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.
Jordan Hart from Digital Media Academy joined Elecia to discuss ways to make science, technology, and engineering fun for kids through Minecraft, Arduino robotics, and music.
DMA video: Robotics and Electrical Engineering with Arduino
TED talk: The child-driven education which describes the "method of the grandmother" teaching style.
Georgia Tech online CS Master's degree
Sincere apologies to fans of Gottfried Leibnitz, he had a truly amazing career that went well beyond calculus, read about it on Wikipedia.
Rob Mitchell and Elecia discuss management, what they like about project schedules, and lessons learned on the path from engineer to manager.
Phil King of Weekend Engineering returned to give Elecia advice on how to fabricate a board, both in a professional capacity and for garage projects.
EaglePCB is a commercial package which is also available as a free, noncommercial version for small 2-layer boards. Other open source packages mentioned include Kicad and gEDA. Some board fabricators provide free tools that work only with their fab houses (such asExpressPCB). Digikey's SchemeIt provides a way to get a PDF schematic (and a BOM), but falls down by not providing a way to generate a net list, a critical part of board fabrication.
PCB West is this week at the Santa Clara convention center.
How Printed Circuit Boards are Designed (1960 Edition)
Hildy Licht electronic assembly and manufacturing
Karen Field (@karenfield) and Elecia talk about 2014 DesignWest, the embedded systems conference, and how to submit your idea for a session.
2014 DesignWest is March 31 - April 3, 2014.
Call for abstracts is open, submit your idea!
Speaker benefits include speaker room, speaker party, full conference pass, conversation starting badge for networking, plus resume fodder.
Elecia White and Amy Button discuss Amy's dream of going to Mars, her previous role in training astronauts to handle disasters, and her current work on a magic box of rocks that will keep Orion's air breathable.
Elecia White spoke with Elizabeth Brenner about devices that can be used to help families worry less about grandparents who live alone (and 87-year-old neighbor friends named Dolores).
Life Alert is the big name in senior push-button call systems. Life Call are the "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up" people. (See the commercial!) Life Call and Lileline have accelerometers to detect falls.
Twilio allows programs to send and receive phone calls and text messages using its web service APIs.
If This Then That (ifttt.com) connects channels to allow an event to trigger other events (i.e. "failed to twitter today" -> text family) .
Fibit API for connecting Fitbit data to other applications.
We didn't talk about this but it is a similar idea: Goodnight lamp.
Elecia tries to get a handle on whether Agile works with embedded software. Curtis Cole (@citizencurtis) argues in favor of user stories, scrums, and story points.
Agile software development on Wikipedia
Test Driven Development for Embedded C by James Grenning
"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Winston Churchill
Andreas Eieland (@AndreasMCUguy) from Atmel joined Elecia to talk about how the AVR processor line came to life, why there is an AVR in Arduino, and the spirit of making things.
OpenCores AVR FPGA implementation
Elecia's new dev kit is a SAM D20 Xplained Pro
Artist Kristin Anderson of Idle Creativity spoke with Elecia about the technology of working with slumped glass, getting started on Etsy (Elecia mentioned her craft electronic ideas), and moving from Silicon Valley technology to artistic pursuits.
Kristin's Etsy store, blog, and Facebook page
Elecia's intial craft electronics idea and some followup
Great book for getting started: Contemporary Fused Glass
Kristin suggests Marketing Creativity and Handmadeology as blogs to help build a craft business
Etsy is a great resource for learning to use Etsy: forums and video tutorials.
Bullseye Glass, see classes, especially "Set Your Kiln on Fire" [That does sound fun! -El]
Kristin suggests Marketing Creativity and Handmadeology as blogs to help build a craft business
Etsy is a great resource for learning to use Etsy: forums and video tutorials.
Christopher White ( @stoneymonster) emerges from his producer responsibilities to chat with Elecia about starting a podcast: the gadgetry, the software, the distribution, and, the big question, why we do it.
Links from the show:
Libsyn, a dedicated podcast audio hosting service.
SquareSpace, fast and easy website building and hosting.
5x5, Dan Benjamin's (@danbenjamin) phenomenal podcast network.
Starting a podcast, Dan's guide to podcast equipment.
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