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.
Andrei Chichak joins Elecia and Christopher to do a deep dive into the world of interrupts.
Andrei writes on our blog: Embedded Wednesdays. He has written specifically about interrupts in multiple ways: general introduction, buttons and debouncing, peripheral data transfer via DMA, and so on). The knock-knock joke comes from Chris Svec's Embedded.fm blog post on interrupts.
Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) chat about listener questions and things they've been up to.
A listener turned Chris on to Ray Wilson and his Music From Outer Space website on DIY analog synths and book Make: Analog Synthesizers. After collecting parts for a total DIY, he found and built a neat kit: Kastle Synth (as heard on the show) and has connected it to his Roland SE-02 Analog Synthesizer (on Amazon). BTW, his ham radio WSPR kit is the Ultimate 3 in case you are behind on hobbies. You can hear more about it in 197: Smell the Transistor.
Elecia has been working through Udacity's Self-Driving Engineer nanodegree. She completed term 1 with its computer vision and machine learning and is on to term 2 with sensor fusion, localization, and control. She blissfully is unaware of the cost because she got to be an industry expert for the Intro to Self-Driving Cars course.
Listener Simon asked about non-fiction books. Elecia gets many of hers by looking at what is on discount at BookBub's science section which lead to two books she highly recommends Spirals in Time (snail facts) and Tristan Gooley's How to Read Water (beach explainer).
Chris has been reading Scott Wolley's The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age and How Music Works by David Byrne.
Some show-related recommendations include Gretchen Bakke's The Grid (hear Gretchen on episode 213: Electricity Doesn't Behave Like an Apple) and Jimmy Soni's Mind at Play (hear Jimmy on episode 221: Hiding in Plain Sight). She's reading Tim O'Reilly's WTF book about the future in anticipation of an upcoming episode. That's a good reminder: we, of course, also recommend Making Embedded Systems.
Zach asked about Michael Barr's Embedded Software Training in a Box. Apologies if we weren't specific enough, it would likely make a better blog post.
Also: $1 Microcontrollers!
Jonathan Beri (@beriberikix) spoke with us about his double life: Particle.io product manager by day, maker by night (and weekends).
Jonathan wrote a chapter about piDuino5 Mobile Robot Platform in JavaScript Robotics.
Product manager resources from product.careers and Ken Norton's Newsletter. For an alternate take, there is a good cartoon about effective product management from Henrik Kniberg.
For getting into open source, see the guide from Github. Also, there is a newi-sh consortium, the TODO group, with guides and resources about running open source projects.
There is also the often useful Google's developer documentation style guide.
NerdRage's video on the chemistry of etching
The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen by Bunnie Huang
Speaking of Robot Operating System (we did, briefly), IEEE Spectrum had a nice history of ROS.
Author Jimmy Soni (@jimmyasoni) spoke with us about his biography of Claude Shannon, founder of information theory and digital circuit theory.
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. For an introduction to the book, read their post 10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives.
Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
Mark Levinson's Particle Fever is a documentary film about the Large Hadron Collider. He is also directing a film about Claude Shannon
Scientific Aspects of Juggling by Claude Shannon
Ben Hencke (@im889) spoke with us about OHWS, Tindie, and blinking lights.
Ben sells his Pixelblaze WiFi LED controller on his ElectroMage store on Tindie. It is based on the ESP8266 and uses the DotStar (APA102) lights.
To hear John Leeman's trip report on the Open Hardware Summit (OHWS), listen to Don't Panic Geocast, Episode 140 – "Juicero of Tractors"
Ben's websites are bhencke.com and electromage.com. Go there if you want to see some of Ben's projects, including Synthia. You can also find Ben on Hackaday, Github, and YouTube.
We talked with Charles Lohr about ESP8266 WiFi controlled lights and ColorChord on Embedded.fm episode 102: The Deadly Fluffy Bunny (With WiFi).
More about the 4-bit Radio Shack computer (and an Arduino-based emulator for it!)
Ben Hencke (@im889) spoke with us about OHWS, Tindie, and blinking lights.
Ben sells his Pixelblaze WiFi LED controller on his ElectroMage store on Tindie. It is based on the ESP8266 and uses the DotStar (APA102) lights.
To hear John Leeman's trip report on the Open Hardware Summit (OHWS), listen to Don't Panic Geocast, Episode 140 – "Juicero of Tractors"
Ben's websites are bhencke.com and electromage.com. Go there if you want to see some of Ben's projects, including Synthia. You can also find Ben on Hackaday, Github, and YouTube.
We talked with Charles Lohr about ESP8266 WiFi controlled lights and ColorChord on Embedded.fm episode 102: The Deadly Fluffy Bunny (With WiFi).
More about the 4-bit Radio Shack computer (and an Arduino-based emulator for it!)
Talia's nightlight
Josh Bleecher Snyder (@offbymany) joined us to talk about PayPal's Beacon, being acquired, the Go programming language, BTLE, computer vision, and working at a large company after founding small ones.
Bluetooth Low Energy: A Developer's Handbook by Robin Heydon
Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision by Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler
Gatt is a Go package for building Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals (video description by Josh from GopherCon 2014)
Machine learning's Theano
Eigen Library for matrix math
Kelly Shortridge (@swagitda_) spoke with us about the intersection of security and behavioral economics. Kelly's writing and talks are linked from her personal site swagitda.com. Kelly is currently a Product Manager at SecurityScorecard.
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
What Works by Iris Bohnet
Risky Business, a podcast about security
Teen Vogue's How to Keep Your Internet Browser History Private
Surveillance Self-Defense from EFF, including security for journalists as mentioned in the show
Twitter suggestion @SwiftOnSecurity, @thegrugq, and @sawgitda_.
Dirk Akeman of SEGGER (@SEGGERMicro) joined us to talk about debugger specifics.
We recently did two other shows on debugging: a general intro with Alvaro Prieto and one with a focus on the development-system's debugger software interface with Pierre-Marie de Rodat.
Herd immunity and find a flu shot
And, yes, we did bleep Dirk's answer for favorite processor because he later reconsidered the idea that he only had one favorite.
Bob Skala of Interactive Instruments spoke with us about very large servo motors, wind tunnels, and staying current in tech.
Hydraulic Press YouTube channel (and our favorite video)
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
Other good tech podcasts included The Amp Hour and HamRadio 360 WorkBench
Chris talked about getting into WSPR in 197: Smell the Transistor but we first talked about it in 76: Entropy is For Wimps. The new WSPR mode he mentioned is called FT8 (google it).
And a note from Bob:
Below is a link to a type of servo system that tries to simplify the interface to be more like a stepper. It integrates the driver and motor into a single package so you can treat it like a stepper with digital step and direction or serial commands. You get the smoothness, speed, accuracy and low power (when idle) of a servo but the servo motor, driver, and cabling are integrated into one magic box. You add a DC supply and simple control signals and you are all set. They came out with this to replace stepper motors. I haven't used one yet but I hope to at some point.
https://www.teknic.com/products/clearpath-brushless-dc-servo-motors/
Carmen Parisi (@FakeEEQuips) joined us to talk about electronics and podcasts.
Carmen works on switching regulators. If you want to know more, he sent along some very basic application notes: How to Apply DC-DC Step Down Regulators (Analog Devices) and Switching Regulator Fundamentals (TI). The digital communication method with these switchers is the I2C-like PMBus. If all those make sense, dive a little deeper with chapter 9 of the online and free Linear Circuit Design Handbook. Carmen says the whole book is excellent for analog information. Also, the free chapter of the Art of Electronics is on power. If all that still makes sense, you may be Carmen if you can also write an app note like this one: Multiphase Buck Design From Start to Finish (Part 1).
Carmen is a host on The Engineering Commons (@TEC_Podcast). Some episodes you might enjoy are 93: Capacitors with James Lewis of KEMET (aka BaldEngineer) and 77: Remote Host Toast with Elecia White.
Some suggested books from Carmen:
Elecia mentioned How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic by Michael Jay Geier and promised a PID image from her book Making Embedded Systems.
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