jumperless Breadboard (though it has some USB DTR issues as noted in the show: Jumperless_V5_GUI (Shared).xlsx. Note Microsoft Datastreamer is a serial interface to Excel  Teardown 2025 will have talks up soon! Cory Doctorow wrote about 'Enshittification' in Wired. We didn't bleep the word for this episode since it's becoming an essential part of t...

It's another episode with Elecia and Chris. This week they discuss people that have influenced their lives and careers, thinking about past career choices and regrets therein, identities, the Embedded Slack book club, and electronic projects. Chris is currently taking Dogbotic's DIY Rhythm Widgets course which covers making an analog drum machine from components. We had Dogbotic founder Kirk Pearson on the show on Episode 491. Elecia mentioned the book that the Embedded Slack #book-club channel is working through, Data Driven Science & Engineering Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control, which you can find for free at...

Emily Lovell spoke with us about teaching how to contribute to open source, including her own experience creating the LilyTiny as a Master's student and researching the impact as a PhD student.  The LilyTiny work was done in conjunction with Leah Buechley (Embedded episode 382). See the paper The LilyTiny: A Case Study in Expanding Access to Electronic Textiles or watch the video. UCSC Open Source Program Office (note this is different from the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) that we spoke about with Carl Maltzahn (Episode 285). Emily recommended the curriculum f...

Chris and Elecia talk about Murderbot,  LLMs (AI), bikes, control algorithms, and fancy math.  The website with the ecology jobs is wildlabs.net from 501: inside the Armpit of Giraffe with Meredith Palmer and Akiba..  The algorithm Elecia mentioned was from Patent US7370713B1. The Control Bootcamp YouTube series is a great introduction to control systems beyond PIDs There is also a book from the same folks (with matlab and some python code): Data-Driven Science and Engineering: Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control. Finding bad AI interactions is too easy. Copilot PR mess that was...

We spoke with ecologist Dr. Meredith Palmer and embedded engineer Akiba about lions, terror, and technology.  Akiba works for FreakLabs.org on global conservation projects. We talked about their Boombox which Meredith uses to create experiments to map the landscape of fear in predator/prey relationships. While this may look like pranking animals with jump scares, well, there is real science being done.  What would it look like to be smooched by a lioness? (Video) Bird hears lion, decides to go over there (Video) Checking the reflexes of some zebras and ot...

Komathi Sundaram spoke with us about her enthusiasm for tests and test automation. We talked about the different joys of testing vs. development, setting up CI servers, and different kinds of tests including unit, hardware-in-the-loop, and simulation. It may sound dry but we had a lot of fun. Komathi's site is TheKomSea.com which hosts her blog as well as contact info. She will be speaking on automated hardware in the loop test processes at the Embedded Online Conference.  Transcript Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy M...

We spoke with Janet Hansen about the world of professional costumery (with electronics) and becoming an artist. Janet's business is Enlighted where you can find custom illuminated clothing as well as Janet's ready-made art. Janet's personal site is janethansen.com which is more focused on her artistic pursuits. Janet mentioned Seeed's MSGEQ7. We talked about Janet's light up pillow with Debra Ansell on 494: All Tech Is Wearable — Embedded. Transcript If you're interested in the intersection of neuroscience and engineering, you might want to check out what Mouser El...

At the end of this week's show, Elecia reads a Winnie the Pooh poem as Cookie Monster death metal. Before that, Chris and Elecia chat about mental health, journaling, personal projects, and listener questions.  Please sign up for the Nordic Giveaway!  You can also sign up for the Embedded newsletter. Maybe now with job postings? Elecia's journaling notebook is this one on JetPens (which is where she gets her nice pens and some of her stickers and washi tape).  From discussing some listener messages, we mentioned: Matt Keeter's talk on...

OpenMV has a new Kickstarter so CEO Kwabena Agyeman chatted with us about more powerful (and smaller!) programmable cameras.  See OpenMV's site for their existing cameras. See their (already funded!) kickstarter page for the super powerful N6 and the ridiculously small AE3. Note that OpenMV still is committed to open source. See their github if you want to know more. Edge AI is the idea of putting intelligence in the devices (instead of in the cloud). There is an advocacy and education foundation called Edge AI Foundation. This organization was formerly the TinyML F...

Professor Shimon Schocken spoke with us about teaching computer science from NAND logic gates to arithmetic units, micro assembly, virtual machines, compilers, operating systems, and the Tetris games. We also talk about good design, good interfaces, and good tests. Shimon's book is Elements of Computing Systems and the website with the course lecture notes, slides, videos, simulators, and everything you need is nand2tetris.org.  Shimon mentioned his work with teaching math, that is www.matific.com. You can find out more about Shimon's other projects on his site shimonschocken.com (including his fascinating TED t...

Professor Cindy Harnett spoke to us about new and different sensors and actuators, primarily designed for soft robotics and fabricated with relatively low cost materials. Cindy is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Louisville where she runs the Harnett Lab. The papers we discussed are here. You can find a longer list of Cindy's papers on Google Scholar. The video of the SESAME actuator is especially interesting. Transcript Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy MCUs and wireless SoCs since...

Debra Ansell joined us to talk about finding friends and exchanging neat gifts, accidentally tricking people into making unmanufacutable boards, and happy, blinking lights. Debra is usually known by the moniker GeekMomProjects (also her website is geekmomprojects.com). She has been writing for Make Magazine.  Debra won one of the SuperCon badge add-on awards so her poseable Bendy SAO will be available at SuperCon Europe.  Some other things we mentioned: Seeed Studio XIAO board Adafruit QT Py Debra's Remoticon talk about PCB structures Martin Oehler is...

Elecia and Chris talk with each other about the state of Chris' mind, what makes an embedded developer stand out, "LEGO block" based design, unit tests, and astronomy. Whew! Elecia was recently on the Changelog podcast, talking about the world of embedded systems. Chris has been working with Micropython (we talked with Damien George about Micropython on episode 456). He's using a Pyboard to start, but is looking to move on to this board from Sparkfun. Wikipedia has a nice reference on what the pulse-per-second signal is all about. Elecia talked about her experience...

Nathan Jones chatted with us about his proposal for a computer architecture book based on a 4-bit computer.  Nathan found the 4-bit computer in the Hackaday SuperCon 2022 badge and was amazed by some of the ideas that folks implemented (see SuperCon Badge Hacking Awards Ceremony). Nathan spoke at Hackaday SuperCon 2023 on the processor architecture, highlighting some of his ideas for a book. If you'd like to try your hand at the badge, find it on Nathan's Voja4 Tindie page.  Nathan also spoke recently at the Embedded Online Conference (Building a Simple CLI, OOP in...

Chris and Elecia spoke with Kirk Pearson about running audio-electronic-art workshops, interesting sounds, and their book Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos.  Find the book and a whole kit of parts on the Dogbotic Merch page. A few clicks from there you can find the Workshop List (don't forget the coupon in the show audio).  We also mentioned The Thing (a sneaky listening device), Elliot Williams' writing on CMOS synthesizers (a series called Logic-Noise) and the videos of Sebastian Tomczak (YouTube: littlescalemusic). Transcript   Memfault is a l...