Stay ConnectedI am Elecia White alongside Christopher White. We’re here to chat about the interests, careers, and lives of engineers, artists, educators and makers. Our diverse guest list includes names you may have heard and engineers working quietly in the trenches. Either way, they are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and inspiring.
We’d love to share our enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM).
Copyright: © 2013-2023 Logical Elegance, Inc.
Adelle Lin (@Adellelin) spoke with us about wearables, art, playfulness, and getting together in virtual reality. Adelle's website is touchtech.io.
For some VR get togethers, Adelle recommends AltSpace (altvr.com) and Mozilla Hubs (hubs.mozilla.com). Some other remote get togethers:
Virtual Burning Man (August 29 - September 7, 2021)
A. Maze Conference (July 21-24, 2021, remote)
We mentioned the Nautilus jigsaw puzzle from Nervous Systems but actually have the smaller Ammonite one.
Tom Anderson (@tomacorp) joined us to talk about floating pins, ADCs, and teaching and learning things. Tom mentioned Horowitz and Hill's Art of Electronics and the vintage books on TubeBooks.org.
Tom wrote about JFETs and vacuum tubes and Power Supply Filter Design for PCBs. He recommended the TI app note on floating inputs and a power supply book: Modern DC-to-DC Switchmode Power Converter Circuits.
You can fine more of Tom's writing on Medium and the Tempo Automation blog.
Other books:
Practical Handbook of Curve Design and Generation and CRC Standard Curves and Surfaces
Analog Integrated Circuit Design by Johns and Martin
Analog Circuit Design by Jim Williams
Other Vintage Books:
Abramowitz and Stegun Handbook of Mathematical Functions (Applied mathematics)
Typical Oscilloscope Circuitry by Tektronix
Radiotron Designer's Handbook (TubeBooks.org)
Dynamical Analogies (TubeBooks.org)
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
Nitya Narasimhan (@nitya) spoke with us about visualizing learning, visual storytelling, sketchnotes, and finding a job that satisfies.
Nitya's sketchnotes are all available on the @sketchthedocs Twitter stream that includes links to the hi-res drawing, a time-lapse of the drawing being created, and a blog post describing the information in more detail. The hi-res images are also on github, or if you have fast internet to download them all: cloud-skills.dev.
If you'd like to create your own visual notes, sketchthedocs.dev has resources for talks and books you might find helpful. More talks can be found from #VisualieIT 2020.
In July (links are not live until July 1, 2021), Microsoft and Nitya will be celebrating IoT with JulyOT including an introduction for beginners.
Nitya's personal site is nitya.dev
On this quick bonus episode, Elecia and Christopher chat about their various recent projects, some of which have just been released into the wild.
Christopher's band 12AX7 just launched their album Kickstarter, which was selected as one of Kickstarter's "Projects We Love". Check it out here if you are interested in finding out more or backing it. It'll run through July 16th at 10am Pacific Time.
Elecia's Embedded Online Conference talk on map files will be posted publicly on June 22nd, so be on the lookout for that. In the meantime, the slides and examples are available here at embedded.fm/blog/MapFiles (and on Github)
If you'd like other Embedded merchandise such as a mug (many different options), Memory Map Land mousepad (or different poster), we have a Zazzle store.
Her lightning talk about origami, Snails, Paper, and Programming: A Computational Approach to Mollusc Morphology in Origami, is already on Youtube and you can watch it now! Elecia's origami github can be found here.
Finally if you are interested in having your cat or cats appear in 12AX7's upcoming music video, send Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud/whatever links to your clips, along with how you'd like to be credited, to show@embedded.fm. Use the subject line "Cats for 12AX7".
Erin Kennedy (@RobotGrrl) spoke with us about learning new things, nice robots at the beach, lighting up fog voxels, and being part of the maker community.
Erin's Robot Missions (@RobotMissions) was founded to develop robots to clean shorelines of plastic. Her personal website is robotgrrl.xyz (check out the project showcase).
Erin also worked on a Hackaday Dream Team that worked on innovations to reduce the environmental impact of lost or abandoned fishing equipment.
From his view in retirement, David Comer spoke with us about continuing to learn, staying engaged in an engineering career, and how the Galileo memory module worked.
Brittany Postnikoff (@Straithe) spoke with us about scary robots, neat stickers, and contributing to open source projects.
Brittany's website is straithe.com and her sticker channel is twitch.tv/str41the. Her github repo has curated reading lists on technical topics.
She's working at Great Scott Gadgets, maker of a variety of hardware tools including Luna, a toolkit for working with USB. (This was mentioned on a previous Embedded show, 337: Not Completely Explode with Kate Tempkin.)
And if you want Embedded merchandise like mugs, mousepads, and wall art, we have a store for you.
Tenaya Hurst Conklin (@TenayaHurst) discussed STEAM teaching tools and kits from RAFT (@RAFTBayArea).
RAFT is at raft.net. The Abiotic Dissection activity is pretty amusing (from the STEAM Learning Sheets) as are the games in the idea sheets. They also have a summer camp and a Youtube channel.
Tenaya's website is roguemaking.com. She was previously on Embedded 49: Is that an Arduino in your pocket?
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 Road, her YouTube channel, and/or her Robotic 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 at embedded.fm/subscribe.
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