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.
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 Catand a Cartoon Guide to the Internet of Things). You can find more of her writing and videos on BuzzFeedand 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:
Andrei Chichak and Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) join us to talk about bits and how to manipulate them.
Alvaro is host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineeringpodcast. His other Embedded appearances are 130, 200, and 215.
Andrei ("Andrei from the Great White North") works at CBF Systems. His other Embedded appearances are 99, 114, 139, and 200.
Andrei wrote about bit manipulation as part of Embedded Wednesdayson Embedded.fm: Logic in C, part II. Andrei recommends using ISO646.hto reduce confusion around bit manipulation. Also, his suggested calculator is the SwissMicros DM16L
Elecia wrote an introduction to binary and hex.
For more information about programming and binary, see How to Count by Steven Frank
For advanced bit twiddling, check out:
Jasmine Brackett (@asiwatch) spoke with us about @Tindie's electronics marketplace, this year's Hackaday Prize, and tips for wearable electronics.
If you want to buy on Tindie, check out their homepage tindie.com. If you want to sell, that is straightforward too: tindie.com/about/sell.
There is an Embedded contest for the Tindie Blinky LED badge, a nifty little learn to solder kit. Contest ends April 20, 2018 (midnight UTC). You are to send a number to us using the contact link. Closest one wins. One number per person.
You can also get these badges at the Dublin Hackaday Unconference (April 7, 2018, Dublin, Ireland) and at meetups where Jasmine is a presenter.
Thank you to Ben Hencke for some good questions. He talked about his Tindie store with us on 220: Cascading Waterfall of Lights.
Jasmine mentioned the RC2014, homebrew z80 computer kit.
Both Tindie and Hackaday are owned by Supplyframe.
Finally, we talked to Emile Petrone when Tindie was a fairly new thing on 72: This is My NASA Phone.
What do you do after space debris, hacking dinosaurs, and judging robots? If you are Dr. Lucy Rogers (@DrLucyRogers), you build an organization devoted to promoting the Making industry: Guild of Makers (@GuildOfMakers)
Lucy's personal site is lucyrogers.com. She wrote the book It's ONLY Rocket Science: An Introduction in Plain English.
Guild of Maker's Twitter hack chats are weekly on Tuesdays at 8pm UTC. They use the tag #MakersHour.
Lucy programs in Node-RED, a visual language.
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:
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++.
NOTE: The contest already ended.
Chris and Elecia answered some listener questions about dynamic memory and shared code. Then Elecia gave a presentation about ShotSpotter, the gunshot location system she worked on.
Elecia enjoyed The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone.
Ben is the editor of HackSpace, a new magazine about making (and hacking). It's produced by Raspberry Pi, but it's technologically agnostic. The first issue is free online.
The ShotSpotter presentation was originally given with Sarah Newman at the 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing.
Jan Jongboom (@janjongboom) of Mbed (@ArmMbed) joined us to talk about compilers, online hardware simulators, and inference on embedded devices.
Find out more about Mbed on mbed.com. The board simulator is at labs.mbed.com(Mbed OS Simulator). The code for the simulator is on Jan's Github. Mbed Labs also has the uTensor inference framework for using TensorFlow models on devices.
You can see some of Jan's talks and his blog on janjongboom.com.
Jan will be running a workshop at SxSW called Changing the World with Open, Long-Range IoT on March 10 in Austin, TX. Additionally, he will be hosting an IoT Deep Dive Workshop on LoRA on March 14 (also in Austin, TX).
For background on LoRA, check out the recent Amp Hour episode with Richard Ginus.
Roger Linn (@roger_linn) gave us new ideas about musical instruments, detailing how wonderful expressive control, 3D buttons, and keyscanning can be.
Roger's company is Roger Linn Design. We talked extensively about the LinnStrument, some about the AdrenaLinn for guitar, and only a little bit about the analog drum machine Tempest.
A key matrix circuit is a popular way to handle a large number of buttons but it falls prey to n-key rollover. Roger adds force sense resistors to this (FSR example at Sparkfun).
If you have an idea for an instrument, Roger has already written his response to your request for a prototype. Roger gave a keynote address at ADC '16 about the LinnStrument, including showing the sounds it can make.
OHMI Trust is the one handed musical instrument society enabling music making for everyone.
Roger mentioned some other expressive instruments including:
We spoke to author Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) about his books and near-future science fiction.
Robin wrote Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.
Robin's website is robinsloan.com. Go there for some short stories, sign up for his newsletter and check out his new 'zine (also at wizard.limo). Oh! Don't forget his blog, including a description of his neural net for audio generation and for writing.
Some books Robin suggested:
Dustin Franklin of NVIDIA (@NVIDIAEmbedded) spoke with us about the Jetson TX2, a board designed to bring AI into embedded systems.
Dusty wrote Two Days to a Demo, both the original supervised learning version and the newer reinforcement learning version. In general, check out Dusty's github repo to see what's new. Also, The Redtail project is an autonomous navigation system for drones and land vehicles based on the TX2.
The NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference is in San Jose, CA, March 26-29, 2018. Your coupon for 25% off: NVCYATO
The Jetson TX1/TX2 ChallengeRocket contest ends February 18th.
You can find Dusty on on the NVIDIA forums.
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