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.
Leonardo Laguna Ruiz of Vult spoke with us about modelling electronics, modular synthesizers, and modulating sound. We talked in detail about applied digital signal processing.
Leonardo's website is www.vult-dsp.com. Check out the Freak Filter, the user manual alone is a course in signal processing. You can buy finished or DIY versions on vult-dsp.com/store.
The physical hardware is a Eurorack module (wiki) but the Vult modules are also available for the VCV Rack, a Eurorack simulator that you can use to build your own modular synthesizer.
Leonardo has a YouTube channel where he goes in depth on signal processing: youtube.com/c/LeonardoLagunaRuiz. He's also written about modeling vintage analog sound on the Wolfram blog.
For more information about the Vult programming language (or an example for how to build your own, check out the github repository: http://modlfo.github.io/vult/overview/ This episode was sponsored by Qt, a cross platform application framework for desktop, mobile and embedded devices. That means you get a full set of libraries for nearly everything you can think of, plus a world-class GUI that will give you a native look wherever your code runs.
Try Qt for free at www.qt.io/download (qt.io/embeddedfm ! And check out Qt for MCUs!)
Helen Leigh (@helenleigh) joined us to talk about music, electronics, books, and starting a new job at CrowdSupply (@crowd_supply).
Helen was previously on Embedded #261: Blowing Their Fragile Little Minds where we talked about subversive geography, her book The Crafty Kid's Guide to DIY Electronics, and the mini.mu musical gloves.
Helen has a book coming out in 2021 about DIY Music Tech including a soft version of the Michel Waisvisz' CrackleBox (Kraakdos). Check out some of the projects in HackSpace magazine issue 36 and 37 (the book will be serialised in HackSpace). Or look on YouTube for some examples of Helen's purring tentacle and her circuit sculpture harp.
Helen mentioned Bunnie Huang's Precursor, an open mobile phone, on CrowdSupply (campaign ending shortly).
The Giant German Congress mentioned is the CCC Congress Festival
Helen's preferred thread (the one you can actually get) is Madiera's conductive threads. Hit the contact link for purchasing. (Helen notes you can use it for both sides in a sewing machine!)
Becky Worledge of the Qt Company (@qtproject) spoke with us about application frameworks, organizing large code bases, and automotive regulations.
The best place to get started with Qt is the getting started page: doc.qt.io/qt-5/gettingstarted.html
Or skip that and head straight for the code: github.com/qt
Maybe backtrack to see what is available: qt.io/product/features
Hmm, was there talk of Qt and Python? PySide was it? qt.io/qt-for-python
But wait, Qt for MCU? What platforms are supported? QtForMCUs/qtul-supported-platforms.html
Finally, don't get eaten by a Grue, sense when they are coming: doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtsensors-grue-example.html
Qt6 is coming out Dec 2020. So maybe replace all the qt-5 in the links with qt-6 to see if it is ready yet!
Oh, and Qt is hiring: qt.io/careers
The quote at the end is not from Abraham Lincoln. (Quote Investigator). Still a good thought.
Seth Hillbrand (@SethHillbrand), lead developer for KiCAD (@kicad_pcb), spoke with us about open source development, EDA tools, pronunciation, and inclusion.
Seth's company provides support for KiCAD (kipro-pcb.com, @kiproeda).
John McMaster (@johndmcmaster) told us about the process of opening up chips to see how the processors are structured and what the firmware says.
See John's website for information on getting started (as well as digging much deeper).
John has given some interesting Hardwear.io talks including Capturing Mask ROMs and Taming Hydrofluoric Acid to Extract Firmware. His talks and many others are available on the Hardwear.io archive. Or sign up for the Hardwear.io Online Hardware Security Training, Berlin Jan 2021.
As mentioned in the show:
John wrote a blog post about his top lab accidents and explosions.
Paper: Reverse engineering Flash EEPROM memories using Scanning Electron Microscopy by Franck Courbon, Sergei Skorobogatov, and Christopher Woods
Rompar and bitract are the two programs mentioned as helpful for getting from an image to binary code.
Chris and Elecia discuss transcripts, lightsabers, seashells, python, numpy, matlab and how to get into embedded systems development.
Embedded show transcripts are available at embedded.fm/transcripts
Elecia's origami github repository includes a python script for generating origami shell folding patterns. The paper described was Analysis of Shell Coiling: General Problems by David M. Raup from the Journal of Paleontology , Sep., 1966, Vol. 40, No. 5.
Chris used this model to print his lightsaber: Star Wars Lightsaber (Normal version) from YouMagine
The episode was sponsored by Triplebyte. If you are looking to prove your skills, develop your knowledge, or find a job you love, check out Triplebyte.
Ben Hencke (@ledmage, @im889) updated us on blinking lights and running a small hardware business. You can find the current PixelBlaze in the Electomage store on Tindie (tindie.com/stores/electromage/) or signup for a shiny new version on CrowdSupply.
Ben's personal site (bhencke.com) has lots of projects including a page devoted to the awesome Pixelblaze projects (including the BioTronEsis alien light sea creatures which someone who hosts this show hopes will be in her Christmas stocking).
When Ben is making Pixelblaze, the brand is ElectroMage (electromage.com/) so you can see more about Pixelblaze there including the forum.
We didn't talk about TapGlo, the arcade ping pong table that Ben is also working on.
Favorite solder paste: LOCTITE GC 10 paste (henkel-adhesives)
About his favorite acronym, Ben says, "XMLHttpRequest is my favorite because it perfectly illustrates how we're (developers) bad at naming things and like to come up with arbitrary rules for things. The story about how XML is all caps and Html is camel case is just too perfect, and it's popular use rarely has anything to do with XML"
Finally, There are 40 different flavors of Kit Kat. There are 12 flavors of candy corn, they all taste the same.
Christine Sunu (@christinesunu) spoke with us about the feelings we get from robots.
For more information about emotive design, check out Christine's website: christinesunu.com. From there you can find hackpretty.com, some of her talks (including the TED talk with the Fur Worm), and links to her projects (such as Starfish Cat and a Cartoon Guide to the Internet of Things). You can find more of her writing and videos on BuzzFeed and The Verge. You can also hire her product development company Flash Bang.
Embedded 142: New and Improved Appendages is where Sarah Petkus offers to let her robot lick us.
Keepon Robot (or on Wikipedia)
Books we talked about:
Accelerando by Charles Stross
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less by Sherry Turkle (MIT site)
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle (MIT site)
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith (Note: Elecia also wrote a whole octopus annotated bibliography in a recent post)
Drew Fustini (@pdp7) spoke with us about building Linux, RISC-V cores, and many other things. Links, so many links!
Drew is a board member of the BeagleBoard.org Foundation and of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA.org). He is an open source hardware designer at OSHPark (he recommends their blog!). He writes a monthly column for Hackspace Magazine, for example The Rise of the FPGA in Issue 26 and Intro to RISC-V.
Yocto is a tool to help build a Linux distribution specific to your board and application! Bootlin offers free training material for Yocto and OpenEmbedded (as well as many other things such as Embedded Linux and Linux kernel development). Or there is a video: Buildroot vs Yocto: Differences for Your Daily Job - Luca Ceresoli at Embedded Linux Conference. Or look at Embedded Apprentice Linux Engineer (e-ale.org). Or maybe another video: "Yocto Project Dev Day Virtual 2020 #3: Yocto Project Kernel Lab, Hands-On, Part 1" by Trevor Woerner.
RISC-V is an open source processor core. Well, cores. But you can try them out in hardware even if you don't want to play with an FPGA. The SiSpeed Longan Nano has a GigaDevices microcontroller dev board (with an OLED on board!, more info).
Did you know you can run Linux on RISC-V? The cheapest method is emulation and Renode is brilliant for that. Here is Drew using it on the train (twitter). Sipeed boards with Kendryte K210 start at only $13 and can even run Linux (tutorial). There are also affordable open hardware FPGA with free software toolchain support like the ICE40 based Icebreaker and Fomu. For a bit more money, the bigger ECP5 can run Linux. Or look at Greg Davill's wonderful Orange Crab. For a lot more money but on silicon, the Icicle with Microchip PolarFire SoC is aimed at corporate use.
Or you can produce your own physical chips. For free (for a limited time). See the talk from Tim Ansell - Skywater PDK: Fully open source manufacturable PDK for a 130nm process
Drew attends a lot of conferences, here are highlights from the past:
Linux on RISC-V with open hardware and open FPGA tools
Linaro Connect BoF: gpio and pinctrl in Linux kernel (Slides)
RISC-V: How an open ISA benefits hardware security (Slides)
Here are some future conferences he's planning to attend:
Embedded Linux Conference Europe ($50) October 26-29, 2020 (Virtual)
Yocto Project Virtual Summit ($40) October 29-30, 2020 (Virtual)
Open Hardware Summit March 13, 2020
Whitney Huang of Zipline (@zipline) spoke with us about drone delivery of medical products: technology, operations, and applications.
For more information about Zipline, check out flyzipline.com. Also, Zipline is hiring for positions in San Francisco, CA, USA, North America and Ghana, Africa.
Tacocopter was a thing in 2011. (Ok, not a very serious thing but still.)
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