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.
Alan Blackwell spoke with us about the lurking dangers of large language models, the magical nature of artificial intelligence, and the future of interacting with computers.
Alan is the author of Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI which you can read in its pre-book form here: https://moralcodes.pubpub.org/
Alan's day job is as a Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge University department of Computer Science and Technology. See his research interests on his Cambridge University page.
(Also, given as homework in the newsletter, we didn't directly discuss Jo Walton's 'A Brief Backward History of Automated Eloquence', a playful history of automated text generation, written from a perspective in the year 2070.)
Chris and Elecia talk to each other about setting aside memory in a linker file, printing using your debugger, looking around a new code base, pointers as optimization, choosing processors, skill trees and merit badges.
Elecia's Creating Chaos and Hard Faults talk and slides.
STM32 Application Note AN4989 microcontroller debug toolbox includes semihosting. Memfault's Interrupt blog has a good Semihosting post.
Elecia and Steph's Embedded Skills Tree. A far more detailed one pointed out by a listener: A comprehensive roadmap for aspiring Embedded Systems Engineers, featuring a curated list of learning resources.
The most influential book Elecia has never read is You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook for Grown-Up Girls.
Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
Rick Altherr spoke with us about high-speed control, complicated systems, and making quantum computers.
If you want to know more about building quantum computers, take a listen to Rick's MacroFab episode: The Nuts and Bolts of Quantum Computing.
If you want to make your own quantum circuit simulator, it only takes 27 lines of Python: A Quantum Circuit Simulator in 27 Lines of Python.
What about if you actually want to know about quantum computing? Rick suggests Quantum computing for the very curious while we look back at Embedded.fm 344: Superposition, Entanglement, and Interference with Kitty Yeung, talking about her Quantum Computing Comic book and Hackaday lecture series.
Rick works for IonQ where they do trapped-ion quantum computing (there are different physics methods for making ions dance to the tune of quantum computing).
If you want to talk to Rick, maybe to get his advice about your resume or career prospects, he sets aside a few hours each week to share his wisdom: https://calendly.com/mxshift
You can also find Rick on Mastodon and LinkedIn. He was also the guest on 311: Attack Other People's Refrigerators about security hacking and mentoring.
Professor Colleen Lewis joined us to talk teaching pointers with stuffies, explaining inheritance through tigers, and computer science pedagogy.
Check out her YouTube channel to view her videos explaining CS concepts with physical models. These are also collected on her website: Physical Models of Java.
If you are an instructor (or thinking about teaching CS), check out Colleen's CS Teaching Tips. You may also be interested in some other research:
John Edwards Study on Syntax exercises in CS1
Daniel Willingham on why learning styles aren't a real thing
Colleen is an Assistant Professor at University Illinois, Urbana-Champaign's Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. You can find her papers on Google Scholar (including studies on teaching and learning).
Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
Chris and Elecia talk about their current adventures in conference talks, play dates, and skunks.
Elecia's talks are available on YouTube:
Creating Chaos and Hard Faults: An introduction to hard fault handlings, stack overflows, and debugging hard bugs
Introduction to Embedded Systems (O'Reilly Expert Webinar): An introductions to… well, embedded systems
These are both advertising for the 2nd edition of Elecia's book, Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software. You can also find it on O'Reilly's Learning System and probably read it with your 30 Day Trial (here).
Chris got a handheld game console, the Playdate (play.date), and has been writing a game for it. There is an interesting looking MicroPython port for it.
We also mentioned Tiny Tapeout Demoscene which sounds pretty neat. And KiCanvas where you can see KiCAD schematics without loading KiCAD.
Our newsletter has been off but will be back to normal next week. The RSS feed is probably not fun to look at but Elecia's Rebloginator shows some Python tools for parsing feeds.
Neither the dog nor the skunk seem contrite.
Jerry Twomey spoke with us about his new O'Reilly book Applied Embedded Electronics which covers embedded topics such as EMI, signal processing, control systems and non-ideal components.
Jerry is also the principal engineer at Effective Electrons. His articles are linked from there and you can contact him via the site.
Here is a 30-day trial for the O'Reilly Learning System. You can take a look at Jerry's Applied Embedded Electronics and Elecia's Making Embedded Systems as well as hundreds of other books about software, hardware, engineering, and origami.
Carles Cufí spoke with us about Zephyr, Nordic, learning, open source development, and corporate goals.
Carles had some great suggestions for learning Zephyr:
Memfault Interrupt Practical Zephyr blog series
Zephyr's Discord server
Zephyr's YouTube channel (@ZephyrProject), sorted by views
Macrobatics term is from Zephyr Devicetree Mysteries, Solved - Marti Bolivar, Nordic Semiconductor
There is also the Zephyr website for a full picture. And various Nordic tutorials (see nRF5340 Audio applications).
Carles was an author on Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy: Tools and Techniques for Low-Power Networking. The cover animal is a mousebird.
Jan Rychter joined us to talk about building a company, electronic components, and software design.
Jan is the founder and engineer at PartsBox.com. If you are interested in the meta-analysis of the data, check out his article on the Top Ten Hobby Parts and the Electronic Component Database,
You can find out more about Jan through his website (jan.rychter.com), LinkedIn, or Mastodon.
Kwabena Agyeman joined Chris and Elecia to talk about optimization, cameras, machine learning, and vision systems.
Kwabena is the head of OpenMV (openmv.io), an open source and open hardware system that runs machine learning algorithms on vision data. It uses MicroPython as a development environment so getting started is easy.
Their github repositories are under github.com/openmv. You can find some of the SIMD details we talked about on the show:
150% faster: openmv/src/omv/imlib/binary.c
1000% faster: openmv/src/omv/imlib/filter.c
Double Pumping: openmv/src/omv/modules/py_tv.c
Kwabena has been creating a spreadsheet of different algorithms in camera frames per second (FPS) for Arm processors: Performance Benchmarks - Google Sheets. As time moves on, it will grow. Note: this is a link on the OpenMV website under About. When M55 stuff hits the market expect 4-8x speed gains.
The OpenMV YouTube channel is also a good place to get more information about the system (and vision algorithms).
Kwabena spoke with us about (the beginnings of) OpenMV on Embedded 212: You Are in Seaworld.
Elecia is giving a free talk for O'Reilly to advertise her Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition book. The talk will be an introduction to embedded systems, geared towards software engineers who are suddenly holding a device and want to program it. The talk is May 23, 2024 at 9:00 AM PDT. Sign up here. A video will be available afterward for folks who sign up.
Lee Wilkins joined Chris and Elecia to talk about The Open Source Hardware Association, the Open Hardware Summit, and zine culture.
The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) provides certification and support for creating open source hardware. The Open Hardware Summit is happening May 3-4, 2024. It is in Montreal, Canada. It also has many online components including a Discord and online Unconferece. All videos are available for later watching on YouTube.
Lee's personal page is leecyb.org. Their zines are available in their shop.
Elecia mentioned enjoying There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.
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