Embedded

Elecia tries to get Chris to do her homework in preparation for her "Embedded Software: The Tricky Parts" presentation at IEEE-Computer Society meeting in San Jose, CA on Oct 11, 2016. If you register, you can attend, in person or online! And for free! 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.) Also: their unit test framework is GreenTea (not whatever Elecia said).

After a few new announcements, we replayed the episode where Jack Ganssle shared his wisdom on being a good embedded software engineer (hint: it takes discipline). The new announcements include: Book giveaway contest deadline Oct 1st ARM's mbed Connect conference is Oct 24th IEEE CS talk by Elecia iRobot has internships (and other jobs), check their job site and if you want to apply, email csvec. Jack's website is filled with great essays and new videos. He's also written the Art of Designing Embedded Systems and The Embedded Systems Dictionary (with Michael Barr). We covered a lot of ground, here are some of the highlights: Spark language Capers Jones on high quality software and associated statistics Joel on Software test for good teams LDRA unit test tool James Grenning's Test Driven Development for Embedded C

John Leeman (@geo_leeman) spoke with us about geophysics and associated technology. John is one of the hosts of the Don't Panic GeoCast (@dontpanicgeo, iTunes). Some episodes you may like: What if you calibrated your candles differently? Out of the Country (Brad Jolive on moon rocks) "Rock Drills and Beer" Undersampled Radio John is teaching a course at Penn State called Techniques of Geoscientific Experimentation. The information and textbook is online! It uses the SparkFun Inventor's Kit. John has a website with a blog. He has some Cheerson CX-10 tiny drone posts (my favorite, also Alvaro's repo and my posts). John also has a consulting company: Leeman GeoPhysical. Python! Lots of Python was discussed. Jupyter notebooks (here is a good tutorial) Example of reproducing a figure from a paper John's friction model (repo and talk he gave about it at SciPy2016) Neat SciPy talk about open textbooks SciPy is a Python conference in Austin, TX in July Finally, in lieu of rock puns, here is a neat animation showing many different waves from earthquakes. Contest! Contest ends October 1st and now there are more books! In addition to the ones Bob Apthorpe is sponsoring, John's consulting company will sponsor: Earthquake Storms: An Unauthorized Biography of the San Andreas Fault by John Dvorak and The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder.

Briana Morey from MC10 (@mc10inc) spoke with us about stretchable electronics, Tesla coils and lasers. She works at MC10, creators of the L'Oreal My UV Patch as well as the BioStampRC. MC10 is hiring! They are in Lexington, MA, US. The embedded software position is filled already but the EE position is still open. Briana mentioned an excellent science fiction book she'd read recently: Too Like Lightning by Ada Palmer.

Chris and Elecia chat about Bayes Rule, aliens, bit-banging, VGA, and unit testing. Elecia is working on A Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule. ACM has a code of software engineering ethics Toads have trackers (NPR story) An introduction to bit-banging SPI (Arduino, WS2812) We talked to James Grenning extensively about testing on 30: Eventually Lightning Strikes (and about his excellent book Test Driven Development for Embedded C). We spoke with James again on 109: Resurrection of Extreme Programming. We also talked about unit testing with Mark Vandervoord on 103: Tentacles of the Kraken. A neat TED Talk involving octo-copters, still four short of dodecahedracopter. Neat Z80 based very minimal computer kit

Bob Apthorpe (@arclight) spoke with us about software, nuclear engineering, and improv. Bob is giving away three books! Send in your guess by October 1, 2016. One entry per person. (More info below.) Hackaday SuperCon is Nov 5-6, in Pasadena, CA. Bob's long languishing blog is overscope.cynistar.net. Peep (The Network Aualizer): Monitoring Your Network with Sound Safety-I and Safety-II: The Past and Future of Safety Management Now! The books you may win! Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffrey, someone who knows the technology and history and does a fantastic job explaining complex failures in an engaging way without resorting to fear-mongering and hyperbole. (Guess Elecia's number for this one.) Safeware by Nancy Leveson, may be 20 years old, it's still full of amazing insights for delivering safe, reliable systems and ways of looking at the organizational contexts in which these systems are built and used. Even if you aren't developing safety-critical systems, it's a fantastic resource and really thought-provoking. (Guess Christopher's number for this one.) Every Anxious Wave by Mo Daviau is a novel about rock & roll, time travel, love, loss, and finding things you didn't know you were looking for. Full disclosure: The author is Bob's ex-wife. (Guess Bob's number for this one.)

Shimona Carvalho (@shimonkey) joins us to talk about user interface design in embedded systems. Then we talk about internationalization and localization. Then photography. Shimona's website is shimonacarvalho.com and her Flicker account is shimonkey. For an introduction to user interface design, Shimona recommended The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. Internationalization and localization were delved in far deeper in episode 26: The Tofu Problem. Some of the material from that will be on the embedded.fm/blog this week. We mentioned an auxiliary, secret RSS feed that goes all the way back to episode one. (Some notes haven't been filled in yet). We're also on Youtube now.

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 1985 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.

Elecia went to Hackaday's SuperCon, got to announce the Hackaday Prize 2015 winners, then talked to the organizers about their conference. The guests this week were (in order of appearance): Amber Cunningham Dan Hienzsch (115: Datasheeps) Adam Fabio Brian Benchoff Aleksandar Bradic Sophi Kravitz (77: Goldfish, Fetch My Slippers! and 91: Save Us from Astronauts) Mike Szczys (69: Look at this Entire Aisle of Standoffs) Tamagotchi Hive Adam promised us a list of contributors to the goodie bag. Here it is! NFCRing.com OSHpark Wicked Device Seeed Studio Pololu Parallax No Starch Press Microchip Nanomagnetics (http://nanodots.com/gyro.html) The Hackaday Store

Nadya Peek (@nadyapeek) joined us to talk about making machines that build things. Nadya's website is infosyncratic.nl, which includes her blog. Nadya's dissertation defense on Making Machines that Make: Object-Oriented Hardware Meets Object-Oriented Software was standing room only. MIT Center For Bits and Atoms, which studies "how to turn data into things, and things into data." Mods.cba.mit.edu Machines that Make: MTM.cba.mit.edu

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.

Kat Scott (@kscottz) gave us an introduction to computer vision. She co-authored the O'Reilly Python book Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV: The Simple Way to Make Technology See. The book's website is SimpleCV.org. Kat also suggested looking at the samples in the OpenCV Github repo. To integrate computer vision into a robot or manufacturing system, Kat mentioned ROS (Robot Operating System, ROS.org). Buzzfeed had an article about SnapChat Filters. Kat works at Planet. And they are still hiring.

Daniel Hienzsch (@rheingoldheavy) and Majenta Strongheart (majentastronghe_art) gave us suggestions on setting up a home shop and information on setting up a maker space. Daniel is the resident engineer at SupplyFrame's Pasadena Design Lab. He still the owns and runs RheingoldHeavy.com, a company devoted to educational boards, as we talked about on episode 115: Datasheeps. Majenta's web page is MajentaStrongheart.com. We talked more about School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Sarah Petkus in 142: New and Improved Appendages.

Chris and Elecia talk to each other about compiler optimizations, bit banging I2C, listener emails, and small-town parades. Games to learn/play with assembly languages include The Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation and TIS-100 by Zachtronics. We've been enjoying the Embedded Thoughts blog. And Chris is reading Practical Electronics for Inventors and liking it. We talked a little about Interview.io's adventure in voice changing. Shirts are gone for awhile. New logo stickers are available at StickerMule if you'd like to support and share the show.

Fabien Chouteau (@DesChips) of AdaCore (@AdaCoreCompany) spoke with us about theMake with Ada Programming Competition. Giveaway boards are GONE. The Ada programming language (wiki) is interesting in that it was designed for safety critical embedded systems (actually designed, requirements doc and everything!). The Ada Information Clearinghouse has a nice list of tutorials and books as does the very helpful Make with Ada Getting Started page. Elecia's favorite was Inspirel's Ada on Cortex. Some neat projects in Ada that we mentioned on the show: Fabien's CNC Controller (with code in github) Tetris on a Smart Watch (with a formal proof via SPARK) Nano drone flight controller (with formal proof via SPARK) The platforms supported in the contest are on the Getting Started page but you can expand that by looking at the SVD files in the AdaCore drivers on github. (Also, SVD files are neat.) One of the platforms already supported is the Crazyflie nanodrone.

Robb Walters of Flybrix (@flybrix) spoke with us about LEGO-based drones. We graciously let him leave with all his hardware. This time. For a limited time, you can get an Embedded.fm tshirt: teespring.com/embedded-fm. Order by the end of June or miss out. (More info about the shirts.) You can order your Flybrix kit and or read their controller code on github (or their controller app code). Robb mentioned a C++ book he liked, it was Effective Modern C++: 42 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of C++11 and C++14 by Scott Meyers. He also noted LEGO bricks resale sites: Brickowl and Bricklink. LEGO Digital Designer looks like a fun way to design builds. Cascade PID controllers are on Wikipedia (though I found this tutorial a little easier). The congratulations offered at the top of the show were to Meshpoint.me for winning the Best Humanitarian Tech of the Year at the Europas Conference.

Jeri Ellsworth (@jeriellsworth) spoke with us about the latest developments at CastAR, hiring engineers, and her favorite engine. Embedded.fm T-Shirts are available until the end of June on Teespring (more info). CastAR is making an augmented reality system. They are in Palo Alto, CA, USA and they arehiring. They work with Playground. Jeri was last on Embedded.fm episode 23: Go For Everything I Want.

Jonathan Bradshaw spoke with us about working with hardware engineers, schematic reviews, and FPGAs. At the end of the podcast, Jonathan made a pitch for folks to submit proposals for the IEEE Southern Power Electronics Conference in Auckland in December. The FPGA boards Elecia mentioned were the XLR8 board and the Papillio platform (more on the latter in show #66). By the way, The Amp Hour is our "enemy podcast" but we actually like their show quite a lot. It is a joke. But do feel free to tweet their shameless advertising tweet with the link replaced with one to our show. And weta are neat! (Image, wiki)

Jeff Keyzer (@MightyOhm) joined us to talk about consumer manufacturing, how to solder, and having a full time job and a kit company. Jeff's blog is on MightyOhm.com. The Geiger Counter kit is available atMightyOhm.com/geiger. The really, really useful Soldering Is Easy comic book isMightyOhm.com/soldercomic. At Valve, Jeff worked on the Steam Controller (hardware specs at bottom of the Valve page or for sale on Amazon). There is also a neat video showing the manufacturing automation in action. We mentioned Glowforge, Dan Shapiro was on episode 125 (and if you are going to buy one, please consider using our referral link!) Elecia and Chris have a Hakko FX-888 soldering iron. Jeff suggests Kester 186 flux which you can get in smaller-than-giant containers on eBay. No, not the pen on Amazon. Or maybe the MG Chemicals 835 (which is in little bottles on Amazon). Flux seems like a very personal thing.

Patrick Yeon of Planet Labs spoke with us about making satellites. We discussed a method of using orientation to control drag to control speed. While Patrick wasn't sure what he could say about GPS receivers on satellites, another site describes them as part of the flock. Sign up to get access to the huge Open California data set. Planet has many applications and their blog shows off some interesting finds, such as identifying illegal gold mines encroaching on rainforests, quantifying ports with computer vision, counting trees and classifying agriculture crops, fire mapping, and cloud detection. They are still hiring, apply using the email embeddedfm at planet.com will earn us (err, not you) more free tshirts.

Chris and Elecia chat about hobbies and respond to listener feedback and questions. Chris was on an episode of Let's Drone Out, you can listen to it here or search in your favorite podcast platform. It is recorded and broadcast live every Thursday at 8 P.M. (UTC+1) onPowering On. Chris' new quadcopter is a Vortex 285. It runs Clean Flight, an open source flight controller software package. While we had various opinions about RTOSs, we were both interested in the one Alvaro suggested to us: Zephyr Project. As for other embedded podcasts, of course you know about The Amp Hour. And we had Saron of CodeNewbie podcast on, that show is mostly software and people. How aboutMacrofab Engineering? Or O'Reilly's HW podcast?

Paul Sidenblad spoke to us about his engineering career, starting off with GE's work on theGambit spy satellite. Google Protobufs Elecia read Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites a few years ago and remembers liking it, though this was the first time the information was useful.

Torie Charvez spoke with us about what it takes to start and run your own business in the US. We talked about starting your own consulting company, selling your latest gadget, and all of the bookkeeping, tax issues, and details involved. Torie's company is Tax Goddess. The write-off publication she mentioned is on the IRS site isChapter 8 of Publication 535. Elecia mentioned her Snow White's Guide to Your First Stock Options.

Craig Smith (@OpenGarages) spoke with us about hacking the software in cars. His book is the Car Hackers Handbook. There is a 40% off coupon toward the end of the show. OpenGarages is Craig's site to improve and encourage hacking. Some tools he recommends for getting started are USB2CAN and CANTact. An older (shorter) version of the handbook is on OpenGarages. I Am The Cavalry (iamthecavalry.org) is an excellent site for learning more about security.CERT.org is also good. Theia Labs is Craig's company.

Saron Yitbarek (@saronyitbarek) spoke with us about Code Newbie, a site that help people learn to program and about the Code Newbie podcast. We mentioned Paul Ford's Code Newbie episode discussing his Bloomberg issue code. Saron also has a personal blog which has her post I am not a tinkerer. Saron spoke on Punching Your Feelings in the Face at ELA Conf 2015.

Micah Elizabeth Scott (@scanlime) joined us to talk about her new art and engineering projects. Micah's site is misc.name/ and her YouTube channel is micahjd. She launched a Patreon page. Wiggleport has its own site (wiggleport.org) and github (github.com/wiggleport). Check out the art in the repo! The Bela project on kickstarter has some overlap. Micah will be keynoting the 2016 Open Source Hardware Summit in Portland in early October. Her Eclipse project (video) was at the NEAT exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA. Micah has been on Embedded.fm before: 101: Taking Apart the Toaster (mostly aboutCoastermelt) and 41: Pink Universes Die Really Quickly (mostly about FadeCandy). Micah mentioned Boldport and the kit-of-the-month club. (Video of her building the first one!) Also: the BigClive channel on YouTube. Thank you to Planet.com for sponsoring the contest. Check out Planet.com/careers!

Philip Freidin (@PhilipFreidin) spoke with us about his BLE platform OSHChip, debuggers, and consulting. Planet Labs is sponsoring a contest! Hit the contact link to enter. Also check out their careers page and apply to [email protected]. Both the OSHChip and the CMSIS-DAP SWD programming module are on Philip's Tindie store. While Keil is the suggested compiler for now, you can also use mbed (tutorial). The system is wholly open source, you can find everything at github.com/oshchip. (Philip gave anHDDG talk about OSHChip; we didn't talk about it but I thought it was interesting.) Philip's company is Fliptronics. Under Tips and Tricks, that site has his advice on consulting.

Kelly McEvers (@kellymcevers) joins us to talk about the definition of embedded. Kelly McEvers is one of the hosts of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon news magazine. She is also the host of a new podcast called Embedded which takes a story from the news and goes much deeper into it. Her Embedded podcast launches on March 31st. Subscribe now on iTunes, listen onNPR.com or your favorite podcast app. Kelly's Diary of a Bad Year: A War Correspondent's Dilemma is an amazing listen. Kelly mentioned her interview of a drone pilot, Lt. Col. T. Mark McCurley, author of Hunter Killer. She also interviewed Sarah Pennypacker, author of Pax. Elecia does not squee on air. But it was a near thing.

Christopher and Elecia chat about the Hackaday prize, Unity class (and their games), the blog, hams, and IDEs. Embedded.fm blog posts we discussed: Chris wrote about ham radio practice tests and his plane's maiden flight. Elecia is working her way through her book about taking apart toys. Chris Svec is taking a microprocessors approach in Embedded Systems 101. And Andrei's current Embedded Wednesdays posts have been about number format and accelerometer output. Sign up for the Embedded.fm newsletter to get blog content in your email box. Hackaday Prize! Yay! Sign up early and often. Chris and Elecia have been taking a Unity course on Udemy (pricing becomes more sensible after April 1). Elecia's game is live for the next 30 days, you can play it from your computer's browser (but not Chrome). Audio "enhances" the experience. Also: you were warned. Atomic Game Engine is another game engine but open source. Justin has 8 reels of 800 of Atmel AT32UC3A3256S-ALVR. Let us know if you'd like to be connected. Elecia liked the Ed Emberley Make A World drawing book. Bipedal robots at RobotShop.com for software programming or SparkFun's Redbot kit for more hardware oriented fun. If you missed last year's April Fools Embedded.fm: The Elon Musk of Earth. Feel free to listen to it again on April 1 as there will be no such gag this year.

Dan Luu (@danluu) spoke with us about processor features, startups vs large companies, error handling, and computer science research. Dan's blog is danluu.com. Some posts we talked about: CPU features since 1980 Working at Startups vs. Large Companies Recurring Postmorten Lessons Efficacy of Computer Science Research Areas Dan mentioned some conference proceedings he monitors. For computer architecture: ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA):http://isca2016.eecs.umich.edu/ IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Microprogramming & Microarchitecture (MICRO): http://www.microarch.org/ High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA): http://www.hpcaconf.org/ For software engineering: International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE): http://www.icse-conferences.org/ Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE): http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/fse2016/ He also mentioned Operating System Design and Implementation OSDI: https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/179

Sarah Petkus offers to let her robot lick Christopher's leg. Christopher agrees reluctantly once we determine the saliva will be anti-bacterial hand sanitizer. Sarah is a kinetic artist and some of her projects include a robot army (built your own from parts printed out or purchased at robot-army.com), Noodlefeet, and Carl (the flamingo of pendulum inversion). Her Zoness.com site is an umbrella for her drawn and robotic art. Specifically, you may enjoy her webcomic Gravity Roads, her YouTube channel, and/or herRobotic Arts blog. Some other topics we discussed: Sarah got into mechatronics at her time as SAIC. Festo's air jellyfish on youtube Algodoo.com 2d physics simulator Woodgears.ca for 3d printable gears Also, please check out our new embedded.fm/blog or if you prefer email updates, sign up atembedded.fm/subscribe.

Julia Evans (@b0rk) spoke with us about using profile analysis to debug programs. Her PyCon 2015 talk was Systems Programming as a Swiss Army Knife (video). Julia's blog is jvns.ca. Some of the posts we discussed include: Have High Expectations for Computers How I Got Better at Debugging perf top: An Awesome Way to Spy on CPU Usage Julia's favorite conference to speak at is Bang Bang Con in New York City, May 7-8, 2016. Coincidentally, the call for proposals is open. Also, please check out the Embedded.fm/blog!

Andrew "Bunnie" Huang spoke with us about manufacturing in China, writing books, and crowdfunding. Bunnie's new book is The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen. It is available via crowdsupply and the price goes from $30 to $35 when pre-ordering ends on March 17, 2016. Bunnie's blog is at www.bunniestudios.com, many of his professional projects can be found at www.kosagi.com including more information about the Novena open source laptop. Hacking the XBox is available for free from No Starch Press.

Andrei Chichak and Chris Svec join us to talk about our new blog: Embedded.fm/blog (!!). Andrei was on 114: Wild While Loops, about error handling, as well 99: You Can Say A Boat, about MISRA-C. Andrei has been teaching Embedded Wednesdays, an embedded systems class for the Edmonton New Technology Society. It uses the STM32F401C-Discoveryboard. His course materials are on his site (chichak.ca). Chris was on 78: Happy Cows, about empathy driven development. He's also working on a different embedded systems introduction (Embedded Software Engineering 101). His blog ischrissvec.com. Our new blog will include their coursework, excepts from Elecia's new book on taking apart toys, project notes from Christopher, and various other news.

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) answer listener questions about BASIC and their meet-cute story. (Sadly those are unrelated. That would have been cute.) Dennis Jackson at Airware is looking for a senior EE and an EE technician. Contact us and we'll connect you to Dennis so he knows to look out for you. Dennis' episode was 94: Don't Be Clever about drones, simple code, and learning. As for other interviews, Elecia was on The Amp Hour and The Engineering Commons Podcast. Elecia and Chris were both on The Amp Hour's 256th show.

Dan Saks answers many questions about C++ in embedded systems: where it works, where it doesn't, and a path to getting started. Dan Saks is the founder and president of Saks & Associates. He was a columnist for The C/C++ Users Journal, Embedded Systems Design and several other publications. He also served as secretary of the ANSI and ISO C++ standards committee in its early years. We touched on some of his articles: Poor reasons for rejecting C++ Preventing dynamic allocation Calling constructors with placement new Andrei suggested Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day, Seventh Edition by Siddhartha Rao as a good primer for experienced C programmers reluctantly learning C++. Like robots? Check out the job postings at iRobot. If you like what you see, email Chris Svec. (Yes, the guy who was on 78: Happy Cows.) Contest for Making Embedded Systems will end Feb 5, 2016.

Inventor and Youtube-er, Simone Giertz (@SimoneGiertz) tells us about building robots to "help" her daily life. Simone's YouTube Channel. Some of the videos discussed in the show: Chopping Machine VLOG and its TV commercial (Also: the servo motors used) Listener Feedback with TENS machine Wake up machine Simone's blog, with additional robot build details is at simonegiertz.com. For relaxation, Simone visits the Hello Denizen YouTube channel and watches hamsters eating gourmet meals. She also mentioned her preferred Reddit feed. Like robots? Check out the job postings at iRobot. If you like what you see, email Chris Svec. (Yes, the guy who was on 78: Happy Cows.) Contest for Making Embedded Systems will end Feb 5, 2016.

Anh Bui, Vice President of @Benetech Labs, joined us to discuss using technology for good. Benetech is most widely known for Bookshare, an online library for people with print disabilities. Note that this is only open to people with print disabilities per the Chafee Amendment (copyright exceptions with cause). There are some public domain books you can search through on the site. Martus is another of Benetech's core programs, in their human rights and civil liberties program. It is an open source, secure information collection and management tool. Poet Image Description Tool is a Benetech tool to aid in making visuals more accessible to everyone. Some accessibility guidelines and techniques: W3 Web design accessibility Apple's many accessibility resources POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust) website design article Enabling The Future is the group that 3D prints prosthetic limbs.The Dean Kamen water filtration system is called Slingshot. Hackaday Prize (2016 announcement is coming!) For more information about the embedded software position at Avid Identification Systems, please email Mark (Engineering Manager) and CC Karen (HR Manager).

Eric Hankinson (@Kumichou) tells us about the new embedded software components ofContextual Electronics. There is a 10% coupon announced in the show, good until June. CE uses the ST-Nucleo-F030R8 board. Eric's blog is www.erichankinson.com and his day job is at LeanDog. The Amp Hour episode with Chris and Elecia is 281: Crossovers and Call-ins Sealand

Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) inflict lightning round on each other, talk about their new favorite toys, and get momentarily serious about performance reviews. Elecia is looking for a datasheet for the SunPlus SPHE8104GW. Not the 8200. This is not something Google-able. It probably requires knowing the right person, but if you do (or if you are the right person), please help. Tickle is the IOS app to program the Sphero BB-8 (and many other robots) in the kids programming language Scratch Laser Stars Indoor Light Show Automatic: BLE car monitoring The Cheerson CX-10 is the base model quadcopter Elecia and Chris have been playing with. They flew a CX-10C with its 0.3MP video camera off a cliff at beach (but it didn't record the video). Elecia's self-evaluation for 2014 year is on her blog Python library for mashing binaries into other forms is IntelHex Elecia couldn't find the .map file scripts she was thinking of though one on stackoverflow was pretty close

FIRST Robotics is way to get students of all ages into robotics. Former participant and dedicated mentor, Michael Hill (@Michael_A_Hill) tells us about FIRST and how we can get involved. Official site: FIRSTInspires.org which also has a list of volunteer roles and qualifications Forums are at ChiefDelphi.com This year's theme is FIRST STRONGHOLD and was designed in collaboration with Disney. There is a trailer on YouTube (expect castles!). One of the NI control units is the RoboRIO (not the nearly-already-a-robot RIO Robot we linked to initially, thank you Alan Anderson!) Micheal's team is Innovators Robotics. Chris and Elecia will be helping out on The Amp Hour call in show, recording January 6,2015. If you'd like to chat, hit our contact link or email [email protected]. Please include your name, location, Skype name and what you hope to discuss on air.

Sarah and Abi Hodsdon speak with us about being a maker family. Sarah's site and blog are Sarahndipitous Designs, her twitter handle is @sarahndipitous. The online K-12 school they use is Connections Academy. Making Makers by AnnMarie Thomas is a book about encouraging kids toward making. Backyard Ballistics by William Gurstelle is an excellent addition to any library. Giwishes is a massive global scavenger hunt. Some learning sites the Hodsdon's recommend include: Code Academy Kahn Academy Instructables For e-textiles and wearables, they recommend: Lynne Bruning's eTextile Lounge Becky Stern Leah Buechley's Sew Electric book

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) spoke with us about laser turrets, tearing down quadcopters, flux capacitors, the moon, and culture at work. Alvaro's blog Alvaro's github repositories including Proto-X quadcopter information, Silta bus monitoring, and Skype video message exporter for OSX. One of the inspirations for taking apart the Proto-X was watching Micah talk about herCoastermelt project. We talked to her about it on episode 101: Taking Apart the Toaster. One of his reasons for going to Planet Labs was knowing Shaun Meehan, check out his Amp Hour interview. Daemon by Daniel Suarez Video of Supercon talk on laser shooting robots Podcast Award nominations open in early 2016

We ask Matt Berggren (@technolomaniac) to envision an ideal world of product creation. Matt's Spartan 6 FPGA shield is on the Hackaday Store. Its build process is documented on Hackaday.io. You can see Matt's other projects on Hackaday.io/matt. Matt works for SupplyFrame. Wishbone is the open source bus system that Elecia likened to ARM's AHB/APB.

Simon Monk (@simonmonk2) talks with us about zombies and writing books. Simon has 20+ books out, check out his Amazon author page or his web page for a full listing (simonmonk.org). Some you might want sooner rather than later include: The Maker's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Defend Your Base with Simple Circuits, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi Hacking Electronics 30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius Kits for building some of the projects from Simon's books can be found at Monk Makes. (@monkmakes).

🐔=🦃+1 (or Why isn't there a duck emoji?) Christopher and Elecia talk about languages, twitter, listener emails, and Star Wars. Podcast Awards The Amp Hour talked about languages, they also referenced this compiler writing exercise C alternative tokens iso646.h and an up to date C reference (Harbison and Steele) $20 Linux board from vocore.io Real Strawberry DNA extraction technique (Elecia forgot the soap and the salt.) fromScientific American (with real science) or in easy-to-follow picture form on genome.gov.

Dan Shapiro (@danshapiro), CEO of Glowforge (@glowforge), speaks with us about laser cutters and his book, The Hot Seat. If you succumb to the wonder of 3D laser printers, consider using our Glowforge link so you get $100 (and we get $100). Dan's book, the one Elecia gushes about, is The Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook. Some of that information is also found in Dan's blog. If you are in the Seattle area, Glowforge is hiring! Check out their jobs page. We didn't talk much about Robot Turtles, a game to teach programming principles to preschoolers.(Also on Amazon.) There is another interesting interview with Dan at Tested.com.

Windell Oskay (@Oskay) of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) told us about co-authoring a book: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory. Some great EMSL links: A signed copy of Windell's book Dis-integrated 555 timer kit Candle flicker LEDs Food in specimen jars EMSL blog post Spherical pen plotter (EggBot Pro!) The book Chris brought up was Thinking Physics. Windell is also on Google Plus. Contest to get Windell's signed book ends 11/13, send in your entry!

Bob Coggeshall (@BobCoggeshall) runs a boutique assembly house. And he co-wrote sudo. There are sandwich jokes. Bob's business is Small Batch Assembly (@SmallBatchA). (There might be a discount on your first order near the end of the show. Maybe.) His pick and place machine is a Mancorp MC400. Octopart's Common Parts Library We mentioned OSHPark a few times, Laen has been on Embedded.fm: 92: Everybody Behave, Please Boldport makes nonlinear traces (SEAHORSE!!) Relevant XKCD panel My Date with Drew How did we not know about Astromech.net? Bob's Wifi Nixie driver board (also: how Nixie tubes work)

Chris and Elecia try out their new recording location, give advice for getting a job in embedded software, and respond to listener emails. SparkFun's Pit of Despair is a blog post about how to create products from prototypes. Visual Studio has plug-ins that support microprocessors, see Visual Micro. The Guardian reports that 2016 VW models have a different defeat.