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.
Natalie Friedman joins us to discuss when, where, how, and why robots should wear clothing. Natalie is a PhD candidate at Cornell Tech.
Natalie's website is natalie-friedman.com and you can find her papers in the research section. She has an Instagram account: @natalie.victoria.f
AIForGood shows several robots dressed in home, business and social attire.
Roomba cosplaying a mouse (Instructable)
Pepper is an android-ish robot made by SoftBank. There are many clothing lines devoted to dressing it for whatever occasion you need, simply search for Pepper robot clothing. What could go wrong?
Natalie recommended Fashion Is Spinach by Elizabeth Hawes. It is fascinating.
Uri Shaked surprises us with a chat about silicon design when we were expecting to talk about a web-based board simulator.
If you want to try your hand at silicon design, check out Tiny Tapeout, a way to possibly get your design on to real silicon. The digital design guide is a great way to start looking at how chips work.
If you aren't quite ready for silicon, Wokwi has a Verilog simulator where you can learn to do the digital design. The Verilog Simon Game on Wokwi is amazing.
Wokwi is a web-Based simulator, simulating processors, boards, and peripherals. You can build a whole system there, from Dancing Servos to 7-Segment display from 30 LCDs and Arduino Mega to Raspberry Pi Pico boards you can program in C when you click More Options on the front page. You can also create your own peripheral using the Chip API. Or learn to use Zephyr on Wokwi.
And now there is Wokwi for VS Code.
All that and Wokwi is open source: github.com/urish
Uri recommends reading Relax for the same result by Derek Sivers
Previously on Embedded 396: Untangle the Mess
Nathan Jones has been talking about building command line interfaces, good design practices in C, creating MCU boards, wielding the PIC of destiny, and going beyond Arduino. As we are too lazy to attend the conferences, we asked him to give us the highlights.
Nathan is giving two conference talks at Crowd Supply's Teardown 2023 June 23-24 in Portland, Oregon:
He spoke recently at the Embedded Online Conference about Object Oriented Programming (well, really good design practices). He has a related github repository so you can look at the examples for yourself. He also gave a workshop on creating a simple command line interface (another excellent github repo full of examples).
Probably the best place to start is his Embedded for Everyone Wiki where he collects all the bits and pieces you might want to know about getting into embedded systems.
Julia Evans spoke with us about how computers compute. We discussed number representation including floating point as well as Julia's extensive collection of 'zines and comics.
Julia's zines about debugging, managers, Linux commands, and more are available on WizardZines.com. If you want samples, check out the comics section. Also, the experiments (aka playgrounds) are great additions to the zines (and fun on their own), letting you explore without changing your own DNS or removing all the files from your root directory. If you want to check out numbers, look at memory-spy (or from other sites like https://float.exposed/ and https://integer.exposed/)
Julia also has a detailed blog on jvns.ca and active github repositories
Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry, Tyler Hoffman of Memfault, and Elecia White discuss the software tasks that tend to fall through the cracks after the device has all its features but before it is in customers' hands. Noah Pendleton of Memfault was the moderator.
You can see the video on the Embedded YouTube channel or directly from memfault (also see their other panels and webinars).
Memfault's Slack Channel and Interrupt Blog are both excellent resources for embedded information of all kinds.
Kari Love joined us to talk about soft robotics, robots in religion, and squishiness.
Kari co-authored Soft Robotics: A DIY Introduction to Squishy, Stretchy, and Flexible Robots. Her website is karimakes.com. She was previously on Embedded 189: The Squishiness Factor
One of the pneumatic drives that we mentioned was a Hackaday Prize Winner: FlowIO. Another was the Soft Robotics Toolkit. However, Kari recommended Amitabh Shrivastava's Programmable Air (Crowd Supply page for Programmable Air).
Some search terms for getting started with soft robotics: "DIY Jamming gripper", "Positive pressure gripper", and "bendy straw robot joints". (That last one leads you to the delightful video Make a Robotic Hand with Straws.)
Polysense conductive dye for making sensors out of found objects. (On Hackaday.)
Simulation of Soft Bodies in Real World Applications (for squish and stretch) include SOFA, Abaqus, and DiffPD.
An incomplete list of power systems people have used for generating soft robotic motion:
Pneumatic - air and vacuum
Hydraulic - using liquid
Electrical - using currents
Thermal - using temperatures
Cable control - using motor control
Magnetic - using magnets
Chemical - using reactions
Photonic - using light
Biological - using living cells
Hybrid systems - multiple sources in tandem
An incomplete list of things people have used to make soft robots:
Fabric
Silicone or other rubbers
Flexible plastic
Plastic films
Metallic films
Paper
Carbon fiber
Silly Putty
Shape-changing alloys
Electroactive polymers
Liquid metals
Gelatin or Gluten
Cell tissue
Chris and Elecia talk about internetting your thing, motivating yourself with cheese, a pile of scrabble letters, an electric ouija board, and a supervillain origin story.
Elecia will be on a Memfault Panel on June 1, 2023: From Concept to Launch: What It Takes to Build and Ship a New Device
Elecia was on Alpenglow's Industries Solder Sesh #60 with Carrie Sundra. See the highlights (or the whole thing) on YouTube.
Chris has been working on building a baritone ukulele from a StewMac kit.
The conversation about uninteresting projects reminded Elecia of one of her favorite blog posts: Resilience Is a Skill
Classpert will be offering a self-paced version of Elecia's Making Embedded Systems course. Sign up on Classpert to be notified about the details.
The O'Reilly Learning System will have the first looks of the second edition of Making Embedded Systems. The full book should be out in the fall.
Carl Bugeja makes actuators out of PCBs, puts them to work flapping origami bird wings (or moving robot rovers), and takes videos of the whole process. Oh, and get this, self-soldering circuits.
First, origami: flap actuators video. Your source for the PCB actuators: flexar.io
Carl's YouTube channel is filled with hardware, software, successes, and misses. Check out his tiny foldable rover and the self-soldering circuit. His projects are open source so you can find the information on github.com/CarlBugeja
Carl has a site (carlbugeja.com) and shows his projects on Instagram instagram.com/carl_bugeja
Elecia worked on a zero-heat-flux, deep tissue temperature measurement system.
We spoke with Chris Gammell about IoT, podcasting, relaxing, and learning. Chris works at Golioth.io. They have a neat blog that talks about reference designs, Zephyr RTOS, and making products.
We talked about ESP chips which are made by Espressif. The ESP32 line is RISC-V.
Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)
Some YouTube channels we discussed:
Wendover Productions: explaining stuff
CGP Grey, especially the recent one about vexillogy and US state flags
Blacktail Studio: Soothing woodworking
Adam Neely: music theory
Shawn Hymel on Digikey's channel explaining continuous integration and delivery: Intro to CI/CD
Want to know more about self-paced Making Embedded Systems? Sign up for the waitlist at Classpert. Want to learn electronics? Check out Chris Gammell's Contextual Electronics.
Chris and Elecia talk about ChatGPT, conferences, online compilers, and Ardupilot.
Compiler Explorer: godbolt.org (and function pointer example)
Jupyter Notebooks with colab: colab.research.google.com/ (and one of Elecia's origami pattern generator collabs)
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Conferences and happenings:
Embedded Online Conference : late April, online
Open Hardware Summit 2023: end of April in NYC, NY
Teardown 2023 | Crowd Supply: late June in Portland, OR
SEMICON West: July in San Francisco, CA
embedded world North America: October 2024, Austin, TX
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