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.
Chris Svec (@christophersvec) chatted with us about going from engineer to manager and working from home.
Chris had many book recommendations (these are affiliate links):
Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green (fiction)
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink
The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier
Resilient Management by Lara Hogan
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Chris is hiring for his team. Check out the iRobot Jobs page or look at the specific jobs he's hiring for (in Boston, MA): Associate Software Engineer and Principal Software Engineer.
Chris gave a talk to Purdue students about working from home, there is a video and a summary blog post.
An interesting tweet about the difference between working from home and what people are doing now. The Canadian Federal government gave the following advice:
Finally, Svec's family wants a cat. They probably won't get a Sphinx despite it matching all the criteria. Maybe an Abyssinian. Or maybe a dog.
Matt Godbolt (@mattgodbolt) spoke with us about settling arguments with Compiler Explorer.
Compiler Explorer comes in different flavors:
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:
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)
Kate Stewart (@_kate_stewart) of the Linux Foundation spoke with us about the Zephyr operating system (@ZephyrIoT).
Some Zephyr docs:
Two projects using Zephyr:
Open Artificial Pancreas System (openaps.org)
Zephyr on a Hearing Aid talk at Embedded Linux Conference 2019
Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) discuss listener questions about USB, thesis projects, prototype iterations, motivation, and processor cores.
Chris has been using audiomovers.com to mix audio remotely in real time.
Daniel Situnayake (@dansitu) spoke with us about machine learning on microcontrollers.
Dan is the author of TinyML: Machine Learning with TensorFlow Lite on Arduino and Ultra-Low-Power Microcontrollers. You can read the first several chapters at tinymlbook.com.
TinyML is a part of TensorFlow Lite. See the microcontroller getting started guide.
Dan works for Edge Impulse (@EdgeImpulse) which is making tools for easier machine learning integration at the edge. Their tools are free and they also have a getting started guide.
Dan recently posted on the Edge Impulse blog about training a TinyML model to capture lion roars.
For TinyML meetups and a forum, check out tinyml.org
Lacuna Space: low cost sensors transmitting to space
Erin Talvitie of Harvey Mudd College spoke with us about machine learning, hallucinating data, and making good decisions based on imperfect predictions.
Paper we discussed: Self-Correcting Models for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Erin's grant: Using Imperfect Predictions to Make Good Decisions
For a reinforcement learning book, Erin suggests Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto or the lecture series by David Silver.
For a machine learning book, Elecia likes Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems by Aurélien Géron
John Saunders (@NYCCNC) spoke with us about building a Johnny Five robot on his NYC CNC YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/saunixcomp).
You can find all of the Johnny Five build videos on a playlist or check out the NYC CNC page. As mentioned, Input Inc did a lot of the preliminary work.
John recommends books:
John is also the founder of Saunders Machine Works (they have a contact page).
Adam Wolf (@adamwwolf) of Wayne and Layne (www.wayneandlayne.com) spoke with us about making kits, museum exhibit engineering, working on KiCad, and extraterrestrial art philosophy.
Adam has a personal blog on www.feelslikeburning.com/blog/ as well as a website adamwolf.org. Adam co-wrote Make: Lego and Arduino Projects
If you want to know how to contribute to KiCad libraries, check out their instruction page: kicad-pcb.org/libraries/contribute/
We also mentioned:
Evil Mad Scientist's Guide to Improving Open Source Hardware Visual Diffs
KiCad Automation Tools: tools to autogenerate KiCad artifacts when committing to git
Kivy: open source Python library for making displays
Cedux: application framework
OKGo Upside Down and Inside Out video and Art in Space project
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.
Carmen Parisi spoke with us about changing jobs from a semiconductor specialist at TI to an electrical engineering generalist at Wasatch Photonics.
Carmen was previously on Embedded 216: Bavarian Folk Metal and formerly was the host of The Engineering Commons podcast
Carmen works at Wasatch Photonics making Ramen Spectrometers.
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