Embedded

Carmen Parisi (@FakeEEQuips) joined us to talk about electronics and podcasts. Carmen works on switching regulators. If you want to know more, he sent along some very basic application notes: How to Apply DC-DC Step Down Regulators (Analog Devices) and Switching Regulator Fundamentals (TI). The digital communication method with these switchers is the I2C-like PMBus. If all those make sense, dive a little deeper with chapter 9 of the online and free Linear Circuit Design Handbook. Carmen says the whole book is excellent for analog information. Also, the free chapter of the Art of Electronics is on power. If all that still makes sense, you may be Carmen if you can also write an app note like this one: Multiphase Buck Design From Start to Finish (Part 1). Carmen is a host on The Engineering Commons (@TEC_Podcast). Some episodes you might enjoy are 93: Capacitors with James Lewis of KEMET (aka BaldEngineer) and 77: Remote Host Toast with Elecia White. Some suggested books from Carmen: The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design by Jim Williams Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science and Personalities by Jim Williams An Engineer's Guide to Solving Problems by Bob Schmidt Elecia mentioned How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic by Michael Jay Geier and promised a PID image from her book Making Embedded Systems.

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) joined us to talk about the basics of debugging, from software to hardware. Some of the programmer devices we talked about: SEGGER JLink and Black Magic Probe. Chris mentioned a visual frontend for gdb called "Vulcan" but which is actually called Voltron. (He's got graphics on the brain). How did we forget to mention the six stages of debugging? Alvaro Prieto and Jen Costillo's new podcast on reverse engineering! And on Twitter as @unnamed_show. Alvaro's Cheese Cave: making cheese and cheese-lapse photography of Brie aging.

Kristen Dorsey explained MEMS sensors: how do they work, how they are made, and what new ones we expect to see in the future. Kristen's website is kristendorsey.com. She is a professor of engineering at Smith College and runs the MicroSmithie. MEMS stands for microelectromechanical systems (Wiki). Used in some sensors, Galistan is a room-temp liquid with interesting properties (Wiki). A few interesting MEMS applications: Micronium: a tiny resonator making music 2-stroke gas engine Pinball machine One of Kristen's stretchy strain sensor, not MEMS (so you can see it)

Gretchen Bakke spoke with us about the future of power generation and transmission. Her book is The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future. Gretchen is a professor of anthropology at McGill University. Gretchen's website The book's Facebook page Grechen's first book is Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader

Kwabena Agyeman joined us to talk about making OpenMV (@OpenMVCam), an easy-to-use camera and control module with built-in machine vision functions, all interfaced via MicroPython. To learn more about computer vision, Kwabena suggested looking at PyImageSearch or reading the April tags code as it is a good introduction to image manipulation and matrix operations. Some other interesting links: Ferrari World, view from satellite Cloud Atlas (on Netflix) DIY Robotics from Chris Anderson: DIY Robocars Kwabena worked on the CMUCam (version 3) The Amp Hour had a good episode about MicroPython Elecia likes this introduction to linear algebra, matrix operations, and singular value decomposition (SVD) OpenMV on Hackaday.io and for sale at SparkFun The future of OpenMV might include Google's MobileNets Kwabena gave a talk about the OpenMV manufacturing difficulties at the Hackaday Supercon 2016 and he plans to be there for Supercon 2017 (Pasadena, November 11th and 12th)

Dennis Jackson spoke with us about making the career shift from software to embedded. Dennis buys James Grenning's Test Driven Development in Embedded C for his new hires and often recommends Elecia's Making Embedded Systems. His tip that everyone should know was "Learn make!" and he has a reference for that: Why Use Make. He suggested Joel Spolsky's reading lists from Joel On Software, even the ones that don't obviously apply. Additional suggested-reading articles: 30 Pitfalls for Real Time Systems (part 1 and part 2) Rules for defensive C programming Why are you still using C What every computer scientist should know about floating point arithmetic The Power of Ten -- 10 Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code . In his previous appearance on Embedded (#25: Don't Be Clever), we talked about code complexity and measuring cyclomatic complexity. At that time he wanted a tool to monitor the code's status. He has since found one: pmccabe. Dennis currently works at Element Science.

Alan Yates (@vk2zay) told us about his entries to the 2017 Flashing Light Prize. Alan's entries involved making a light bulb and dripping charge. Alan works at Valve. He told us about making virtual reality hardware in Embedded episode 162: I Am a Boomerang Enthusiast. Hackaday SuperCon is Nov 11-12, 2017 in Pasadena.

Pierre-Marie de Rodat (@pmderodat) joined us to talk about how debugger software works (and what compilers tell the debugger). Pierre-Marie works for AdaCore on GNATcoverage (among other things). His github repo is pmderodat. Note that the AdaCore sponsored Make with Ada competition is running right now but you still have time to enter! Last year's winner, Stephane Carrez with EtherScope, made an Ethernet monitor for an STM32 board (github). GDB supports Python scripting!?!!! DWARF is the most standard debugging data format. Before that it was stabs. To see this information in a Linux or Mac system, use objdump. (It is really interesting!) Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Elecia gave a talk about machine learning and robotics at the Hackaday July Meetup at SupplyFrame DesignLab (video!) and LA CrashSpace. She gives it again in the podcast while Chris narrates the demos. Embedded Patreon Embedded show #187: Self Driving Arm is the interview with Professor Patrick Pilarski about machine learning and robotics applied to prosthetic limbs. I have also written more about my machine learning + robot arm on this blog. My code is in github (TyPEpyt). My machine learning board is Nvidia's Jetson TX2. The Two Days to a Demo is a good starting point. However, if you are new to machine learning, a better and more thorough introduction is the Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera. To try out machine learning, look at Weka Data Mining Software in Java for getting to know your data and OpenIA Gym for understanding reinforcement learning algorithms I use the MeArm for my robot arm. For July 2017, the MeArm kit is on sale at the Hackaday store with the 30% off coupon given at the meetup (or in Embedded #207). Inverse kinematics is a common robotics problem, it took both Wiki and this blog post to give me some understanding. I wasn't sure about the Law of Cosines before starting to play with this so I made a drawing to imprint it into my brain. Robot Operating System (ROS) is the publisher-subscriber architecture and simulation system. (I wrote about ROS on this blog.) To learn about ROS, I read O'Reilly's Programming Robots with ROS and spent a fair about of time looking at the robots on the ROS wiki page. I am using OpenCV in Python to track the laser. Their official tutorials are an excellent starting point. I recommend Adafruit's PCA9685 I2C PWM/Servo controller for interfacing the Jetson (or RPi) to the MeArm. Finally, my talk notes and the Hackaday Poster!

Natalie Silvanovich (@natashenka) discussed reverse engineering hardware, working on security software, and the fantastic world of Tamagotchis. Natalie's site and blog Hardware Excuse Generator Original CCC 2012 talk: Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation CCC 2013 talk: Even More Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation Natalie's upcoming BlackHat talk: Attacking ECMAScript Engines with Redefinition Flash exploit article for Project Zero: One Perfect Bug: Exploiting Type Confusion in Flash Tamagotchis are still available as are the works of Shel Silverstein (Snowball is in Falling Up). Natalie's Tamagotchi board"> Natalie's Tamagotchi board

Chris Svec (@christophersvec) has an idea about adding empathy to software development. It is a good idea. His blog is Said Svec. He works for iRobot and they are hiring. (Chris' email is given toward the end of the show but if you hit the contact link here, we'll pass along info to him.) Obligatory cat video Embedded has an episode devoted to impostor syndrome. O'Reilly's Head First book series is pretty awesome. Elecia is still talking about Thinking, Fast and Slow as a great way to understand brains. Chris Svec also recommends Make It Stick. The Richard Hamming quote came from his address to the Naval Postgraduate School. The whole lecture is available on YouTube.

Professor Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech joins us to talk about robotics including how androids interact with humans. Some of her favorite robot include the Darwin, the Nao, and, for home-hacking, the Darwin Mini. Ayanna has a profile on EngineerGirl.org, a site that lets young women ask questions of women in the engineering profession. Elecia has been working on a typing robot named Ty, documented on the Embedded.fm blog. It uses a MeArm, on sale in July 2017 at Hackaday.com, with coupon noted in show. (don't use PayPal to check out or you can't apply the coupon). Other robots for trying out robots: Lego Mindstorms (lots of books, project ideas, and incredible online tutorials!), Cozmobot, Dash and Dot. Some robotics competition leagues include Vex, Botball, and FIRST.

This week, we mix things up a bit. This joint show with the Don't Panic Geocast. This episode explores what happens when electrical engineering meets geoscience in cold places. We're joined by guest Dr. Sridhar Anandakrishnan of Penn State to talk about geopebbles, ice, climate, and more! Asimov Robot Series Anthropornis (giant penguins) Ice crystal structure Ice streams GeoPebble Propeller Programming (Book) Fun Paper Friday: The Boring Company

This week we talked to Addie (@atdiy) and Whisker (@whixr), the Toymakers (@Tymkrs). They make electronics kits, videos, and conference badges. Toymakers site (tymkrs.com) has a link to their IRC channel, videos, and Tindie store(including those amazing heart simulators, the easy to make Amplify Me, and Protosynth Midi). Their reddit community is r/Tymkrs. It has a lot more information about the CypherCon 2017 badges. More about CypherCon at cyphercon.com. Some of their ZombieTech podcast is available on YouTube (along with First Spin and Patch Bay, see the playlists to find grouped series). Note that Rabbithole is the name of their hackspace as well as the video series documenting project creation. Episode 200 has the violin we discussed. We seem to have talked about a lot of other people on the show, especially shared friends and past Embedded.fm guests (some of whom were on ZombieTech). Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories with their online and Sunnyvale store. This is run by Lenore (40: Mwahaha Session) and Wendell (124: Please Don't Light Yourself On Fire) Joe Grand (58: Use These Powers For Good) John Schuch (74: All Of Us Came In Sixth) Alvaro Prieto (130: Criminal Training Camp and 200: Oops) Some fiction for you: Black Mirror (Netflix) Feed by Mira Grant [Everything by Mira Grant / Seanan McGuire is on my "devour immediately" list! -El] MiTel SX Technician's Handbook

Phoenix Perry (@phoenixperry) spoke with us about physical games. Phoenix is CTO of DoItKits (@DoItKits) and More about Phoenix: Bot Party Her site: PhoenixPerry.com Goldsmith's page She enjoyed Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin Physical games are sometimes called Alt Ctrl such as at the Alt Ctrl Game Jam. Phoenix co-founded Code Liberation with Nina Freeman (http://ninasays.so/) and Jane Friedhoff (http://janefriedhoff.com/). "Code Liberation catalyzes the creation of digital games and creative technologies by women, nonbinary, femme, and girl-identifying people to diversify STEAM fields." There is an 8-part workshop in London in Summer 2017 (more info). Some other interesting people: Catt Small Lynne Bruning (http://etextilelounge.com/) Helen Steer (http://doitkits.com/) Perla Maiolino Rebecca Febrink How to Get What You Want wearables site Yoga Pants AutoDesk Fusion360 I know you only read the show notes because you wanted this link: Velastat LessEMF has the supplies for ghost hunting!

Charlie Ladd (@csladd) joined us to give an overview of good hardware practices. The oil quality sensor is from VSI Oil. Recent fiction included Ready Player One, John Scalzi, and Matthew Mather. To stay current, Charlie reviews the trade magazines: EEWeb.com, EDN, ECN, and EETimes. A junior engineer's tale of woe.

Professor Alex Dean spoke with us about his ARM embedded systems books and @NCState courses. Alex's page in North Carolina State University's department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His book is Embedded Systems Fundamentals with Arm Cortex M Based Microcontrollers: A Practical Approach (ecopy available from the ARM Media site). It uses the FRDM-KL25Z as the example board throughout the text. Alex also co-authored Embedded Systems, An Introduction Using the Renesas RX62N His favorite RTOS is Keil RTX. We also mentioned about Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin and Flush by Carl Hiaasen

Shaun Meehan (@logiclow) joined us to talk about robot arms and stealth rocket companies. Shaun's rocket startup is hiring; information about the job openings are below. Shaun's robot arm is an ABB IRB-2000 (video of Fred). Elecia was reading How to Choose the Right Industrial Robot when Shaun emailed. He convinced her that the MeArm Pocket Size Robotic Arm is the likely best choice for her machine learning typer project (which needs a better name). All this led to a discussion of inverse kinematics, robot operating system (ROS), and OpenAI. SparkFun has a nice guide to selecting the right motor if the DC, servo, stepper section went by a bit fast. Elecia mentioned the TI Piccolo line as good motor controllers, assuming you aren't building an FPGA controller from scratch on your own. Repair cafes are a thing. Shaun was on The Amp Hour 220: Doctiloquent Dove Deployer where he talked a lot more about his robot pets. For more about Fred, the robot arm, check out LogicLow.com. Also, see Shaun's github repo, Fun with Flip-Dots (on hackaday.io), his intended page for big servos (Not Your Hobby Servo, also hackaday,io) His personal site detailing new projects, motors, and fire-breathing dodo birds is ShaunAndKelly.com. Shaun recently enjoyed The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Stealth Space Rocket Company Hiring Information We are a small, highly entrepreneurial team of rocket engineers with deep technical expertise who love to build things and relish the idea of a grand challenge. Building on over a decade of technology development in rocket propulsion, structures, and avionics funded by NASA and DARPA, we are applying a fast-paced, hardware-focused, agile approach to space launch. Are you an engineer, hacker, maker, or physicist who has always dreamed of building rockets? Come help us build the hardware and launch the services that will open the frontier of space to the next generation of entrepreneurs. The company is in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. If you want to apply, email Shaun: space at logiclow dot com.

Episode 200! Let's have a party (and a survey)! Former guests joined us in a panel-style celebration of working in embedded systems: Alvaro Prieto, Andrei Chichak, Elizabeth Brenner, Chris Svec, and Chris Gammell. Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) was a guest on 130: Criminal Training Camp. Andrei Chichak writes Embedded Wednesdays and was on 99: You Can Say a Boat, 114: Wild While Loops and 139: Easy to Add Blood Splatter. Elizabeth Brenner (@eabrenner) was a guest on 17: Facebook Status: Maybe Not Dead and 54: Oh, The Hugh Manatee, Chris Svec (@christophersvec) writes Embedded Software Engineering 101 was on 78: Happy Cows and 139: Easy to Add Blood Splatter. Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) was a guest on 35: All These Different Reasons Why You Might Want to Do Something as well as a co-host on the holiday Embedded/Amp Hour crossover episode 181: Work on It for Ten Years. Fiction mentioned: Authors Harlan Coben and CJ Cherryh Robopocalype by Daniel Wilson The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu (Translator) Trollhunters HTML5 in Easy Steps by Mike McGrath Episodes cited as favorites: 94: Don't Be Clever 53: Being a Grownup Engineer 111: Potty Train Your Tamagotchi 187: Self-Driving Arm 162: I Am a Boomerang Enthusiast 150: Sad Country Song Tools discussed: Software: Beyond Compare, Edit+, and Crossover Logic analyzers / small oscilloscopes: Saleae, Digilent Analog Discovery and Digital Discovery Other tools: JLink Pro debugger/programmer, HP16C calculator (recommended emulator is Nonpareil for Mac and for Windows and Linux) Notes: T-shirt sales are probably already over unless you hurry. March micro madness and Digilent Digital Discovery contests also end very soon.

Chris and Elecia answer listener questions about contracting (and consulting). Reminders: T-shirts! Hat contest! Digilent contest announced in #197! It all ends around May 18th so get your entries in now! The original discussion was on episode 4: Are We Not Lawyers? Elecia's salary to rate conversion can be found as a Google spreadsheet.

Walter Stockwell spoke with us about the legalization of drones, UAVs, UASs, and UFOs. Walter works at DJI which makes the Phantom. They have some jobs open. Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson Intel/Pepsi drone show at SuperBowl halftime AOPA Facebook page The amateur model aircraft organization discussed was the Academy of Model Aeronautics(AMA). ASSURE UAS Ground Collision Severity Evaluation Final Report (also: press release) Elecia mentioned the Madgwick Filter. Embedded.fm t-shirts are available for a limited time! There are two distributors: one US based, one Europe based. Choose whichever is closest to you. Elecia's TV appearance on The Jennylyn Show is on YouTube. Digilent Digital Discovery contest ends May 19.

Chris and Elecia talk with each other about science fiction, advertising, ham radios, debugging tools, and programming languages. You can buy Embedded.fm t-shirts until May 18, 2017. You can always buy Elecia's book: Making Embedded Systems. And don't forget we have a Patreon if you'd like to support the show directly. Some science fiction we mentioned: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, Nightfall and Last Question by Isaac Asimov, and the All This Time video from Jonathan Coulton. Digilent sent us goodies to review: one Analog Discovery 2 and two Digital Discovery units. So we did, though we didn't cover the high speed adapters and other nifty goodies. Check out Alvaro Prieto's Troubleshooting tools HDDG talk for some additional information on the devices. For the giveaways, rules are in the show, hit the contact link to enter. Contest ends May 19th. Chris has been doing low-power ham radio contacts (WSPR) using an Ultimate 3S kit from QRP Labs. We talked about WSPR some with Ron Sparks in episode 76: Entropy Is For Wimps Make with Ada competition is back! It start May 15, 2017. We talked the 2016 competition with Fabien Chouteau in episode 158: Programming Is Too Difficult For Humans. Elecia is still fighting with Ubuntu before she can build her robot typist with her NVidia Jetson TX2 board. Philip Freidin sent in Stanford CS department's reply to the lightning round question of "what language should you learn in the first college course?" Even better, he sent a link to a google spreadsheet showing how many schools answer the question. Elecia was on the Jennylyn Show. (I'll update with a link to the specific episode on YouTube when it is available.) March Madness ended with PyBoard as the champion, more info on getting your winner's hat soon.

Aditi Hilbert (@HilbertAditi) spoke with us about MyNewt, an Apache-licensed RTOS and bootloader. MyNewt's Apache page is mynewt.apache.org and the github repository is github.com/apache/incubator-mynewt-core. In the README.md, check out the section marked browsing which points to the file system, ble stack, and assorted other source code goodies you may want to read. The secure bootloader code is also in there but as it is also a cross-RTOS effort (with Linux's Zephyr), you can find the MCUBoot repository at github.com/runtimeco/mcuboot Aditi works for Runtime.io (@runtime_io), a primary contributor to MyNewt. They work with companies who want to use MyNewt on their products. We talked about OIC (openconnectivity.org) and using UDP endpoints over BLE. Constrained http is actually called constrained application protocol: CoAP (coap.technology). We also mentioned MQTT, an older standard attempting to solve some of the same problems. The Apache license is one of the most permissive of open source licenses: choosealicense.com/licenses Assorted other links discussed in the show: Decoding the Heavens by Jo Marchant List of HTTP status codes (418 is the best) Last year's tshirts, logo will be the same but the shirts will be slightly different for the tshirt campaign starting April 26, 2017.

We discussed CubeSats with their co-inventor, Professor Jordi Puig-Suari, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at CalPoly SLO and co-founder of Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems. The 2017 CubeSat conference is in San Luis Obispo, CA on April 26-28. More details at CubeSat.org. Information about CubeSats at CalPoly SLO can be found at PolySat.org. Tyvak is hiring for a number of different positions: tyvak.com/careers. For more satellite goodness, we spoke with Patrick Yeon of Planet about their CubeSat-based platform and deployment mechanism in Embedded episode 153: Space Nerf Gun. Thank you to Embedded Patreon supporters for Jordi's microphone!

Shulie Tornel (@helixpea) joined us to talk about the 2017 Hackaday Prize (@hackaday and @hackadayio). Hackaday World Create Day is April 22nd, let them know if you want do a meetup so they can add you to the calendar. Elecia gave away all of her potential ideas, trying to figure out which one would work best for entry. It was probably Maxwell except for its lack of novelty (Embedded shows #17 and #54and there is a SparkFun Tutorial). Are you entering? The first phase (until May) is community driven (popularity contest). Post your entry here or tweet to us (@embeddedfm) and we'll like it. Also, it was Shantam Raj's Self-sustained Ultralow-power Node that we discussed in the show. Neon Demons (trailer) Embedded blog contributor Chris Svec was on the CodeNewbie podcast talking about robots and chip design. The following week Saron invited Elecia to record an episode about getting into hardware and embedded software.

Owen Anderson (@OwenResistor) joined us to talk about how compilers are written. We discussed LLVM, intermediate representation, clang, and GPUs. As mentioned at the end of the show, Owen's current employer is hiring. If you are interested and would like to get the brownie points that come with being a friend of a friend, contact us and we'll connect you to Owen and he'll submit your resume. Recent books Owen mentioned: Manager Path, Feminist Fight Club, The Laundry Files seriesby Charles Stross. LLVM Language Reference Teardown of what goes into rasterization What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior

Terry Dunlap, CEO of Tactical Network Solutions (@tacnetsol), spoke with us about security in the Internet of Things. The good: Top 10 Secure Coding Practices (from CERT.org) UL 2900 standard (consumer label for security) The bad and the ugly: FTC complain about TrendNet FDA alert about St Jude's implantable defibrillator Mirai botnet

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) answer listener emails. Get your entries in for March Micro Madness, the matches start very soon. The short story Elecia finds most memorable is All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury. We mentioned Procopio who teaches microcontrollers at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education ITESM (site, wiki) Hector sent up the IEEE Code of Ethics, a good high-level set of rules.

Matt Godbolt (@mattgodbolt) spoke with us about settling arguments with Compiler Explorer. Compiler Explorer comes different flavors: https://rust.godbolt.org/ https://d.godbolt.org/ https://go.godbolt.org/ https://gcc.godbolt.org/ You can see the beta version by putting a beta on the end: https://gcc.godbolt.org/beta/ This a fully open source project. You can read the code and/or run your own version: https://github.com/mattgodbolt/compiler-explorer https://github.com/mattgodbolt/compiler-explorer-image Matt works at DRW working on low latency software. Note that DRW is hiring for software engineers. You can read about the evolution of Compiler Explorer on their blog. Matt's personal blog is xania.org. You might like parts about 6502 Timings. He also has several conference talks on YouTube including x86 Internals for Fun & Profit and Emulating a 6502 in Javascript. Matt was previously at Argonaut Games. Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and his C++17 Commodore 64 Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? paper (with a nod to Don't Panic GeoCast's Fun Paper Friday)

Kari Love (@ikyotochan) spoke with us about creating soft robotics. You can see her edible soft robots talk from 33c3. Kari works at Super-Releaser. Her personal site (and blog) is Kari Makes. Kari mentioned that the Super-Release intern Aidan had some picks for soft robotics on Instructables. Super-Releaser created the Glaucus soft robot and Adafruit has an in-depth tutorial for how to make it. Some videos of soft actuators and soft robots: Super-Releaser Playing with Heat-Sealed Actuators (including the spiral) Silicone gripper from a cardboard mold Voxel Soft Robotic Simulation Evolution Super Long Mylar Robot MIT Tangible Media Group AeroMorph Soft Exoskeletons http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/11/12/wearable-power-assist-device-goes-on-sale-in-japan/ http://biodesign.seas.harvard.edu/soft-exosuits http://www.roamrobotics.com/ Rat heart cell robot from Popular Mechanics First Autonomous Entirely Soft Robot (Harvard Octobot) VoxCad Tutorial for simulating soft robotics Also, if you haven't seen Big Hero 6, you should. Consider it computer science homework. If you just want to see Baymax, here is a short video. Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate (Elecia's latest octopus related reading, the previous one was called Kraken)

Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) of the Hanselminutes Podcast talks about technology podcasting and philosophy. You can find Scott's blog on Hanselman.com/blog and his other podcasts on Hanselman.com/podcasts. We talked about Hansleminutes' WebVR episode with Ada Rose Edwards and Alcohol and Tech with Victor Yocco. We also mentioned Scott's blog post from 2014 about what technologies he would learn if he had to start over.

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: pred = numpy.dot(xt,w) delta = r + gamma*numpy.dot(xtp1,w) - pred e = gamma*lamda*e + xt w = w + alpha*delta*e xt = xtp1 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.

Indrek Rebane (@RebaneIndrek) spoke with us about the Garage48 Hardware and Arts hackathon, hardware incubators in Estonia, linguistics, hydrology, and startup investments. Garage48 Hardware & Arts hackathon is February 17-19, 2017 at the Institute of Physics, University of Tartu (Tartu, Estonia). The event is organized by Garage48, University of Tartu and the Estonian Academy of Arts. Indrek is CTO of Build It Hardware Accelerator and electronics engineer for Hedgehog Engineering. Recommended book: The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you Other resources Indrek mentioned after recording: Why to Not Not Start a Startup by Paul Graham (blog) Why not to do a startup by Marc Andreessen (blog) Don't Follow Your Passion by Ben Horowitz (video) Why Not To Do a Startup by Dave McClure (video)

While we planned to ask Andrei Chichak to podcast when he was in town for the Embedded.fm party, we spent too much time goofing off. So we are replaying Andrei's first appearance on the show where he spoke with us about MISRA-C and ethics. (Note that this is the same Andrei who writes the STM32 Embedded Wednesday posts for the Embedded.fm blog.) Linker post: It's dangerous to go alone! Take MISRA-C Andrei's has personal website (we failed to talk about his kite aerial photography, it is really neat though) and his company is CBF Systems. Plum Hall C Compiler Validation PC Lint JPL Coding Standards for C (and the mentioned video discussing Mars Code) ISO 26262 Automobile software standard Cortex-R for high reliability systems (ARM's description) National Society of Professional Engineers code of ethics and Canadian Engineering Guidelines on the Code of Ethics Offline, Andrei recommended two books and another podcast about MISRA: C Traps and Pitfalls Safer C MISRA with Johan Bezem (podcast)

Debby Meredith (@DebbyMe) stops by to tell us what it is like being a venture partner and interim VP of engineering. Debby is a venture partner at Icon Ventures. Her website is DebbyMeredith.com. She was on a new podcast: Women Who Code Radio. Computer History Museum's new exhibit is Make Software: Change the World. It opens on January 28, 2017. After recording, Debby mentioned a book she likes: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP

Ben Krasnow (@BenKrasnow) spoke with us about prototyping, Patreon, and staying current. And a whole bunch of stuff. January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP Ben's YouTube channel is Applied Science. His recent videos have been shot with the high speed Chronos camera (whose creator David Kronstein was on The Amp Hour #325). Ben has a Patreon page which funds randomness. (Embedded also has a Patreon page, for randomness and mics.) Ben was previously on the show: 119: Do Your Neighbors Have Any Idea? For BLE prototyping, Ben mentioned the OSH Chip by Philip Freidin (146: The Loyal Opposition) and using Processing for Android to make quick-n-dirty test applications. We mentioned the Wazer desktop waterjet. Chris brought up this video describing impedance with a mechanical model. One of Ben's favorite videos that he did was the first one with an electron microscope, way back in 2011: DIY Scanning Electron Microscope - Overview. Ben gets a lot of his news from Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/ Ben's Twitter criteria was that they didn't post updates often too often for his one-a-day check and that they focus on tech: @bunniestudios @vk2zay @elonmusk (for updates on my car's firmware) @LongHairNasaGuy @szczys @samykamkar @PaulStoffregen @mikelectricstuf @johndmcmaster @michaelossmann @macegr @Chris_Gammell @EMSL @mightyohm And some of his favorite YouTube channels (Ben said it was very difficult to distill as there are many great choices): mikeselectricstuff tesla500 Matthias Wandel NightHawkInLight The Signal Path Techmoan Cody's Lab This Old Tony Clickspring Nick Moore Gross Science Haas Automation Hackaday Reactions I Build It Alex Dainis bigclivedotcom We also mentioned architect Frank Howarth of the urbanTrash channel.

Philip Koopman (@BetterEmbSW) spoke with us about making better embedded software. His Better Embedded Systems Software blog has lots of great information including links to his growing video library. Two posts noted in the show: Recording Peer Reviews Spreadsheet Code Review Checklist His company, Edge Case Research, performs design and code reviews and teaches how to do them. You can find out more about his course and background on his Carnegie Mellon University staff page. That also leads to the pretty amazing Vintage Aero paper airplanes. Phil's book is Better Embedded Software, available via koopman.us and (more expensively) Amazon. Fagan Inspection Videos of robots being stressed Also: Embedded.fm Jan 28th Party RSVPs on Eventbrite

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talk with each other about about a party, listener emails, and assorted questions. RSVP for the Embedded.fm party! The Embedded Blog is at embedded.fm/blog. Chris Svec wrote a post about picking a processor platform. Don't Panic Geocast episode with Elecia Elecia'a book: Making Embedded Systems Compiler explorer is GodBolt.org Imposter Syndrome: episode #24 is all about. And you might find #78 with Chris Svecrelevant. Also: Adam Savage talking about overcoming self-doubt. The RSS feed for all of our shows (not only the most recent 100) is http://makingembeddedsystems.libsyn.com/rss We have a Patreon fund that buys mics for guests (plus the occasional goodie for us and our blogging team). Crunchy Frog RTL-SDR: Software defined radio BaoFeng's unusable Ham radio ESA investigation on the Schiaparelli landing

Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) of The Amp Hour and Contextual Electronics joined Elecia and Chris for a holiday special Ampbedded (EmbHour?) episode. Embedded will be having a Hats and Hacks party in Aptos, CA. You can come! RSVP on Eventbrite. Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise Analog Discovery vs Saleae Embedded blog (with Andrei Chichak and Chris Svec) including a post on podcasts we listen to Hemmingway App, useful for making writing clearer and simpler Tweezer sets make excellent gifts The Way Things Work Now is an update on a classic book Flybrix is a LEGO drone platform for learning control systems and flight robotics. The founder was on Embedded #157. Nordic nRF52 makexyz: 3D printing in your neighborhood Fusion 360 Video of Tesla seeing two cars ahead, having an accident The LDC1000 has never been attached to a Bluetooth sensor Free calculus book online: Single Variable Calculus: Early Transcendentals. There are other online textbooks approved by the American Institute of Mathematics. Raptitude's Maybe You Don't Have a Problem Isaac Asimov is a great inspiration: Medium Post by Charles Chu

Have you ever wondered how your programming tool works? Piotr Esden-Tempski and Gareth McMullin have built the Black Magic Probe and joined the show to explain how it works. Kickstarter for Black Magic and 1Bitsy ends December 29th. If you missed it (or need a Black Magic v2 instead of waiting for v2.1) go to the 1BitSquared Store. For more in-depth information about Black Magic, look at Gareth's github repo. For more information about the 1Bitsey dev board, look at 1bitsy.org. Contest! Tweet to @1bitsquared. The YouTube channel about electronic teardowns was Mike's Electric Stuff: youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff. If you want to say other hellos to Piotr, try his personal account: @esden. Or you can contact Gareth via Black Magic's Gitter channel. Embedded.fm Hats-n-Hacks party will be 2-5pm on Saturday, January 28, 2017 in Aptos, CA. More details soon, including how to RSVP.

Miro Samek (@mirosamek) of Quantum Leaps spoke with us about making better state machines through actor objects and hierarchical state machines. Miro wrote a book: Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++: Event-Driven Programming for Embedded Systems. He has an excellent YouTube channel explaining embedded concepts. We discussed his video that describes how a stack overflow works and the related in-depth post on EmbeddedGurus.com. Elecia enjoyed his object oriented programming in C PDF for both the OO and the UML refresher. Miro mentioned the Software Engineering Radio podcast. We mentioned our favorite podcasts blog post. Also, we talk about Jean Labrosse's recent episode of Embedded.fm.

We spoke with Chris Maury (@CMaury) about using speech recognition to interact with devices. Note: Please turn off your Echo and Dots as we invoke Alexa a lot. Chris is the founder of Conversant Labs. They created TinCan.ai which can help you wireframe or prototype a conversational user interface. They can also help you build Alexa Skills, though if you are so inclined, you might try it for yourself: Alexa Skills Kit. Chris will be speaking at the O'Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco, CA in March 2017, giving a tutorial on building voice based user interfaces. You can read more from Chris on his Medium posts medium.com/@CMaury. CMU PocketSphinx Some of the embedded devices Elecia mentioned: Audeme (as heard on The Amp Hour #258) Grove Speech Recognizer from Seeed EasyVR We haven't gotten embedded.fm (or any podcast) to work with Alexa but we aren't sure why. Have you?

After a few announcements, we replayed the episode where James Grenning told us about Test Driven Development. Note: the contest mentioned in the show is over. However, the SparkFun TinkerKit contest ends December 9th so you still have time to win something! Other announcements include: Elecia was on the Don't Panic GeoCast (#97) You can send us email by hitting the contact link on embedded.fm This does not count for our Patreon because it is a repeat

Chris and Elecia answer listener emails on-air. Patreon Embedded.fm blog SparkFun Tinker Kit BB8 Sphero Jewelbots (from #173) Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

Toni Klopfenstein (@ToniCorinne) joined us to talk about what it is like working at SparkFun(@SparkFun) and why open source hardware is important. Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA.org) has a certification program for open source hardware projects and products. Some of the SparkFun products and posts we talked about: Tinker Kit SparkPunk Sound Kit FLiR Dev Kit with its hookup guide and neat video Digital handpan (electronic drum) blog post Inflatable Friends (balloon robot) blog post Open Source Hardware Summit was in Portland, OR in October. Hackaday Superconference was in Pasadena, CA in November. Their site has the 2015 videos available. (There was an Embedded.fm show about it too!)

Jean Labrosse of Micrium (@Micrium) spoke with us about writing a real time operating system (uC/OS), building a business, and caring about code quality. Take a look at the uC/OS operating systems (available for free to makers) and Jean's excellent and free RTOS books (it was the Kinetis one that talks about the medical process). Also, check out the uCProbe which integrates with your debugger to replace some logic analyzer and oscilloscope features. Jean's blog about detecting stack overflows: part 1 and part 2. Brother to Brother by Gino Vanelli

We spoke to Evan Shapiro, CTO and cofounder of Knit Health (@KnitHealth), about baby monitors, IoT security, neural nets, and professional poker. The Knit Health Kickstarter ends November 17, 2016. Evan recommended Google Tensor Flow and Python's Theano for an introduction to machine learning. (If those sound familiar it is because Kat Scott mentioned them as well.) Evan also suggested that if you'd like to know more about the history of neural nets, check out this post by Audrey Korenkov. If you'd like a gentle introduction, check out a Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule. Evan mentioned some videos he did about poker, they are on Card Runners (NOTE: it is a paid site with free tastes). Final quote was from Neil Gaiman's excellent Graveyard Book.

George Stocker (@gortok) spoke with us about software, Jewelbots (@Jewelbots) and learning embedded systems to ship the product. Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems. George also recommended Getting Started with BLE and Programming Pearls. The processor we talked about was the Nordic nRF51, a BLE system on a chip.

James Cameron of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) tells us about Forth, science fiction, and laptops. We have some tickets for ARM's mbed Connect conference is Oct 24, 2016 in Santa Clara. Will you be in the area? Want to go? Contact us if you want one of our free tickets! (There are still some tickets remaining.) One Laptop Per Child is one.laptop.org. Some getting started information on Forth: Mitch Bradley's Forth and Open Firmware Lessons James has been writing about putting C Forth on a Teensy (more on the Teensy from the creator's site). He also has a post on using Forth to snoop the Milo Champions Band's BLE. James is Quozl on most sites that require a unique ID (such as Github: https://github.com/quozl). This is from a book called Quozl by Alan Dean Foster. The other older-sci-fi reference was to the Pern books by Anne McCaffery, specifically to the White Dragon.

Saar Drimer of Boldport (@boldport) spoke with us about the crossover of art to electronics and building a business around it. Monthly, the Boldport Club ships aesthetically-pleasing electronics kits. We discussed past projects include The Lady and Touchy on the show. The seahorse board is on the blog. Micah Scott (@scanlime) has entrancing videos of putting together the first club project (Pease) and second one (Superhero). Saar uses PCBMode to create his circuits. He also wrote the tool. It is open source. Cratejoy is used for the sales and shipping logistics.