Embedded

Chris and Elecia explain when and why to use an operating system on a microcontroller (real-time or not). Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters, particularly to our corporate patreon, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).

Dr. Loretta Cheeks (@loretta_cheeks) spoke with us about implicit bias in text, machine learning, getting a PhD, and STEAM outreach via Strong Ties (strongtiesaz.org). Also see: Loretta's research on identifying implicit bias (The thumbnail image is from her work.) Lotetta's TEDx talk on AI and remembering Yoshua Bengio wiki Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters for Loretta's mic, particularly to our corporate sponsor, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).

Amanda "w0z" Wozniak (@kainzowa) spoke with us about her career through biomedical engineering and startups. Amanda contributed a chapter to Building Open Source Hardware: DIY Manufacturing. (A book we spoke with Alicia Gibb about in #289.) Amanda's chapter was titled Design Process: How to Get from Nothing to Something. For more information about the companies we discussed, check out Amanda's LinkedIn page.

What do you get when you connect the open-source reverse engineer of Valve's Steam Controller and the main electrical engineer of said device? Jeff Keyzer (@mightyohm) and Gregory Gluszek (@greggersaurus) join us to talk about building and taking apart devices. Greg's project is on github as the OpenSteamController. He used pinkySim, an ARM simulator. Jeff has left Valve and is now a freelance engineer as well as selling kits on mightyohm.com. The incredibly useful comic on how to solder lives there: mightyohm.com/soldercomic I-Opener was the computer discussed.

Jay Carlson (@jaydcarlson) is back on the show to discuss education and the techniques he's using to teach embedded systems. Jay has some great posts on his jaycarlson.net blog. The one related to this show was entitled "How I Teach Embedded Systems." Jay was also on Embedded 226: Camp AVR Vs. Camp Microchip where we discussed his fantastic survey of micros in The Amazing $1 Microcontroller. We also mentioned one of his recent posts about 3 cent micros. Teaching has many different approaches. We talked about Bloom's taxonomy and mentioned the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition.

Jen Costillo (@rebelbotjen) joins Elecia and Christopher to discuss their experiences interviewing (both as interviewer and interviewee). Elecia did an hour long webinar on how to conduct technical interviews. In this show, she mentions a good post-interview ratings system. Google discovered that their brainteasers are not a very effective way to interview. Despite the news that swearing is good for you, we tried to bleep everything. Also, it is minesweeper, not minefield. What were we thinking? It was obviously all Christopher's fault. Though we should have stood up to him. Elecia's book has more interview questions but from the perspective of how do you ask a question and what do you look for in a response.

Christopher interviews an embedded systems engineer with ~25 years of experience across medical, scientific, industrial and consumer products. He asks about career trajectory, field stories, and assorted destruction. Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software Tony's show about Kalman Filters was 43: A Lot of High-Falutin' Math

Carter Frost spoke with us about the Cabrillo College Robotics club and winning the 2019 NASA Swarmathon. Cabrillo has many student clubs. Cabrillo Robotics has a Facebook page and is @CabrilloRobotic on Twitter. The club gets its funding from the Cabrillo Foundation (to donate, make sure to note "Cabrillo Robotics Club" in your contribution). Please RSVP for the Embedded 300 party on Eventbrite.com.

Christopher and Elecia talk about the upcoming Embedded 300 party (Sept 7th!), podcasting, and listener emails. Please RSVP for the party. If you didn't hear the link in the show or don't recall it, contact us. Thank you to iRobot for sending us Root Robots as prizes! Embedded Patreon Merchandise! We send the Samson Meteor as our guest mic. Thank you for listening!

Monk Eastman (@MonkFunkster) joined us for an enlightening conversation about hardware compliance engineering. We covered the basics of CE, FCC, UL, and battery certification. We mentioned that Alan Cohen's Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market has a good overview of certification. Alan was on Embedded 269: Ultra-Precise Death Ray. For a deeper view of compliance engineer, Monk suggested this book: Electrical Product Compliance and Safety Engineering. Listener Skippy wrote about his experience with CE certification. Monk plays bass saxophone in the East Bay Brass Band. Details on registering for the Embedded 300 party on Eventbrite.com are in the show itself.

Eric Brunning (@deeplycloudy) returns to talk about doing science in the field in this crossover episode with the Don't Panic GeoCast's John Leeman (@geo_leeman). Eric is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech University specializing in storm electrification and lightning. We spoke with Eric on 268: Cakepan Interferometry about lightning and using baking goods as measurement devices. Eric was also on GeoCast 134: Launching Balloons out of a UHaul. We spoke with John about his Phd research in 169: Sit on Top of a Volcano. The previous Don't Panic GeoCast crossover was with John and Sridhar Anandakrishnan in 206: Crushing Amounts of Snow. John's company is Leeman Geophysical. The paper was Reconstructing David Huffman's Legacy in Curved-Crease Folding by Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine and Duks Koschitz. Elecia is working her way through Erik Demaine's Phd thesis on the same topic as well as Jun Mitani's excellent book Curved-Folding Origami Design. Geology also has folds. For 3D printed origami, Eric mentioned Henny Seggerman's twitter @henryseg.

Chris Svec (@christophersvec) spoke to us about how hope can improve our software and work environments. Chris is the author of Embedded Software Engineering 101 blog and has been on the show several times since his first appearance in 78: Happy Cows. He mentioned Seth Godin's Three Wishes post. We talked attentional focus and passing basketballs. Details for the Embedded Cats and Hacks party are in the show. If you can't attend, well, maybe you can still get a mug (zazzle). If you can attend, iRobot has graciously given us a couple Root robots that we'll be giving away.

Shruthi Jaganathan spoke with us about recycling, machine learning, and the Jetson Nano (@NVIDIAEmbedded). More about the Green Machine, the computer vision, machine learning, augmented reality way to sort your lunch leavings. The code is available. The system was on a Jetson TX2 developer kit and Shruthi has been moving it to the physically smaller and only $99 Jetson Nano developer kit (buy). Shruthi has been getting into AI with the Jetson Two Days to a Demo as well as NVIDIA's free Getting Started with AI on the Jetson Nano online course. For more information about FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), we talked about it with Derek Fronek on Embedded 257: Small Parts Flew Everywhere.

This week we talk about CircuitPython (@CircuitPython) with @adafruit's Kattni Rembor (@kattni) and Scott Shawcroft (@tannewt). The suggested first board is CircuitPlayground Express with LEDs, sensors, and buttons. CircuitPython is also available for many other boards including the BLE Feather (NRF52832). For a basic introduction take a look at What is CircuitPython and see some example scripts. To dig a little deeper, check out the many resources in Awesome CircuitPython. The whole thing is open source so you can see their code. If you are thinking about contributing (or just want some fun chats), get in touch on the CircuitPython channel of the Adafruit Discord server: adafru.it/discord Many of the language's design choices favor ease-of-use over ready-for-production. Imagine teaching an intro to programming class without worrying what computers will be used or how to get compilers installed on everyone's machines before time runs out. One final note: Kattni did a project that gave us the show title: Piano in the Key of Lime. After we finished recording, Chris asked her why she didn't add a kiwi fruit to her mix… Kattni explained she had limes and they were small. Chris only wanted a different fruit so she could rename it Piano in the Kiwi of Lime. It is always sad when we stop recording too early.

Mike Harrison (@mikelectricstuf) 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 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. Mike will be at 2019 Hackaday SuperCon!

Limor Fried of Adafruit spoke with us about engineering, education, and business. Some new boards we talked about include the PyGamer and PyBadge (which also has a lower cost version). TinyUSB, an open and tiny USB stack from Hathach. In addition to the many excellent tutorials there are some interesting business related posts on Adafruit Learn: How to Build a Hardware Startup and How to Start a Hackerspace Want to get more involved with the extensive, wonderful, and supportive Adafruit community? Join their Discord chat server or Show and Tell on Wednesdays 7:30pm (ET) followed by Ask an Engineer at 8pm.

Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) babble about their current projects involving ants, guitars, machine learning, and party planning. A video of Christopher's ants Some tweet threads about our tour of Santa Cruz Guitar Company. Arrival (also: very old wood) Wood is awesome Adding science to precision craft Elecia has been reading Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron. While the 2nd edition preview is on O'Reilly's electronic library (formerly Safari Online), it will be available via Amazon on July 5th. Or pick up the first edition. Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry (290: Rule of Thumbs) is looking for blog posts, exchanging editing and exposure for posts that make sense on the site. Contact him with a topic idea before jumping in. For the Embedded blog, related to the show with Phillip, Elecia wrote a post about learning to give feedback. Listener Brian asked about a CS degree for going into firmware. We mentioned our show with Dennis Jackson (211: 4 Weeks, 3 Days). Listener Craig asked about PICs. We suggested taking a look at Jay Carlson's Amazing $1 Microcontroller. We talked to Jay in 226: Camp AVR vs. Camp Microchip. Listener Happyday asked about UL testing. We added FCC testing then asked if any of you could help us. Hit the contact link on Embedded.fm. Embedded has a Patreon. There are new sponsorship levels! Nothing has changed though.

Karl Auerbach of InterWorking Labs spoke with us about how the internet works. We talked about domain name services (DNS being the primary one), registries and registrars, domain thieves, and the History of the Internet project. Karl runs his own (non-DNS) domain name service on his site www.cavebear.com. The site also includes notes from his time on the ICANN board (such as this one where they talk about redemption periods).

We spoke with Phillip Johnston (@mbeddedartistry) of Embedded Artistry about embedded consulting, writing about software, and ways to improve development. In the Embedded Artistry welcome page, there is a list of Phillip's favorite articles as well as his most popular articles. Some of Phillip's favorites include: Embedded Rules of Thumb Improving SW with 5 LW Processes Learning from the Boeing 737 MAX saga We also talked about code reviews and some best practices. The Embedded Artistry newsletter is a good way to keep up with embedded topics. You can subscribe to it at embeddedartistry.com/newsletter What are condition variables?

Alicia Gibb (@pipix) joined Elecia to talk about open source hardware, the OSHW association (@ohsummit), using trademarks for quality control, and light-up LEGO blocks. Alicia is the editor and author of Building Open Source Hardware: DIY Manufacturing for Hackers and Makers. It is a handy resource for any manufacturing. Alicia is the director of the Blow Things Up Lab, part of the Atlas Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. Light up LEGO blocks are available at Build Upons. The LilyPad Arduino has many sewable electronics components. You can find more talks and hacks on Alicia's personal site, aliciagibb.com.

Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) discuss embedded systems education and project documentation. Elecia wrote about her love of notebooks on the https://www.embedded.fm/blog-index. yEd, for when you don't have Visio. Asciiflow.com, for when you don't have yEd (or you want to put diagrams in your comments) We talked about many different documents and tried to note design vs implementation, product vs engineering vs user, and why we wanted them. We didn't mention mechanical things because, ya know, software engineers. Some documentation we mentioned: Product documentation Schematics with block diagrams and comments. Also a GPIO to function spreadsheet. UI flow when the system has a screens (Balsamiq for wireframe testing UIs) SW spec and design doc: what do we plan to build and what are the tricky parts SW configuration and SW developer docs: how to rebuild the computer that can build the code from scratch, also notes on debugging methodology User manual: Usually not written by SW but may need SW's patient input Code comments: Functions and files get 5Ws: who, what, why, when, where, and how. Who should call this? What will its effect be? ("What will it do" but not in line by line detail!) How does it work? Why does it work this way? When should it be called? Where are its parameters? ("What" works here too but "where" is nice to remind you to check your memory assumptions.) Repository checkin comments Style guide (Such as Google's or PEP) Manufacturing docs and tests docs Adafruit and Sparkfun both write good documentation, writing to users about how to use their code. Elecia likes Adafruit's sensor library as a good set of code to review (including how much is in their docs vs their code).

Crossing machine intelligence, robotics, and medicine, Patrick Pilarski (@patrickpilarski) is working on smart prosthetic limbs. Build your own learning robot references: Weka Data Mining Software in Java for getting to know your data, OpenIA Gym for understanding reinforcement learning algorithms, Robotis Servos for the robot (AX is the lower priced line), and five lines of code: Patrick even made us a file (with comments and everything!). Once done, you can enter the Cybathlon. (Or check out a look at Cybathlon 2016 coverage.) Machine Man by Max Barry Snow Country by Bokushi Suzuki Aimee Mullins and her many amazing legs (TED Talk) Patrick is a professor at University of Alberta, though a lot more than that: he is the Canada Research Chair in Machine Intelligence for Rehabilitation at the University of Alberta, and Assistant Professor in the Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and a principal investigator with both the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) and the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (RLAI). See his TED talk: Intelligent Artificial Limbs.

Kate Compton (@GalaxyKate) spoke with us about casual creators, Twitter bots done cheap and quick, and the creativity that is within each of us. Kate's website is galaxykate.com. Her Phd dissertation defense is interesting, see it on youtube.com. She is joining UCSC's CROSS to do more work on casual creators and open source software. (We talked to Carlos Maltzan, the head of CROSS in 285: A Chicken Getting to the Other Side.) Tracery is an open source story generator using a specific grammar. One example is at Kate's BrightSpiral.com which creates a whole story every time you refresh. You can use Tracery to make Twitter bots via CheapBotsDoneQuick.com. They are often text (@infinite_scream, @str_voyage, @DUNSONnDRAGGAN) or emoji based (@choochoobot, @infinitedeserts). However, Tracery and CBDQ can be used to create SVG images (such as @softlandscapes). Elecia's text bot is @pajamaswithfeet. It tweets (usually) kind things you can (sometimes) say to other people (or yourself).

Colin O'Flynn (@colinoflynn) spoke with us about security research, power analysis, and hotdogs. Colin's company is NewAE and you can see his Introduction to Side-Channel Power Analysis video as an intro to his training course. Or you can buy your own ChipWhisperer and go through his extensive tutorials on the wiki pages. ChipWhisperer on Hackaday ColinOFlynn.com Some FPGA resource mentioned: Fpga4fun.com TinyFpga.com MyHdl.org (Python!)

Carlos Maltzahn joined us to talk about graduate studies in open source software, research incubators, and how software development tools can be used to aid the reproduction of scientific results. Carlos is the founder and director of the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS). He is also an adjunct professor of computer science and engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Some projects we spoke about: Jeff LeFevre — Skyhook: using programmable storage in Ceph to make Postgres and other databases more scalable and elastic (skyhookdm.com) Ivo Jimenez — Black Swan: using DevOps techniques and strategies to speed up the systems research delivery life cycle (falsifiable.us) Kate Compton — Tracery2 and Chancery: using open source software to support artists and poets (tracery.io)

Ori Bernstein (@oribernstein) joined us to talk about the dielectric constants of foods, reflective energy steering, and smart microwaves. Elecia got a little silly. Ori works at Level Hot Pantry for more about the smart microwave, check out his !!ConWest talk. Ori has a github and personal site. EMSL papadum testing (where our thumbnail came from, with permission) Hackaday explained recently why grapes explode Short intro to how a microwave works

Jennifer Wang (@jenbuilds) spoke with us about machine learning, magic wands, and getting into hardware. For more detail about her magic wand build, you can see Jen's Hackaday SuperCon talk or her !!ConWest talk. The github repo is well documented with pointers to slides from her SuperCon talk and an HTML version of her Jupyter notebook. Check out this good introduction to machine learning from scikit-learn. It was their choosing the right estimator infographic we were looking at. (Elecia has bookmarked this list of machine learning cheat sheets.) Jennifer's personal sites are jenbuilds.com and jewang.net. She recommends the Recurse Center and wrote a blog post on her experience there.

We spoke with Laughlin Barker of OpenROV (@OpenROV) about underwater drones, underwater navigation, underwater exploration of the Antarctic, and extraordinarily large (underwater) jellyfish. Watch this video of a Trident ROV being eaten by a shark… yes, you get to see the inside of a shark. S.E.E. Initiative: Science Exploration Education from National Geographic Laughlin left us with a coupon code for the Trident ROV. Please remember to invite us along on your ROV'ing.

Combining a love of engineering with a love of words, Jenny List (@Jenny_Alto) is a contributing editor at Hackaday (@Hackaday). Jenny's writing at Hackaday including Debunking the Drone Versus Plane Hysteria and Ooops, Did We Just Close An Airport Over a UFO Sighting? Previously Jenny worked for Oxford English Press working on computational linguistics software. While there she wrote post about the word "hacker". Elecia has been secretly dreaming of being a lexicographer since reading Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper.

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talk about design patterns, conferences, and Molotov cocktails. Wrapper / Decorator / Facade Observer aka subscriber/publisher (caveat) Delegation and Dependency Injection Model View Controller (very important if somewhat dated UI pattern) PyFlakes is a static Python checker KiCAD Conference is in Chicago on April 26-27, 2019 BangBangConWest 2019 is over but the videos will be up soon including the one Elecia noted about liking things (which was done by Lynn Cyrin). Embedded.fm Patreon

Valve's Alan Yates (@vk2zay) spoke with us about the science and technology of virtual reality. Elecia looked at the iFixIt Teardown of the HTC Vive system as she was unwilling to take apart Christopher's system. Alan shared some of his other favorite reverse engineering efforts: Doc OK's Lighthouse videos, documentation on github by nairol, and a blog by Trammell Hudson. Alan's sensor circuit diagrams were on twitter: SparkleTree sensor circuit (think simplified) and the closer-to-production Lighthouse sensor. Make Magazine talked about Valve's R&D Lab. This is important in case you want to work at Valve (they are currently hiring for EE but if that doesn't describe you and you want to work there, apply anyway). Alan also has a website (vk2zay.net) though it doesn't see much updating right now.

Patrick Yeon (@patyeon) spoke with us about nonprofit spaceships then asked our opinions about embedded software. Pat is working for something something nonprofit space something something. To fill in some of the blanks, apply for a job on NonprofitSpaceship.org. Pat was previously on episode 153: Space Nerf Gun when we talked about cost-optimized satellites. We talked about several books: Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet Managers Path: Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides Head First Design Patterns: A Brain-Friendly Guide by Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Robson, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra Elecia's command code is on github.

Matthew Liberty (@mliberty1) shared good advice for lowering power. We talk about different ways to measure current (Matt has a nice write-up) and things software can do to decrease power consumption. Sleeping is critical, of course, as is choosing your clock speed and setting the GPIOs to good states. Everything is fine until you start getting into the microamps, then your multimeter measurements may start to fail you. (EEvblog explains why in his uCurrent intro.) Eventually, you may want to measure nanoamp sleep states along with amp-consuming wake states. Matt's Joulescope is a tool to do just that (Kickstarter goes live Feb 19, 2019!), automatically moving between 9 orders of magnitude of dynamic range and graphing the results on your computer. Matthew's consulting company is JetPerch. We mentioned Colin O'Flynn's ChipWhisperer which uses differential power analysis for security attacks. We also talked about Jacob Beningo's post on protecting your tools. Elecia is giving away a chapter of her O'Reilly book, Making Embedded Systems. It is Chapter 10: Reducing Power Consumption. Hit the contact link if you want a copy.

Jie Qi (@qijie) spoke with us about making paper-based electronics (@Chibitronics) and learning about patent law (via @Patentpandas). Jie Qi is the founder of Chibitronics, a crafting electronics platform that uses paper and stickers to create (and teach) circuits. Building the company and working on electronics-filled pop-up books led to the realization that patent law does apply to open source maker-type companies. She started PatentPandas.org to share what she's learned. Jie is not the only one who has had issues with big companies patenting their open source work. We mentioned Jarek Duda and his fight to keep his compression algorithm unburdened by patents. If you are having or wondering about having an issue, Patent Pandas is intended to be an amusing and gentle introduction. If you are looking for prior art, you can look at the Prior Art Archive and Patents.StackExchange. (If you have some free time, there are often requests to find prior art.) If you are a maker wanting to ensure that your work has dated prior art, submit it to the Wayback machine (Archive.org).

Jesse Rutherford (@BentTronics) gave us an in-depth look at the 555 timer IC (wiki). Jesse runs Bent-tronics.com and wrote The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to the 555 Timer (Amazon). Some great 555 projects: 555 Decimal Adding Machine 555 found in a drill trigger speed controller as seen on the Ben Heck Show 555 found inside a solar charger controller, video by Julian Ilett Somehow, despite it being in the plan, we didn't mention the Evil Mad Scientist The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer which builds a 555 Timer out of discrete parts. If only the creator would come on to talk about it and his other cool projects. Note that EMS also has a great description of how the 555 timer works. The giveaway is Jesse's book and the components to build the projects in his book.

Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) shared truly weird responses from AIs. Her website is AIWeirdness.com where you can find machine-learning-generated ideas for paint colors, ice cream, and cocktails (and many other things). We never said they were good ideas. Janelle's FAQ will help you get started trying out RNNs yourself. We recommend the Embedded show titles. We talked about BigGAN which generates pictures based on input images. Wikipedia list of animals by number of neurons Janelle's upcoming book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. Sign up for her newsletter to be the first to order it (as well as getting the PG-13 versions of her hilarious AI outputs).

Ivan Kravets (@ikravets) spoke with us about PlatformIO (@PlatformIO_Org), IDEs, embedded libraries, and RISC-V. PlatformIO is an editor, an integrated development environment with debugging and unit testing, and/or a library index. Its goal is to make embedded development easier and more consistent across host operating systems and development hardware. It is also a .org because the goal is to make all of this open source and free to engineers. Ivan Kravets is the founder of PlatformIO.org. Personal site, Github, LinkedIn, and a neat interview. He recommends seeing the Dnieper River if you are in his area. Ivan recently attended the RISC-V Summit. RISC-V is an open source processor core (like ARM but open source). SiFive was mentioned as one of the RISC-V processor vendors. RISC-V is being used extensively in research. Western Digital is planning to develop RISC-V based controllers. And MIPS recently joined RISC-V.

Chris and Elecia chat with each other about the new year. All is fine until she starts quizzing him about some language details of his new project. Many object-oriented resources suggest using composition (has-a) over inheritance (is-a-type-of) (wiki). Where do swift extensions fit in? It seems to me (Elecia here) that extension is invisible composition that allows adding of functions. For example, say you want a TiltSensor and you already have an ImuSensor object so you need to add a function for TiltComputation. You could make the TiltSensor contain an ImuSensor (composition). You call the ImuSensor functions to check the readings when running TiltComputation function. You don't need to know what is in ImuSensor, only what the API is. You could have TiltSensor be a child class of ImuSensor (inheritance) so that TiltSensor responds to all ImuSensor functions as well as its new TiltComputation function. You could use the variables in ImuSensor directly for TiltCompulation but you will need to know what is in ImuSensor for that to work. Or, in Swift, you could have TiltSensor be an extension of ImuSensor. Except it wouldn't be called TiltSensor, it would be part of ImuSensor: any file that had access to your extensions would be able to create an ImuSensor instance and call TiltComputation as if it was part of the original ImuSensor API. The TiltComputation function would only have access to its extension's variables and ImuSensor's API. You get to add new functionality without breaking backward compatibility. Some more resources on this topic: Composing Types in Swift Swift Language Guide: Extensions Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Matthew Mathias and John Gallagher iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Christian Keur and Aaron Hillegass LinkedIn Learning Courses Blender Beta with EEVEE renderer The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers by Robert C. Martin Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction by Steve McConnell Gelly Roll Glitter Pens (by Sakura) Google Podcast Link (or see the Subscribe page)

Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) of The Amp Hour (@TheAmpHour) joined us to talk about the state of the industry, listeners, guests, and life in general. Embedded's accounting episode (150: Sad Country Song) Contextual Electronics Consulting forum (requires you to apply) Remote work 250: Yolo Snarf Excellent video on how prototype PCBs have improved over the years Quickly falling cost of dev boards Elecia worked on learning and building robots and happily got a related job Chris W is building IOS apps Object oriented Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market by Alan Cohen (Emebdded.fm interview) CircuitPython Visual Basic as a prototyping language ESP32 and EXP8266 longevity and use in products WiFi provisioning Electric Imp, Particle.io Azure IoT Hub, AWS IoT, Google Cloud Iot, Ubidots, and IoT App Story (the one Chris G remembered later) Wallet.fail Anki Vector robot Genuine People Personality (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Genuine people personalities are coming to our gadgets (ArsTechnica) LoRA and chuckable sensors LoRaWAN and ARM Mbed OS Telepresence and mirroring others The Amp Hour ToorCamp episodes Sourdough (a novel about robotics and AI) and Embedded's interview with the author Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil Jeri Ellsworth spoke about the demise of CarstAR in The Amp Hour 394 The Stone Monsters music products Llama and the IoT zines Related Oatmeal comic Supporting Embedded Patreon leads to a link to their slack channel, mentioned in this show. Supporting The Amp Hour Patreon is also a great idea.

Alex Glow (@glowascii) filled our heads with project ideas. Alex is the Resident Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io. Her page is glowascii and you might want to see Archimedes the AI robot owl and the Hardware 101 channel. They have many sponsored contests including BadgeLove. Lightning round led us to many possibles: It you were building an IoT stuffed animal, what would you use? Mycroft and Snips are what is inside Archimedes. If you were building a camera to monitor a 3d printer, what would you use? For her M3D Micro Printer, Alex would use the Raspberry Pi based OctoPi to monitor it. If you were going to a classroom of 2nd graders, what boards would you take? The BBC Micro:bit (based on Code Bug) or some LittleBits kits (Star Wars Droid Inventor Kit and Korg Synth Kit are on Amazon (those are Embedded affiliate links, btw). If you were going to make a car-sized fighting robot, what dev system would you use? The Open Source Novena DIY Laptop initially designed Bunnie Huang There were more software and hardware kits to explore: Google DIY AI Arduino Maker1000 Raspberry Pi Chirp.io For your amusement Floppotron plays Bohemian Rhapsody Alex gave a shout out to her first hackerspace All Hands Active Ableton is audio workstation and sequencer software. Alex recommends Women's Audio Mission as a good way to learn audio production and recording if you are in the San Francisco area. There is an Interplanetary File System and Alex worked on a portable printer console for it. Elecia is always willing to talk about Ty the typing robot and/or narwhals teaching Bayes Rule. She recommended the book There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.

James Grenning (@jwgrenning) joined us to talk about Test Driven Development, dealing with legacy code, and cleaning out very large pipes. James is the author of Test Driven Development for Embedded C. If you want to take his live online course, check out the remote delivered TDD classes on Wingman Software. His blog has many great articles including TDD How-to: Get Your Legacy C into a Test Harness and TDD Guided by ZOMBIES. Book: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers James mentioned Given-When-Then, a testing design pattern (brief intro). Kent Beck also wrote about test && commit || revert style testing. James and Bob Martin present IoT implementation strategies in a series of videos on Clean Coders. James mentioned working with a Synapse Wireless radio.

Alan Cohen (@proto2product) wrote a great book about taking an idea and making it into a product. We spoke with him about the development process and the eleven deadly sins of product development. We did not talk about ultra-precise death rays. Books we discussed: Alan's Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market Elecia's Making Embedded Systems The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition: Essays On Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier Alan mentioned writing software graphically with Enterprise Architect

Christopher White resurrects an Apple ][+ with his brother Matthew White. This is a show about the software Christopher and Matthew wrote when they were kids and the hardware they wrote it on. Matthew's favorite fictional robot (we should have asked): Venus Probe from Six Million Dollar Man. We did ask about his favorite fictional computer and there is a video for that too. Apple ][+ Wiki Timex Sinclair Z81 Wiki Eric Schlaepfer's Monster 6502 Grant's 6502 Computer Kerbal Space Program for the Apple ][ Elecia got to $42 in Lemonade Stand by the end of the show Matthew's Nebula Wars and Eye of Eternal Death BASIC games circa 1982 and 1981 respectively. If you feel like it, you can try out an Apple ][ in your web browser, with tons of disks available at the Internet Archive or in a Javascript Emulator. Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems.

After many bouts of lightning round, we finally got our lightning questions answered by Eric Brunning (@deeplycloudy). Eric is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech University specializing in storm electrification and lightning . You can hear some of Eric's field adventures by listening to his episode of the Don't Panic Geocast show. The Wikipedia page for lightning will lead you down many strange pathways. Though the Wikipedia Lightning Energy Harvesting page may convince you that it isn't feasible (though some math might as well, as discussed on this show). For more about lightning interferometry, check out Michael Stock's in-depth site. You can hear lightning on Jupiter if you listen to the right bands. Neat video of the Milky Way in radio waves reflecting off the moon Elecia really enjoyed The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney.

Lindsey Kuper (@lindsey) spoke with us about !!Con West, being a new professor, and reading technical journals. The call for speakers for !!Con West is open until November 30, 2018. The conference will be in Santa Cruz, CA on February 23-24. Lindsey's blog is Composition.al and it has advice for !!Con proposals, advice for potential grad students, and updates on Lindsay's work. The Banana Slug is the UCSC mascot. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System by Leslie Lamport, 1978

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talk about conferences, simulations, and future episodes. Simulation/Emulation: QEMU and Renode. Chris also noted there were QEMU for STM32 instances such as this one from beckus. For conferences, we named several but had no particularly useful advice. We did recommend classes such as James Grenning's training on TDD in Embedded Systems and Jack Ganssle's Better Firmware Faster. There are several (free) machine learning courses available from Udacity including Intro to Machine Learning which was part of the Self-Driving Car series that Elecia took. The future basics episodes were grouped into: Flow of program control (pre-RTOS) Design patterns RTOS information

Anita Pagin gave us an insider's view of being a recruiter. Anita recently started at Carbon3D and is recruiting for software and hardware. Anita also does career coaching on the side. Given the advice she gave us for free, imagine what she could tell you if you paid her. Finally, Elecia's favorite list of resume keywords.

Chris Svec (@christophersvec) returns to chat about recruiting for embedded jobs and to help us answer listener questions. Also, he's looking for engineers to join him at iRobot. Want to get into embedded and don't know how? We did a show about that: 211: 4 Weeks, 3 Days. Also, there is an EdX class that is popular and a Coursera course that may be useful. You can meet up with Chris at Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA on Nov 2-4. Fulgurites are cooled lightning.

James Grenning (@jwgrenning) returns to discuss TDD, Agile, and web courses. James was on Embedded.fm episode 30: Eventually Lighting Strikes. James' new company is Wingman Software. His excellent book is TDD for Embedded C. James suggested Training From the Back of the Room! as resource to people looking to put together a class. He uses and recommends CyberDojo as a coding instruction tool. Before Agile was Agile-for-business, it was Extreme Programming. James recommends Extreme Programming Explained. James will be the keynote speaker at AgileDC in October.

Professor Angela Sodemann of @ASU spoke with us about new ways of teaching, robotics, and haptic displays. Angela's robotics courses can be found at RoboGrok.com, including the parts kit. Note that they focus on creating usable robotics as well as teaching theory so there is math, code, and hardware.