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.
Yanina Bellini Saibene joined us to discuss teaching, localization, barriers to learning coding, and global communities.
Yani works on Teach Tech Together (https://teachtogether.tech/) with Greg Wilson. It is a fantastic resource if you are learning to teach. It is available in English and Spanish. She also works on The Carpentries which teaches coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide.
Yani has a site (yabellini.netlify.app) that includes the courses she has online (for free). She is also the community manager of rOpenSci and is part of R-Ladies.
You can find Yani on fosstodon.org/@yabellini.
Chris and Elecia talk about their favorite processors, their breakfast preferences, large language model ethics, presents, and Eeyore's birthday.
Elecia's new edition of her book Making Embedded Systems is finished! (Except for a couple months of tech reviews, updating, copyediting, and drawings.) It will be out in March.
All of the back issues of Byte Magazine
Chris' radio kit that he mentioned but didn't name is the QRP Labs QCX+ 5W CW Transceiver.
Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.
Kevin Lannen is an embedded systems engineer making powered wheelchairs safer. This sounded interesting to us.
Kevin works at LUCI Mobility (luci.com). Check out their tear jerker introduction video as well as technical description of over-the-air update concerns on smart wheelchairs. We also talked about the app that goes with the system: LUCI View.
You can find Kevin on Twitter (@kevlan) and LinkedIn.
Go Baby Go - The Adaptive Sports Connection
Memfault is making software the most reliable part of the IoT with its device reliability platform that enables teams to be more proactive with remote debugging, monitoring and OTA update capabilities. Try Memfault's new sandbox demo at demo.memfault.com. Embedded.fm listeners receive 25% off their first-year contract with Memfault by booking a demo here: https://go.memfault.com/demo-request-embedded
Marian Petre spoke to us about her research on how to make software developers better at developing software.
Marian is an Emeritus Professor of the School of Computing & Communications at the Open University in the United Kingdom. She also has a Wikipedia page.
The short version of How Expert Programmers Think About Errors is on the NeverWorkInTheory.org page along with other talks about academic studies on software development topics.
The longer version is a keynote from Strange Loop 2022: "Expert Software Developers' Approach to Error".
This concept as well as many others are summarized in Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think (Mit Press) by Marian Petre and Andre van der Hoek (MIT Press, 2016). The book's website provides an annotated bibliography. Marian has also co-written Software Designers in Action: A Human-Centric Look at Design Work.
She is current conducting inquiries into:
Code dreams: This research studies whether software developers dream about coding – and, if so, the nature of those dreams. Following on from work on software developers' mental imagery and cognitive processes during programming, this project investigates developers' experience of coding in their dreams (whatever form that takes), and whether the content of such dreams provides insight into the developers' design and problem solving.
Invisible work that adds value to software development: The notion of 'invisible work' – activity that adds value in software development but is often overlooked or undervalued by management and promotion processes – arose repeatedly in discussions at Strange Loop 2022. Developers asked for evidence they could use to fuel conversations -- and potentially promote change -- in their organisations. This research aims to capture the main categories of 'invisible work' identified by developers (e.g., reducing technical debt; improving efficiency; addressing security; development of tools and resources; design discussions; …), and to gather concrete examples of the value that work adds to software.
Chris and Elecia discuss the pros and cons of completing one project or starting a dozen.
Elecia's 2nd edition of Making Embedded Systems is coming out in March. (Preview is on O'Reilly's Learning System.) She's working on a companion repository that is already filled with links and goodies: github.com/eleciawhite/making-embedded-systems.
If you'd like to know more about signal processing, check out DSPGuide.com aka The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing By Steven W. Smith, Ph.D. And as noted in last week's newsletter, there is an interesting overlap between smoothies and the Fourier Transform.
Giang Vinh Loc used Charles Lohr's RISCV on Arduino UNO to boot Linux (in 16 hours).
We also talked a bit about Greg Wilson's recent episode with Elecia (Embedded 460: I Don't Care What Your Math Says).
Thanks to Nordic for sponsoring this week's show!
Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.
Author, engineer, manager, and professor, Dr. Greg Wilson joined Elecia to talk about teaching, science in computer science, ethics, and policy.
The request for curriculum that started the conversation was the Cost of Change, part of NeverWorkInTheory which summarizes scientific literature about software development.
Greg is the founder of Software Carpentry, a site that creates curriculum for teaching software concepts (including data and library science). Software Carpentry has great lessons for those who want to learn about software, data, and library science. It is a great site if you are teaching, trying to get someone else to teach, learning, or looking for some guidance on how to do the above. Check out their reading list.
Greg's site is The Third Bit. Here you can find his books including full copies of several of his books including The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Teaching Tech Together, and most recently Software Design by Example.
Professor AnnMarie Thomas spoke with us about playful learning through joy, whimsy, surprise, and meeting new people.
We also spoke with AnnMarie about how adults can foster an environment that encourages innovation. See more about that (and the interviews of various engineers and makers) in her book Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation
You can find AnnMarie on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@AnnMariePT
If you want to know more about squishy circuits, check out AnnMarie's TED talk: Hands-on science with squishy circuits (or the related book Squishy Circuits (21st Century Skills Innovation Library: Makers as Innovators)).
She is the head of The Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas where she is a professor of engineering and entrepreneurship.
We also talked about the LEGO Foundation. More about that on LearningThroughPlay.com
AnnMarie suggested the cephalopod-centric novel The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Elecia countered with The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery (non-fiction).
And now, a question for you to ponder, what is your most meaningful learning experience?
Trond Snekvik spoke with us about developing VSCode extensions and Bluetooth meshes.
Trond is a Staff Software Engineer at Nordic Semiconductor.
Nordic's Visual Studio Code Extensions include device tree and kconfig support for the Zephyr project as well as tools for nRF Connect.
Trond's github page: github.com/trond-snekvik
In 329: At Least 32-Bits, Thank You, Kate Stewart of the Linux Foundation spoke with us about Zephyr in 2020
Thank you to Christopher for providing a picture of what may (or may not) be a troll.
Chris and Elecia chat about their ongoing efforts to create and learn. Then they answer some listener questions.
Duck quacks do echo but the echoes seem to align in phase so that there is no interruption making the echo sounds like an extension of the quack (Mythbusters episode in which Jamie says "Quack, damn you!")
Elecia continues to work on Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition. The early release copy is available on the O'Reilly Learning System.
Classpert is offering an asynchronous cohort for Elecia's Making Embedded Systems course. You'd be going through the class with others and there will be discussions and mentor (and Elecia's) help on the Discord. No live classes but you get access to the best bits of the previous live classes. Class starts in September.
Tickets are on sale for the tenth annual Hackaday Supercon is Nov 3-5, 2023 in Pasadena, CA. Someone there will be giving out stickers. More details to follow on that front.
Elecia is enjoying OrigamibyBoice Crease Pattern Class YouTube series. (It is a prereq for The Plant Psychologist's Origami Design Class.)
Last week's newsletter (sign up here!) had tidbits about learning the Kalman filter. Some of that came from Elecia's blog post about it, some were fresh. There doesn't seem to be a good introduction to semantic webs in linguistics. Here is a too-dense article about Semantic Maps as Metrics on Meaning from a Linguistics Discovery Journal.
If you like the show and would like to support the show, we now take Ko-fi donations (https://ko-fi.com/embedded), as well as Patreon and reviews in your favorite podcasting app.
Damien George spoke with us about developing with and for MicroPython while Elecia tries not to spill all the secrets about her client.
To start at the beginning, you probably want to check out micropython.org. Wait, no, one step back. Before listening to the show, you probably should read the Wikipedia MicroPython entry because we kind of start in the middle in the show.
You can find the code on github: github.com/micropython/micropython.
The PyBoard can be found on store.micropython.org. It is out of stock but lead time trends show parts may be available soon(ish).
For more about branes, Lie point symmetries and other physics fun stuff, check out Damien's list of papers on dpgeorge.net.
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
