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.
After a few new announcements, we replayed the episode where Jack Ganssle shared his wisdom on being a good embedded software engineer (hint: it takes discipline).
The new announcements include:
Jack's website is filled with great essays and new videos. He's also written the Art of Designing Embedded Systems and The Embedded Systems Dictionary (with Michael Barr).
We covered a lot of ground, here are some of the highlights:
John Leeman (@geo_leeman) spoke with us about geophysics and associated technology.
John is one of the hosts of the Don't Panic GeoCast (@dontpanicgeo, iTunes). Some episodes you may like:
John is teaching a course at Penn State called Techniques of Geoscientific Experimentation. The information and textbook is online! It uses the SparkFun Inventor's Kit.
John has a website with a blog. He has some Cheerson CX-10 tiny drone posts (my favorite, also Alvaro's repo and my posts). John also has a consulting company: Leeman GeoPhysical.
Python! Lots of Python was discussed.
Contest! Contest ends October 1st and now there are more books! In addition to the ones Bob Apthorpe is sponsoring, John's consulting company will sponsor: Earthquake Storms: An Unauthorized Biography of the San Andreas Fault by John Dvorak and The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder.
Briana Morey from MC10 (@mc10inc) spoke with us about stretchable electronics, Tesla coils and lasers. She works at MC10, creators of the L'Oreal My UV Patch as well as the BioStampRC.
MC10 is hiring! They are in Lexington, MA, US. The embedded software position is filled already but the EE position is still open.
Briana mentioned an excellent science fiction book she'd read recently: Too Like Lightning by Ada Palmer.
Chris and Elecia chat about Bayes Rule, aliens, bit-banging, VGA, and unit testing.
Elecia is working on A Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule.
ACM has a code of software engineering ethics
Toads have trackers (NPR story)
An introduction to bit-banging SPI (Arduino, WS2812)
We talked to James Grenning extensively about testing on 30: Eventually Lightning Strikes (and about his excellent book Test Driven Development for Embedded C). We spoke with James again on 109: Resurrection of Extreme Programming. We also talked about unit testing with Mark Vandervoord on 103: Tentacles of the Kraken.
A neat TED Talk involving octo-copters, still four short of dodecahedracopter.
Bob Apthorpe (@arclight) spoke with us about software, nuclear engineering, and improv.
Bob is giving away three books! Send in your guess by October 1, 2016. One entry per person. (More info below.)
Hackaday SuperCon is Nov 5-6, in Pasadena, CA.
Bob's long languishing blog is overscope.cynistar.net.
Peep (The Network Aualizer): Monitoring Your Network with Sound
Safety-I and Safety-II: The Past and Future of Safety Management
Now! The books you may win!
Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffrey, someone who knows the technology and history and does a fantastic job explaining complex failures in an engaging way without resorting to fear-mongering and hyperbole. (Guess Elecia's number for this one.)
Safeware by Nancy Leveson, may be 20 years old, it's still full of amazing insights for delivering safe, reliable systems and ways of looking at the organizational contexts in which these systems are built and used. Even if you aren't developing safety-critical systems, it's a fantastic resource and really thought-provoking. (Guess Christopher's number for this one.)
Every Anxious Wave by Mo Daviau is a novel about rock & roll, time travel, love, loss, and finding things you didn't know you were looking for. Full disclosure: The author is Bob's ex-wife. (Guess Bob's number for this one.)
Shimona Carvalho (@shimonkey) joins us to talk about user interface design in embedded systems. Then we talk about internationalization and localization. Then photography.
Shimona's website is shimonacarvalho.com and her Flicker account is shimonkey.
For an introduction to user interface design, Shimona recommended The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
Internationalization and localization were delved in far deeper in episode 26: The Tofu Problem. Some of the material from that will be on the embedded.fm/blog this week.
We mentioned an auxiliary, secret RSS feed that goes all the way back to episode one. (Some notes haven't been filled in yet).
We're also on Youtube now.
Christopher White resurrects an Apple ][+ with his brother Matthew White. This is a show about the software Christopher and Matthew wrote when they were kids and the hardware they wrote it on.
Matthew's favorite fictional robot (we should have asked): Venus Probe from Six Million Dollar Man. We did ask about his favorite fictional computer and there is a video for that too.
Eric Schlaepfer's Monster 6502
Kerbal Space Program for the Apple ][
Elecia got to $42 in Lemonade Stand by the end of the show
Matthew's Nebula Wars and Eye of Eternal Death BASIC games circa 1985 and 1981 respectively.
If you feel like it, you can try out an Apple ][ in your web browser, with tons of disks available at the Internet Archive or in a Javascript Emulator.
Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems.
Elecia went to Hackaday's SuperCon, got to announce the Hackaday Prize 2015 winners, then talked to the organizers about their conference.
The guests this week were (in order of appearance):
Adam promised us a list of contributors to the goodie bag. Here it is!
Nadya Peek (@nadyapeek) joined us to talk about making machines that build things.
Nadya's website is infosyncratic.nl, which includes her blog. Nadya's dissertation defense on Making Machines that Make: Object-Oriented Hardware Meets Object-Oriented Software was standing room only.
MIT Center For Bits and Atoms, which studies "how to turn data into things, and things into data."
Machines that Make: MTM.cba.mit.edu
Valve's Alan Yates (@vk2zay) spoke with us about the science and technology of virtual reality.
Elecia looked at the iFixIt Teardown of the HTC Vive system as she was unwilling to take apart Christopher's system.
Alan shared some of his other favorite reverse engineering efforts: Doc OK's Lighthouse videos, documentation on github by nairol, and a blog by Trammell Hudson.
Alan's sensor circuit diagrams were on twitter: SparkleTree sensor circuit (think simplified) and the closer-to-production Lighthouse sensor.
Make Magazine talked about Valve's R&D Lab. This is important in case you want to work at Valve (they are currently hiring for EE but if that doesn't describe you and you want to work there, apply anyway).
Alan also has a website (vk2zay.net) though it doesn't see much updating right now.
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