Embedded

Author Susan Lammers joins the show to discuss the 40th anniversary edition of her classic book, Programmers at Work. We discuss what it was like to interview young and pioneering software developers like Toru Iwatani, C. Wayne Ratliff, and Michael Hawley and how the personal computer revolution was built by individuals seeking freedom from corporate mainframes.

Susan also shares her experiences as Editor-in-Chief at Microsoft Press, leading Microsoft's early interactive CD-ROM division, founding Headbone Interactive in the 1990s, and why she's bringing retro games like Elroy Goes Bugzerk back to Steam today.

Programmers at Work: 40th Anniversary Edition – Official site featuring updated bios, excerpts, and current career paths of the 19 interviewees

Programmers at Work on Amazon or on Simon & Schuster website

Overview and list of interviewees on Wikipedia

HeadboneInteractive.com

Headbone Interactive - Wikipedia

Elroy Goes Bugzerk on Steam – The classic 1990s interactive cartoon adventure game brought back for modern platforms

VisiCalc on Wikipedia (The first computer spreadsheet)

Ukatsuke Komachi (The automated receptionist robot at Namco in 1985)

The Paris Review interview series (The literary inspiration behind Programmers at Work)

Transcript

Kevin Santo Cappuccio, founder of Architeuthis Flux, joins the show to discuss creating Jumperless, an open-source breadboard that replaces physical jumper wires with software-controlled analog crossbar switches. We explore the need for 445 RGB LEDs on a breadboard, using MicroPython to create scriptable circuits, some of the lessons that can be implemented with the Jumperless, and how it might be used to create new instruments. Kevin also shares the story behind his upcoming Barnacle Board.

Jumperless Project & Hardware Resources:

Jumperless Docs and Discord

Jumperless Shop (Also available via CrowdSupply but any discounts only apply to Kevin's shop)

JumperlessV5 · GitHub: Open-source hardware files, schematics, and firmware

Barnacle Board - GitHub: The future of jumperless includes a modular breadboard with custom-stamped clips and removable protoboard tops

Other Resources and Mentions:

Wokwi Simulator: Online browser-based electronic circuit simulator

Falstad Circuit Simulator: Kevin's favorite browser-based analog simulator

Hackaday Prize 2023: Jumperless took 2nd place in the 2023 contest.

Peter Griffin made an Microsoft Excel plugin interface for Jumperless, we discussed it with him in episode 505: Potato in a Number Field.

Kevin also talked with Chris Gammell of The Amp Hour with more information about the electrical response, timing, and the crossbars.

Giant squid - Wikipedia

Elecia and Christopher celebrate winning the IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education! A huge thank you to Mark Omo and the wonderful listeners who submitted nomination letters. Chris and Elecia talk about learning Hungarian to qualify Chris for an EU passport. They also cover Cory Doctorow's new book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, smart ways to hand off codebases, and the most valuable skills they've relied on through their engineering careers.

IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education

"For creating and sustaining Embedded.fm, a long-running technical engineering podcast that bridges academic theory and industry practice, champions underrepresented groups in STEM, addresses professional ethics, and provides informal technical mentorship to a global audience."

Huge thanks to Mark Omo for submitting the nomination and to the other nominators for advocating for our work.

To the 450+ guests—artists, makers, educators, entrepreneurs, and traditional engineers—who have generously shared their time and deep expertise with us: this award belongs to you too.

And to our incredible global listener community: thank you for tuning in, sharing episodes with your colleagues, and keeping the STEM pipeline strong.

If Embedded.fm has ever helped you solve a tricky bug, navigate a career transition, or stay inspired in hardware/software design, we'd love for you to celebrate with us by sharing your favorite episode with an early-career engineer or student this week!

Embedded episode 501: Inside the Armpit of a Giraffe, an interview with biologist Meredith Palmer and engineer Akiba, won a Communicator Award for an Individual Episodes-Science & Technology, Distinction 2026.

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow

Programmers at Work: Interviews With 19 Developers Who Shaped the Computer Industry by Susan Lammers (1986)

Embedded AI: Intelligence at the Deep End by David Such (No Starch Press, Early Access)

The Hungarian phrase "Boldog vagyok" ("I am happy"). Elecia's Duolingo page

Zephyr RTOS and embedding Rust libraries into Zephyr environments

Memfault observability, CSV data extractions, and battery performance analytics

AI models escaping sandboxes (The OpenAI and Anthropic benchmark incidents)

Transcript

Marine biologist Dr. Steven Haddock joins the show to share the alien, glowing, and transparent wonders of the deep ocean. We discuss his beautiful new book, The Radiant Sea, and explore the complex engineering and high-sensitivity optics required to capture living deep-sea creatures. Steve walks us through the evolutionary logic of biological light, how vantablack organisms trap photons in the dark, the horizontal sun-compass navigation of jellyfish blooms, and what it's like to play games underwater with giant Pacific octopuses and jumbo squids.

Dr. Steven Haddock is a Senior Scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and an adjunct professor at UC Santa Cruz.

Bioluminescence in the deep sea: How and why do animals create their own light? Steven Haddock explains the diverse and striking functions of light emission in the ocean's twilight zone. (So many pretty pictures!)

Mysteries of the Deep with Dr. Steve Haddock — Bioluminescence! Long-form lecture on the physics and evolutionary biology of bioluminescence.

Live Blackwater Diving Q&A with MBARI and Aquarium Scientists! | Into The Deep Q&A with scientists about diving in the middle of the ocean at night.

Rarely Encountered Seven-Arm Octopus in Monterey Bay: Footage captured by Steve Haddock and MBARI's Biooptics team shows an octopus with a jelly snack.

Steve's Books:

The Radiant Sea: Color and Light in the Underwater World by Steven Haddock and Sönke Johnsen

Practical Computing for Biologists by Steven Haddock and Casey Dunn

Scientific & Marine Mentions:

Steven Haddock's Wikipedia Page

Steven's MBARI home page. His lab is the Biodiversity and Biooptics Lab

Electric Disco Clams Exist—Watch Them Light Up This Coral Reef | National Geographic

Disco Snails (Official Video) - Music

Jelly-like Siphonophores Astound with Breathtaking Beauty: A close-up collection of the incredibly complex, colonial siphonophores that Steve mentioned, showing off their bizarre structures and flowing shapes in the pitch black.

How the Disco Clam Uses Light to Fight Super-Strong Predators: See the "electric" flashing effects inside the disco clam's mantle up close, alongside an explanation of how their silica spheres scatter ambient light to startle predators.

Absurd Creatures: Comb Jellies Are Ready to Rave – A fun, fast-paced video exploring the "Skittles" rainbow iridescence caused by the moving rows of cilia on ctenophores under white submersible lights.

Transcript

Chris Svec returns to the show to discuss the messy, non-linear realities of engineering management and onboarding new college graduates. We explore why companies should bother hiring fresh grads in the first place, how to prevent junior developers from going dark when they get stuck, and why admitting ignorance publicly is an absolute workplace superpower. Along the way, we dive into managing genius firmware engineering hires, battling technical debt and software entropy, and why your development team shouldn't communicate solely through pull request comments.

Chris Svec is the Director of Embedded Software Engineering at Insulet. If you're looking for an experienced leadership or management thought partner to help scale your development team, Chris Svec offers private coaching and consulting. You can reach him directly at the email given in the show (or hit the contact link and we'll forward your message along).

The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier – A guide for navigating tech leadership and managing engineering teams.

Resilient Management by Lara Hogan – A book dedicated to the human side of engineering management.

A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout – A high-level philosophical perspective on software engineering and architecture.

The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas – A classic text on software development best practices.

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky – Insights on software development methodologies and managing tech teams.

Making Embedded Systems by Elecia White – A comprehensive guide to firmware design patterns and embedded architecture.

Embedded for Everyone by Nathan Jones – A curated repository of accessible embedded system learning resources.

Shenzhen I.O. by Zachtronics – An interactive puzzle game for learning assembly programming.

Typer Shark! Deluxe – A classic game to improve typing speed and precision for developers.

Embedded.fm blog post: Resilience is a Skill and Embedded Skills Tree

The "Meow Meow Beans" episode from the TV show Community (season 5, episode 8), see a snippet.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells – The sci-fi novel featured in today's closing quote

If you want to dive into Svec's previous appearances on the podcast, be sure to check out:

78: Happy Cows (His very first appearance, discussing empathy in software development)

250: Yolo Snarf (All about version control, gitflow, and D&D)

297: Mice to Do My Bidding (Focusing on attentional focus and workflow psychological tricks)

402: We Are a Lazy Species (Software schedule estimation alongside Philip Johnston)

436: 20 GOTO 10 (Discussing modern kids' programming languages and the longevity of the Joel Test)

Transcript

Tyler Hoffman returns to the show to discuss diagnostics and observability data in embedded systems. We catch up on his life after startup acquisition, explore the hows and whys of keeping product data separate from operational data, and consider the realities of fleet management at scale.

Tyler is the co-founder of Memfault. Memfault was acquired by Nordic Semiconductor about a year ago. While Nordic has nRF Cloud as a smaller scale solution for Nordic devices (~100 devices), Memfault will continue to maintain support for non-Nordic platforms as well.

During the discussion, Tyler advocates for a "device-in-control" philosophy, emphasizing that edge devices should retain the intelligence to manage their own firmware updates and telemetry. We also discuss the practical constraints of remote fleet debugging, outlining why tools built for high-bandwidth web infrastructure will quickly bankrupt an IoT company, and identifying exactly when a project is too low-bandwidth, or too small, to justify an external observability platform.

Christopher shares his recent experiences with Memfault which leads to a discussion of chunks, flash memory buffers and MDS. The Memfault Diagnostic Service (MDS) is a standardized way for BLE devices to send the chunk payloads to a gateway device (mobile phone) which can then forward the data to the Memfault cloud.

If you want a deep dive into the reasoning around starting Memfault, Tyler was on Embedded.fm episodes 390: Irresponsible At the Time and 395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong.

Reaching back into the archives, Elecia, Tyler, and Phillip Johnston were on the Memfault Coredump Sessions podcast, a special crosspost with Embedded.fm, episode 451: From Concept to Launch

You can also find technical deep dives on Memfault's Interrupt blog.

"What we do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." – Dr. Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey.

Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk about pushing out of their comfort zone, networking advice, adding STARs and action verbs to resumes, using rust, thermo forming plastics, soldering together audio gear, and winning awards.

If you are looking for an update to your resume or are interviewing for a new job and you haven't heard of the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result), it is a good way to formulate what you've done in a way that helps people see your impact. The Rutgers College Career Development Center has a STAR description that includes how to take your current, boring "did the task" resume bullet point and move it into STAR format and then into resume format to say "got great things done". There are lots of examples of STAR in practice (ex 1, ex 2). We mainly talked about resumes but it is very useful for having coherent stories during interviews. (Search "STAR resume", "STAR interview", "STAR engineering" to find a presentation that works for you. The college career sites are probably the best ones I've found.)

On the topic of resumes, if you don't know about resume action verbs, let us share some lists that will make writing your resume 25% less painful. Again, college career development centers have the best ones (Harvard Business School's action verb list is good for managers, Penn State has a nice set of verbs for engineering or see University of Houston's verb list for engineering.)

And on the topic of interviewing and networking, do you have an elevator pitch for yourself? A short introduction of who you are? It is really handy to have that for conferences as well. Princeton has a short write up on putting one together; UPenn has a long write up (ironic given the topic but still useful).

Will Chris be adding the Rust language to his resume? Too early to tell. He's been learning with Rust for Embedded C Programmers - OpenTitan Documentation.

Elecia has been playing with origami molded fabrics, as learned on Instructable Paper Mold Origami Fabrics 3. The term on Instagram seems to be #plissage and it is covered in (super famous origami guy) Paul Jackson's encyclopedic Complete Pleats.

Chris has built a Colour Duo 2-Channel Colour Channel Strip Kit (a preamp with modifiable analog processing). This kit is from DIY Recording Equipment. He's enjoying working with it while recording music.

After Elecia's New Year's Resolution to apply for awards, we won a Communicator Award for Individual Episodes-Science & Technology, Distinction 2026 for an episode about engineering the landscape of fear and conservation technology in the wild: 501: Inside the Armpit of a Giraffe. This was quite the honor but after some consideration, we are even more honored to be nominated by listeners for the IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB) Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. This award "recognizes IEEE members who volunteer their time and effort to improve the informal education community, helping to promote engineering to students, parents, and the general public."

Having fulfilled the objective and gone beyond, Elecia is still planning to apply for the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards where we'll need to find one or two episodes from July 2025 to July 2026 that show off "scientific accuracy, initiative, originality, clarity of interpretation, and value in fostering a better public understanding of science and its impact."

Transcript

Dr. Victoria Serrano spoke with us about STEM outreach, fostering curiosity, and inspiring students with engineering education. Victoria is a professor at the Technological University of Panama (her faculty page: UTP | Dra. Victoria Serrano). Her youtube channel is CIATEC PANAMA which talks about circuits, electronics, and robotics. The channel goes along with her ciatecpanama.com website which shows the types of courses and outreach she does with Arduino UNOs and other low cost equipment.

Victoria is also a Fulbright Scholar, an IEEE STEM Champion 2023, and Honorable Mention IEEE Rising Stars Conference 2024. She also received the IEEE EAB Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education in 2019 (the award Elecia and Chris believe is related to their work on Embedded.fm and for which they were honored to be nominated).

The final quote was from Haben Girma's book: Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law.

Transcript

Dr. Tom Williams spoke with us about robots, ethics, teaching, and books. Then we talked about mines, umpires, water, and more books.

Tom is the author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice (free at MIT Press: Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice!).

As part of the discussion, we talked about some other books and media:

Nonfiction:

Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI by Ayanna Howard (Embedded episodes 367: Data of Our Lives and 207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head)

Embodied AI Safety: Reimagining safety engineering for artificial intelligence in physical systems by Philip Koopman (related Embedded episode 514: Just Turn Off All the Computers)

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

Waki Kamino's research on robot umpires: Beyond Accuracy: Rethinking the Value of AI in Decision-Making Through Baseball's Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) System (or see the summary in the Cornell Chronicle: AI on deck: assessing impact of MLB's new ball-strike system)

Fiction:

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chalmers

Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries Book 8) by Martha Wells (Embedded episode 432: Robot Bechdel Test)

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

The Good Place TV show was mentioned a few times as an introduction to ethics for people who prefer their education crammed with amusement.

Critical Role web series

There was a discussion about water use in AI. Tom recommends Why is Everyone So Wrong About AI Water Use?? while Elecia unsurprisingly mispronounces synecdoche.

Tom is a computer science professor at the Colorado School of Mines where he runs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab (MIRROR lab). See also Tom's page on mines.edu.

The final quote is from an essay written by Karel Capek and translated to English in in The Man Who Coined the Word "Robot" Defends Himself - IEEE Spectrum.

Nathan Jones spoke with us about hardware security, motivation, conference talks, and writing.

Nathan wrote an in-depth series of posts about the benefits of superloops vs RTOS: You Don't Need an RTOS (Part 1), Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. He also wrote about How Hardware Gets Hacked (Part 1) and Part 2 which discusses the MITRE embedded CTF (Capture the Flag) challenge. See his EmbeddedRelated profile and Digikey profile. And Nathan's excellent Embedded for Everyone Github repo.

Nathan recommends The Hardware Hacking Handbook by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn. It is an excellent resource on embedded security. We spoke with Jasper about the book in 431: Becoming More of a Smurf and with Colin about the Chip Whisperer in 286: Twenty Cans of Gas.

The European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has specific features that are required to be implemented by all devices that want the safety CE label. This is important for products shipping to Europe.

If you are going to the Embedded Online Conference, you can get a discount with the code JONES100. Nathan will be giving a workshop on the Chip Whisperer Nano. (Recent guest Mark Omo will also be presenting: Security for the Rest of Us: What Matters and Where to Start.)

Another conference for the security-minded is Hardwear.io which is in Santa Clara, CA, USA at the end of May and in Amsterdam in November.

Last year, Nathan spoke about Exception Handling for EOC 2025 (video). Elecia mentioned her own Creating Chaos and Hard Faults from EOC 2024.

The Embedded Slack book club is reading The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition. Well, some of us are just watching.

The quote came from Elizabeth Bear's Ancestral Night (White Space) which is part of a series with some neat mechanics around brain chemistry.

Transcript

Chris and Elecia chat about Leapfrog toys, things they like, large company politics, awards, and open source governance.

The Toy Story 5 Trailer with LilyPad toy which is suspiciously similar to the LeapFrog LeapPad tablet. Which is different from the original LeapPad which had cartridges and capacitive touch (capacitive touch was used on the globe as well… the latest globe also has a screen). Why does Elecia want an award? Who knows? But right now, she's getting ready for a listener to nominate the show (Chris and Elecia) for IEEE's Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. Probably. But we've got nominators and endorsers so that's mostly sorted. She also signed Embedded up for the Women Podcasters Award which is a popularity contest. You can vote here: www.womenpodcasters.com/awards-voting. The show is under the Science Podcasters category.

Some things we like:

Ctrl-R: In a command shell, ctrl-r searches your history. Better than ! because you don't have to remember as much.

Data bars in Excel: This can create a plot of your data in the column.

Merlin Bird ID: Want to know what bird is making that sound? Want to know the name of the bird you just saw? Merlin Bird ID is a free app that is amazing.

Plucky Cards: Want to have a 1:1 where you talk about more than your status? Choose a card, any card. Or maybe just look through and have a 1:1 by yourself

Just reading about Bunnie Huang's new RISCV board Dabao Evaluation Board for Baochip-1x taught us things! We're not sure what we'd use it for yet but it does spark a few ideas.

The Embedded.fm Patreon Slack book club is reading Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition.

Talking about open source projects and governance models, we referenced three contributing guidelines: Valetudo, ESPHome, and Zephyr. Some later research led to Leadership and Governance | Open Source Guides and presentation by Cornelius Schumacher – The spectrum of FOSS governance models (Slides). The link between the politics associated with the size of companies and the open source governance models clearly needs a bit more thought.

Transcript

Sonia Grego speaks with us about a topic no one likes to talk about, but could be used to monitor personal dietary health and widespread disease outbreaks. Toilets! Sonia leads Duke University's Smart Toilet Lab and the spin out Coprata which makes the Microbiome Activity Tracker.

As discussed in the show, when developing a project far from where it will be deployed, there are many common issues. The Lessons Learned chapter of Sonia's recent book gives an excellent introduction to the unexpected environment far from the comfort of desks. The book is (free online!) Engineering Field Testing of Non-Sewered Sanitation Systems: Compendium of Lessons Learned,

See Sonia Grego at Duke Electrical & Computer Engineering, the Smart Toilet Lab as well as Sonia's company Coprata.

Some terms that came up in the show:

Coprolite: fossilized excrement (Wikipedia entry has great(?) pics!)

Scatological: material, humor, or language that relates directly to bodily waste

Helminths: parasitic worms including roundworms, tapeworms, and fluke (oh look. more great images on Wiki entry)

Poop jokes

Transcript

Kenneth Finnegan entertained us with stories about accidentally contributing to the internet's ability to network.

Wondering how the internet works? All those terms about IPv4, IPv6, BGP, OSPF, CDN and other alphabet soup? Check out the YouTube videos by NetworkChuck.

Kenneth writes about his adventures on his blog, The Life of Kenneth. Some of the posts related to this show are:

Creating an Internet Exchange for Even More Fun and Less Profit

Building an Anycast Secondary DNS Service

Building the Micro Mirror Free Software CDN

We also mention FCIX aka fcix.net or the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange

You can also find Kenneth at @kwf@social.afront.org where you will find more about half-dollars, nickels, and trains.

If you also secretly long to run a locomotive, take a look at the Run-A-Locomotive program at WPRM.

The title is related to the XKCD comic 2347: Dependency.

Transcript

Chris and Elecia apologize, discuss uses and abuses of chatbots, reach out to an uncertain manager, try to help someone out of their professor's draconian rules, and extol the joys of reading.

Chabot Space & Science Center is in Oakland, CA, US. It is wonderful!

Some suggestions for UncertainManager:

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback

Resilient Management

Manager's Path

Soft Skills Engineering podcast

Hang in there! You are probably doing better than you think.

Audio books are great! In the US, many libraries have digital libraries with extensive audio collections. There are several apps with different catalogs for the same library Libby, Kanopy, Hoopla, and Palace (check out the California shelf at Palace!).

And since you are probably going to ask about the games Elecia doesn't play:

Turing Complete shows how logic and logic gates work, building up a processor.

Zachtronics' TIS-100 is another logic and processor design game. It is a little ugly in spots (too real world) but it is a really deep dive into learning assembly. It is the precursor to Shenzhen IO but harder to finish.

Zachtronics' Shenzhen IO is about circuits and how they work .

Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation is about optimizing resources, it turns out to be a lot like assembly programming.

Should you have gotten here because you wanted facts about teeth, Elecia had been enjoying Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans.

Transcript

Mark Omo and James Rowley spoke with us about safecracking, security, and the ethics of doing a bad job.

Mark and James gave an excellent talk on the development of their safecracking tools at DEF CON 33: Cash, Drugs, and Guns: Why Your Safes Aren't Safe. It included a section of interaction involving the lock maker's lawyers bullying them and how the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a Coders' Rights Project to support security research.

As mentioned in the show, the US Cyber Trust Mark baseline has a very straightforward checklist; NISTIR 8259 is the overall standard, NISTIR 8259A is the technical checklist, NISTIR 8259B is the non-technical (process/maintenance) checklist. Roughly the process is NISTIR 8259 -> Plan/Guidance; NISTIR 8259A -> Build; NISTIR 8259B -> Support.

We discussed ETSI EN 303 645 V3.1.3 (2024-09) Cyber Security for Consumer Internet of Things: Baseline Requirement and the EU's CRA: Cyber Resilience Act which requires manufacturers to implement security by design, have security by default, provide free security updates, and protect confidentiality. See more here: How to prepare for the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA): A guide for manufacturers.

We didn't mention Ghidra in the show specifically, but it is a tool for reverse engineering software: given a binary image, what was the code?

Some of the safecracking was helped by the lock maker using the same processor in the PS4 which has many people looking to crack it. See fail0verflow :: PS4 Aux Hax 1: Intro & Aeolia for an introduction.

Mark and James have presented multiple times at Hardwear.io, a series of conferences and webinars about security (not wearables). Some related highlights:

2024: Breaking Into Chips By Reading The Datasheet is about the exploit developed for the older lock version on the safes discussed in the show.

USA 2025: Extracting Protected Flash With STM32-TraceRip is about STM32 exploits.

James Cameron spoke with us about programming for and operating a large telescope. The show is a blend of astronomy, engineering on the fly, and weird lady bug habitats.

The Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) is part of the Australian National University's Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Australia.

The AAT has an all sky camera where you can check in on a very dark sky.

James was on Embedded Episode 172: Tell Forth You Me Please where we talked about the Forth programming language and his experiences with One Laptop Per Child.

Transcript

Unrelated to the AAT, Chris took this image of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) from his Zwo Seestar 50 over 9 hours (multiple days), stacking the images and processing the data.

Nathan Jones and Chris Svec give Chris and Elecia their 2025 performance review.

Donations went to Elevate Tutoring, an organization that provides funding and support to low-income and first-generation college students as well as free STEM tutoring for underserved schools. Embedded has already sent in the match to the donations for a total of over $5000.

Here is a list of all Embedded.fm episodes.

We mentioned the Foldscope, a small but mighty microscope. Also, mentioned was the book If I Only Changed the Software, Why is the Phone on Fire?

The show this week is sponsored by us. And you. Please consider supporting Embedded.fm on Ko-fi or Patreon. Or tell a friend about the show.

Transcript

Sophi Kravitz joined us to talk about art, science, and engineering.

You can see Messages from Space on Sophi's website /sophikravitz.com). A subset of the artwork had a short stay for a demo at Chabot Space & Science Center. The completed work will be shown in 2026. Sophi mentioned collaborating with two sonic environment artists Sofy Yuditskaya and Ria Rajan.

Geiger–Müller tube is an ionizing radiation detector. Cosmic rays move through space at nearly the speed of light, generally originating far away and long ago. You can also see them in a cloud chamber, like the one at San Francisco's Exploratorium. We also talked about using sculpting in Blender (there are many online video introductions).

Sophi does EE consulting and system quality checking at her company Greenlight.

The show this week is sponsored by us. And you. Please consider supporting Embedded.fm on Ko-fi or Patreon. Or tell a friend about the show.

Transcript

Nick Kartsioukas joined us to talk about security in embedded systems.

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is the primary database to check your software libraries, tools, and OSs: cve.org.

Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP, owasp.org) has information on how to improve security in all kinds of applications, including embedded application security. There are also cheatsheets, Nick particularly recommends Software Supply Chain Security - OWASP Cheat Sheet.

Wait, what is supply chain security? Nick suggested a nice article on github.com: it is about your code and tools including firmware update, a common weak point in embedded device security.

Want to try out some security work? There are capture the flag (CTF) challenges including the Microcorruption CTF (microcorruption.com) which is embedded security related. We also talked about the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge (also see Prior SANS Holiday Hack Challenges).

This episode is brought to you by RunSafe Security.

Working with C or C++ in your embedded projects? RunSafe Security helps you build safer, more resilient devices with build-time SBOM generation, vulnerability identification, and patented code hardening. Their Load-time Function Randomization stops the exploit of memory-based attacks, something we all know is much needed. Learn more at RunSafeSecurity.com/embeddedfm.

Some other sites that have good information embedded security:

This World Of Ours by James Mickens is an easy read about threat modelling

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is at cisa.gov and, among other things, they describe SBOMs in great detail

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) also provides guidance:

Internet of Things (IoT) | NIST

NIST Cybersecurity for IoT Program

NIST SP800-213 IoT Device Cybersecurity Guidance for the Federal Government: Establishing IoT Device Cybersecurity Requirements

There is a group of universities and organizations doing research into embedded security: National Science Foundation Center for Hardware and Embedded Systems Security and Trust (CHEST). Descriptive overview and the site is nsfchest.org

European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) - Consumer IoT Security

Camera Ubiquiti configuration issue (what not to do)

Finally, Nick mentioned Stop The Bleed which provides training on how you can control bleeding, a leading cause of death. They even have a podcast (and we know you like those). Elecia followed up with Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT). Call your local fire department and ask about training near you! Transcript

Philip Koopman joined us to talk about embedded systems becoming embodied and intelligent. We focus on the safety considerations of making an intelligent and embodied device.

Phil's new book is Embodied AI Safety: Reimagining safety engineering for artificial intelligence in physical systems. It uses robotaxis as an example as it discusses safety, security, human/computer interface, AI, and a bit of legal theory for tort negligence.

If you'd like a taster, Phil gave a wonderful summary in his video: Keynote Talk: Embodied AI Safety

This new book is intended for a wider (less devotedly technical) audience than his book How Safe Is Safe Enough?: Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety.

Phil was last on the show in episode 473: Math Is Not the Answer where we spoke about his book Understanding Checksums and Cyclic Redundancy Checks

Transcript

Thank you!

This episode is sponsored by you, our listeners! If you'd like to become members and get ad-free episodes as well as bonus shows, sign up at Patreon or Ko-Fi. Thanks for listening.

Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and Empty Crate spoke with us about the joy of puzzles, the changing directions of an interesting career, and the C++ programming language. I mean, of course we talked about C++. But only a little.

Jason recently published Programming Puzzles Big Book: 400 pages of fun for ages 7-99, a book of puzzles for the logically minded. It teaches programming concepts as engaging puzzles: recursion, binary, assembly, Lisp, regular expressions. You may not know what you are learning but you'll likely find you know a lot more about how computers work afterward.

For the puzzles, paper is better than electronic. But you can also get the electronic version on LeanPub (which is better if you like to get lost in Wikipedia links).

This is not Jason's first puzzle book, he's made them for C++ Object Lifetime and Copy and Reference (see his Amazon and LeanPub author page for other books as well).

If you want to catch up on C++, check out C++ Weekly With Jason Turner - YouTube. Note the playlists are useful if you are looking for a deep dive on a particular topic.

If you want to get more out of C++ in your organization, Jason's consulting company is Empty Crate. His contact page is there as well (or look for lefticus on most social media platforms).

Transcript

If you're interested in how 3D printing is changing design engineering, Mouser Electronics has some great resources to check out. Their Empowering Innovation Together platform is taking a deep dive into additive manufacturing—covering smarter production, faster prototyping, and breakthrough materials that move ideas beyond prototypes into real-world products. You'll find podcasts, expert articles, and videos that keep you informed and inspired. Sound like your thing? Head to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and explore.

Katherine "Smalls" Connell spoke with us about making thin and flexible circuits, making stretchable electronics, and running a successful Kickstarter.

Katherine's Kickstarter: Sprite Lights LED Body Art (light-up tattoo).

Katherine shares her makes, describing her build process for companion robots and other projects. You can find her as The Small Wonder on Hackster.io and Hackaday.io. She often goes by Smalls on other social media.

We talked about a paper on making stretchable circuits: Silicone devices: A scalable DIY approach for fabricating self-contained multi-layered soft circuits using microfluidics.

Transcript

If you're interested in how 3D printing is changing design engineering, Mouser Electronics has some great resources to check out. Their Empowering Innovation Together platform is taking a deep dive into additive manufacturing—covering smarter production, faster prototyping, and breakthrough materials that move ideas beyond prototypes into real-world products. You'll find podcasts, expert articles, and videos that keep you informed and inspired. Sound like your thing? Head to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and explore.

Jason Turner (@lefticus) of the CPPCast (@cppcast) spoke with us about modern C++ in embedded systems.

Jason's articles can be found on EmptyCrate.com. You can also contact him there and find out more about his training sessions. Jason's video channel is on C++ Weeklyand includes an ARM emulator written in C++, running on Compiler Explorer.

Jason recommended looking at Odin Holmes' twitter (@odinthenerd) as well as Odin's talks from CPPCon (such as his 2017 talk about agent based class design). Odin runs an embedded C++ conference in Germany called Embo++. Also look into Jens Weller's Meeting C++conference.

During the show, Elecia was looking at cppreference.com. She would also like to apologize to Bjarne Stroustrup.

Embedded Patreon

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) spoke with us about laser turrets, tearing down quadcopters, flux capacitors, the moon, and culture at work.

Alvaro's blog

Alvaro's github repositories including Proto-X quadcopter information, Silta bus monitoring, and Skype video message exporter for OSX.

One of the inspirations for taking apart the Proto-X was watching Micah talk about her Coastermelt project. We talked to her about it on episode 101: Taking Apart the Toaster.

One of his reasons for going to Planet Labs was knowing Shaun Meehan, check out his Amp Hour interview.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Video of Supercon talk on laser shooting robots

Podcast Award nominations open in early 2016

We spoke with Dr. Bennie Lewis (@_benjoe02) about machine learning and robotics. Bennie is a Senior Research Scientist at Lockheed Martin, content creator, and Twitch streamer (benjoe02)

NVIDIA Jetson platformand Cuda for deep learning

LEGO Mindstorms

SAMS C++ in One Hour a Dayby Siddhartha Rao

Stephen Kraig (@Macro_Ninjaneer) and Parker Dillmann (@LnghrnEngineer), of Macrofab (@MacroFab) joined us to chat about getting hardware and software to work together.

Stephen and Parker are also hosts of the Macrofab podcast.

We compared out-the-ordinary podcast guests. For MacroFab episode 112 it was their conversation with a patent lawyer. For Embedded episode 150 it was our conversation with a tax accountant.

Schematics for the Apollo Guidance Computer (and their Kicad replica on github).

Kristina Durivage (@gelicia) described her path getting into making and hardware hacking as a complement to her day job working in front-end software.

Kristina's portfolio.gelicia.com includes write-ups on her projects (TweetSkirt, Kitchen Playset Game) as well as links to her talks. Or you can skip to her github.com/gelicia repository.

Kristina has a chapter in the 10 LED Projects for Geeks book coming out from NoStarch Press.

Thank you to Patreon Embedded supporters for Kristina's mic!

Elecia and Kristina both recommend the classic Robert Aspirin Myth Adventure books!

We spoke with Michael Barr (@embeddedbarr) about the Barr Groupembedded systems survey.

You can download the 2018 survey at the Barr Group survey page. The Barr Group Embedded C Coding Standardis also free to download (with registration). You can buy a paper copy on Amazon.

Programming Embedded Systems in C and C++ 1st Editionby Michael Barr, also available for free in HTML on the Barr Group site. The second edition is Programming Embedded Systems: With C and GNU Development Tools, 2nd Editionby Michael Barr and Anthony Massa.

The second book was Embedded Systems Dictionaryby Jack Ganssle and Michael Barr

Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software.

Christine Sunu (@christinesunu) spoke with us about the feelings we get from robots.

For more information about emotive design, check out Christine's website: christinesunu.com. From there you can find hackpretty.com, some of her talks (including the TED talk with the Fur Worm), and links to her projects (such as Starfish Catand a Cartoon Guide to the Internet of Things). You can find more of her writing and videos on BuzzFeedand The Verge. You can also hire her product development company Flash Bang.

Embedded 142: New and Improved Appendages is where Sarah Petkus offers to let her robot lick us.

Keepon Robot (or on Wikipedia)

Books we talked about:

Andrei Chichak and Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) join us to talk about bits and how to manipulate them.

Alvaro is host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineeringpodcast. His other Embedded appearances are 130, 200, and 215.

Andrei ("Andrei from the Great White North") works at CBF Systems. His other Embedded appearances are 99, 114, 139, and 200.

Andrei wrote about bit manipulation as part of Embedded Wednesdayson Embedded.fm: Logic in C, part II. Andrei recommends using ISO646.hto reduce confusion around bit manipulation. Also, his suggested calculator is the SwissMicros DM16L

Elecia wrote an introduction to binary and hex.

For more information about programming and binary, see How to Countby Steven Frank

For advanced bit twiddling, check out:

Jasmine Brackett (@asiwatch) spoke with us about @Tindie's electronics marketplace, this year's Hackaday Prize, and tips for wearable electronics.

If you want to buy on Tindie, check out their homepage tindie.com. If you want to sell, that is straightforward too: tindie.com/about/sell.

There is an Embedded contest for the Tindie Blinky LED badge, a nifty little learn to solder kit. Contest ends April 20, 2018 (midnight UTC). You are to send a number to us using the contact link. Closest one wins. One number per person.

You can also get these badges at the Dublin Hackaday Unconference (April 7, 2018, Dublin, Ireland) and at meetups where Jasmine is a presenter.

Thank you to Ben Hencke for some good questions. He talked about his Tindie store with us on 220: Cascading Waterfall of Lights.

Jasmine mentioned the RC2014, homebrew z80 computer kit.

Both Tindie and Hackaday are owned by Supplyframe.

Finally, we talked to Emile Petrone when Tindie was a fairly new thing on 72: This is My NASA Phone.

What do you do after space debris, hacking dinosaurs, and judging robots? If you are Dr. Lucy Rogers (@DrLucyRogers), you build an organization devoted to promoting the Making industry: Guild of Makers (@GuildOfMakers)

Lucy's personal site is lucyrogers.com. She wrote the book It's ONLY Rocket Science: An Introduction in Plain English.

Guild of Maker's Twitter hack chats are weekly on Tuesdays at 8pm UTC. They use the tag #MakersHour.

Lucy programs in Node-RED, a visual language.

Dan Saks answers many questions about C++ in embedded systems: where it works, where it doesn't, and a path to getting started.

Dan Saks is the founder and president of Saks & Associates. He was a columnist for The C/C++ Users Journal, Embedded Systems Design and several other publications. He also served as secretary of the ANSI and ISO C++ standards committee in its early years.

We touched on some of his articles:

Andrei suggested Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day, Seventh Edition by Siddhartha Rao as a good primer for experienced C programmers reluctantly learning C++.

NOTE: The contest already ended.

Chris and Elecia answered some listener questions about dynamic memory and shared code. Then Elecia gave a presentation about ShotSpotter, the gunshot location system she worked on.

Elecia enjoyed The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone.

Ben is the editor of HackSpace, a new magazine about making (and hacking). It's produced by Raspberry Pi, but it's technologically agnostic. The first issue is free online.

The ShotSpotter presentation was originally given with Sarah Newman at the 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing.

Jan Jongboom (@janjongboom) of Mbed (@ArmMbed) joined us to talk about compilers, online hardware simulators, and inference on embedded devices.

Find out more about Mbed on mbed.com. The board simulator is at labs.mbed.com(Mbed OS Simulator). The code for the simulator is on Jan's Github. Mbed Labs also has the uTensor inference framework for using TensorFlow models on devices.

You can see some of Jan's talks and his blog on janjongboom.com.

Jan will be running a workshop at SxSW called Changing the World with Open, Long-Range IoT on March 10 in Austin, TX. Additionally, he will be hosting an IoT Deep Dive Workshop on LoRA on March 14 (also in Austin, TX).

For background on LoRA, check out the recent Amp Hour episode with Richard Ginus.

Roger Linn (@roger_linn) gave us new ideas about musical instruments, detailing how wonderful expressive control, 3D buttons, and keyscanning can be.

Roger's company is Roger Linn Design. We talked extensively about the LinnStrument, some about the AdrenaLinn for guitar, and only a little bit about the analog drum machine Tempest.

A key matrix circuit is a popular way to handle a large number of buttons but it falls prey to n-key rollover. Roger adds force sense resistors to this (FSR example at Sparkfun).

If you have an idea for an instrument, Roger has already written his response to your request for a prototype. Roger gave a keynote address at ADC '16 about the LinnStrument, including showing the sounds it can make.

OHMI Trust is the one handed musical instrument society enabling music making for everyone.

Roger mentioned some other expressive instruments including:

We spoke to author Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) about his books and near-future science fiction.

Robin wrote Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

Robin's website is robinsloan.com. Go there for some short stories, sign up for his newsletter and check out his new 'zine (also at wizard.limo). Oh! Don't forget his blog, including a description of his neural net for audio generation and for writing.

Some books Robin suggested:

Dustin Franklin of NVIDIA (@NVIDIAEmbedded) spoke with us about the Jetson TX2, a board designed to bring AI into embedded systems.

Dusty wrote Two Days to a Demo, both the original supervised learning version and the newer reinforcement learning version. In general, check out Dusty's github repo to see what's new. Also, The Redtail project is an autonomous navigation system for drones and land vehicles based on the TX2.

The NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference is in San Jose, CA, March 26-29, 2018. Your coupon for 25% off: NVCYATO

The Jetson TX1/TX2 ChallengeRocket contest ends February 18th.

You can find Dusty on on the NVIDIA forums.

Chris and Elecia chatted about listener emails, and other stuff and things.

Elecia wrote a book called Making Embedded Systems, if you want to see the chapter about interrupts and timers, hit the contact link on embedded.fm.

We also recommend our blog, Chris Svec wrote about the MSP430 from a microprocessor point of view (ESE101) and Andrei Chichak wrote about an ST processor with a more pragmatic and C focused view (Embedded Wednesdays).

You can support the podcast through Patreon.

Kalman filter explanation video with Pokemon

Ben Krasnow's Applied Science YouTube channel

Usbourne's books for teaching kids electronics and programming (the free '80s ones are near the bottom)

Formally verified microkernel: seL4 Microkernel

The first Pokemon games used every programming trick there is for optimization

STM bought Atollic and released TrueStudio Pro for free for STM parts

We spoke with Jackson Keating (@jacksonakeating) about Bluetooth Low Energy, going over GATTs layouts and the general BLE usage.

While Jackson prefers the Bluetooth spec as the best reading explanation, Elecia liked the Adafruit BLE introduction. She wrote about some of her initial experiences with different chips and Chris Svec wrote about BLE roles. We all agreed that the examples and tutorials from your chip vendor is a good place to get experience.

A random UUID generator is uuidgen on Mac or online on uuidgenerator.net.

Elecia mentioned 108: Nebarious, an Embedded episode where we talked about how BLE lacks security.

Jackson suggested looking at the Core Bluetooth API for IOS development as well as the Nordic and LightBlue apps for debugging.

Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) talks about economics, books, and the future. Check out Tim's new book, WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us. And yes, this is Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly books.

Elecia's Making Embedded Systems has a great-eared nightjar, but she's finally adjusted to a modern dinosaur on her cover.

Sunshine Jones (@Sunshine_Jones) spoke with us about synthesizers, electronics, and philosophy.

Sunshine's music is most easily found at TheUrgencyOfChange.com. His writing is at Sunshine-Jones.com.

We talked about Sunshine's User's Guide to the Roland SE-02. That includes Ahmed, a track produced using only the SE-02.

Sunshine also wrote about building a polysynth.

The intro music is an excerpt from LELEK, released on Air Texture Vol. V. The exit music is Fall In Love Not In Line, released this year on vinyl only, TUOC01. See TheUrgencyOfChange.com for more.

Sunshine was the host of SundaySoul.com, a live podcast about music and life.

Nick Kartsioukas (@ExplodingLemur) spoke with us about information security, melting down spectres, lemurs, and sensible resolutions.

Nick recommends Aumasson's Serious Cryptography (also available from NoStarch) as a good orientation. (Offline, he also recommended Shneier's Secrets and Lies.)

When thinking about security, you need to develop your threat model (EFF) and not panic (Mickens). As a user of the internet, there are some getting started guides (Motherboard, EFF, Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy) along with Nick's advice of using an antivirus program (comparison), an Adblocker (uBlock), a password manager, and 2-factor authentication. Data backups are also very useful (3-2-1 rule: 3 copies, 2 separate media, 1 offsite). For a professional infosec perspective, the CIS 20 are best practice guidelines for computer security.

For Spectre and Meltdown, the best high-level explanation is in Twitter from @gsuberland though XKCD does its usual good job as well. For more detail, about speculative execution bugs, check out this github readme.

For the history of the Stuxnet, check out Zetter's Countdown to Zero Day and the Security Now podcast episode 291.

Ham radio Field Days for 2018 are June 23-24

Last but not least: Depression lies so get help and if you want to know how to help someone else, look at MakeItOk.org

The Amp Hour and Embedded join up to send a holiday letter to listeners.

Chris G is ever improving Contextual Electronics. Chris W has a new band: 12AX7. Elecia still has a book: Making Embedded Systems.

Amp Hour episodes mentioned in this one:

Embedded episodes mentioned:

We talked about teaching which led to:

Books we are reading!

Elecia got a JTrace Pro Cortex-M for herself for Christmas. Chris W got a Moog Werkstatt and an assortment of Teenage Engineering small synths. Chris G mostly got sweaters because Chicago is very cold.

BMW now sends YouTube ads via snail mail

Anthony Navarro (@avnavarro42) of Udacity (@udacity) spoke with us about learning.

We talked about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (an education-oriented technical readiness level) and a little about on trunk skills vs. leaf skills.

Elecia took Udacity's term 1 of Self-Driving Car Nanodegree and is planning to take the free AI for Robotics course next. Anthony is enjoying soldering lessons via Boldport (hear #171: Perfectly Good Being Square and Green).

Anthony noted there is a free Embedded course on Udacity.

Jay Carlson (@jaydcarlson), author of The Amazing $1 Microcontroller, joined us to talk about comparing microcontrollers and determining our biases. This was an in-depth comparison of different micro features.

Jay is an electrical engineer specializing in electronics design and embedded programming (contact). His blog is new and interesting.

We talked to SEGGER's Dirk Akeman about JLink on #218: Neutron Star of Dev Boards.

Please note that our Patreon model has shifted to monthly instead of per-episode.

Maria Gorlatova spoke with us about how the combination of devices and cloud computing will change the world as we know it.

Maria's bio, blog, and LinkedIn page.

Other topics:

Note: we really should have talked about Amazon and FreeRTOS. I heard another podcastmight have mentioned it. We'll try to get more info soon.

Windell Oskay (@Oskay) of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) told us about co-authoring a book: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory.

Some great EMSL links:

The book Chris brought up was Thinking Physics.

Windell is also on Google Plus.

Contest to get Windell's signed book has already ended!

Andrei Chichak joins Elecia and Christopher to do a deep dive into the world of interrupts.

Andrei writes on our blog: Embedded Wednesdays. He has written specifically about interrupts in multiple ways: general introduction, buttons and debouncing, peripheral data transfer via DMA, and so on). The knock-knock joke comes from Chris Svec's Embedded.fm blog post on interrupts.

Jack Ganssle on debouncing buttons

Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) chat about listener questions and things they've been up to.

A listener turned Chris on to Ray Wilson and his Music From Outer Space website on DIY analog synths and book Make: Analog Synthesizers. After collecting parts for a total DIY, he found and built a neat kit: Kastle Synth (as heard on the show) and has connected it to his Roland SE-02 Analog Synthesizer (on Amazon). BTW, his ham radio WSPR kit is the Ultimate 3 in case you are behind on hobbies. You can hear more about it in 197: Smell the Transistor.

Elecia has been working through Udacity's Self-Driving Engineer nanodegree. She completed term 1 with its computer vision and machine learning and is on to term 2 with sensor fusion, localization, and control. She blissfully is unaware of the cost because she got to be an industry expert for the Intro to Self-Driving Cars course.

Listener Simon asked about non-fiction books. Elecia gets many of hers by looking at what is on discount at BookBub's science section which lead to two books she highly recommends Spirals in Time (snail facts) and Tristan Gooley's How to Read Water (beach explainer).

Chris has been reading Scott Wolley's The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age and How Music Works by David Byrne.

Some show-related recommendations include Gretchen Bakke's The Grid (hear Gretchen on episode 213: Electricity Doesn't Behave Like an Apple) and Jimmy Soni's Mind at Play (hear Jimmy on episode 221: Hiding in Plain Sight). She's reading Tim O'Reilly's WTF book about the future in anticipation of an upcoming episode. That's a good reminder: we, of course, also recommend Making Embedded Systems.

Zach asked about Michael Barr's Embedded Software Training in a Box. Apologies if we weren't specific enough, it would likely make a better blog post.

Also: $1 Microcontrollers!

Jonathan Beri (@beriberikix) spoke with us about his double life: Particle.io product manager by day, maker by night (and weekends).

Jonathan wrote a chapter about piDuino5 Mobile Robot Platform in JavaScript Robotics.

Product manager resources from product.careers and Ken Norton's Newsletter. For an alternate take, there is a good cartoon about effective product management from Henrik Kniberg.

For getting into open source, see the guide from Github. Also, there is a newi-sh consortium, the TODO group, with guides and resources about running open source projects.

There is also the often useful Google's developer documentation style guide.

NerdRage's video on the chemistry of etching

The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen by Bunnie Huang

Speaking of Robot Operating System (we did, briefly), IEEE Spectrum had a nice history of ROS.

Author Jimmy Soni (@jimmyasoni) spoke with us about his biography of Claude Shannon, founder of information theory and digital circuit theory.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. For an introduction to the book, read their post 10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives.

Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Mark Levinson's Particle Fever is a documentary film about the Large Hadron Collider. He is also directing a film about Claude Shannon

Scientific Aspects of Juggling by Claude Shannon

Ben Hencke (@im889) spoke with us about OHWS, Tindie, and blinking lights.

Ben sells his Pixelblaze WiFi LED controller on his ElectroMage store on Tindie. It is based on the ESP8266 and uses the DotStar (APA102) lights.

To hear John Leeman's trip report on the Open Hardware Summit (OHWS), listen to Don't Panic Geocast, Episode 140 – "Juicero of Tractors"

Ben's websites are bhencke.com and electromage.com. Go there if you want to see some of Ben's projects, including Synthia. You can also find Ben on Hackaday, Github, and YouTube.

We talked with Charles Lohr about ESP8266 WiFi controlled lights and ColorChord on Embedded.fm episode 102: The Deadly Fluffy Bunny (With WiFi).

Laser cut mandalas

OSHPark

Small Batch Assembly

More about the 4-bit Radio Shack computer (and an Arduino-based emulator for it!)

Santa Cruz Idea Fab Lab

Ben Hencke (@im889) spoke with us about OHWS, Tindie, and blinking lights.

Ben sells his Pixelblaze WiFi LED controller on his ElectroMage store on Tindie. It is based on the ESP8266 and uses the DotStar (APA102) lights.

To hear John Leeman's trip report on the Open Hardware Summit (OHWS), listen to Don't Panic Geocast, Episode 140 – "Juicero of Tractors"

Ben's websites are bhencke.com and electromage.com. Go there if you want to see some of Ben's projects, including Synthia. You can also find Ben on Hackaday, Github, and YouTube.

We talked with Charles Lohr about ESP8266 WiFi controlled lights and ColorChord on Embedded.fm episode 102: The Deadly Fluffy Bunny (With WiFi).

Laser cut mandalas

OSHPark

Small Batch Assembly

More about the 4-bit Radio Shack computer (and an Arduino-based emulator for it!)

Santa Cruz Idea Fab Lab

Talia's nightlight

Josh Bleecher Snyder (@offbymany) joined us to talk about PayPal's Beacon, being acquired, the Go programming language, BTLE, computer vision, and working at a large company after founding small ones.

Bluetooth Low Energy: A Developer's Handbook by Robin Heydon

TI CC2540 BTLE module

Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision by Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler

Gatt is a Go package for building Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals (video description by Josh from GopherCon 2014)

Card.io

Machine learning's Theano

Eigen Library for matrix math

Kelly Shortridge (@swagitda_) spoke with us about the intersection of security and behavioral economics. Kelly's writing and talks are linked from her personal site swagitda.com. Kelly is currently a Product Manager at SecurityScorecard.

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

What Works by Iris Bohnet

Risky Business, a podcast about security

Teen Vogue's How to Keep Your Internet Browser History Private

Surveillance Self-Defense from EFF, including security for journalists as mentioned in the show

Bloomberg's Matt Levine

Twitter suggestion @SwiftOnSecurity, @thegrugq, and @sawgitda_.

Dirk Akeman of SEGGER (@SEGGERMicro) joined us to talk about debugger specifics.

We recently did two other shows on debugging: a general intro with Alvaro Prieto and one with a focus on the development-system's debugger software interface with Pierre-Marie de Rodat.

Herd immunity and find a flu shot

And, yes, we did bleep Dirk's answer for favorite processor because he later reconsidered the idea that he only had one favorite.

Bob Skala of Interactive Instruments spoke with us about very large servo motors, wind tunnels, and staying current in tech.

Hydraulic Press YouTube channel (and our favorite video)

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

Other good tech podcasts included The Amp Hour and HamRadio 360 WorkBench

Chris talked about getting into WSPR in 197: Smell the Transistor but we first talked about it in 76: Entropy is For Wimps. The new WSPR mode he mentioned is called FT8 (google it).

And a note from Bob:

Below is a link to a type of servo system that tries to simplify the interface to be more like a stepper. It integrates the driver and motor into a single package so you can treat it like a stepper with digital step and direction or serial commands. You get the smoothness, speed, accuracy and low power (when idle) of a servo but the servo motor, driver, and cabling are integrated into one magic box. You add a DC supply and simple control signals and you are all set. They came out with this to replace stepper motors. I haven't used one yet but I hope to at some point.

https://www.teknic.com/products/clearpath-brushless-dc-servo-motors/

Carmen Parisi (@FakeEEQuips) joined us to talk about electronics and podcasts.

Carmen works on switching regulators. If you want to know more, he sent along some very basic application notes: How to Apply DC-DC Step Down Regulators (Analog Devices) and Switching Regulator Fundamentals (TI). The digital communication method with these switchers is the I2C-like PMBus. If all those make sense, dive a little deeper with chapter 9 of the online and free Linear Circuit Design Handbook. Carmen says the whole book is excellent for analog information. Also, the free chapter of the Art of Electronics is on power. If all that still makes sense, you may be Carmen if you can also write an app note like this one: Multiphase Buck Design From Start to Finish (Part 1).

Carmen is a host on The Engineering Commons (@TEC_Podcast). Some episodes you might enjoy are 93: Capacitors with James Lewis of KEMET (aka BaldEngineer) and 77: Remote Host Toast with Elecia White.

Some suggested books from Carmen:

Elecia mentioned How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic by Michael Jay Geier and promised a PID image from her book Making Embedded Systems.

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) joined us to talk about the basics of debugging, from software to hardware.

Some of the programmer devices we talked about: SEGGER JLink and Black Magic Probe.

Chris mentioned a visual frontend for gdb called "Vulcan" but which is actually called Voltron. (He's got graphics on the brain).

How did we forget to mention the six stages of debugging?

Alvaro Prieto and Jen Costillo's new podcast on reverse engineering! And on Twitter as @unnamed_show.

Alvaro's Cheese Cave: making cheese and cheese-lapse photography of Brie aging.

Kristen Dorsey explained MEMS sensors: how do they work, how they are made, and what new ones we expect to see in the future.

Kristen's website is kristendorsey.com. She is a professor of engineering at Smith College and runs the MicroSmithie.

MEMS stands for microelectromechanical systems (Wiki). Used in some sensors, Galistan is a room-temp liquid with interesting properties (Wiki).

A few interesting MEMS applications:

One of Kristen's stretchy strain sensor, not MEMS (so you can see it)

Gretchen Bakke spoke with us about the future of power generation and transmission. Her book is The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future.

Gretchen is a professor of anthropology at McGill University.

Gretchen's website

The book's Facebook page

Grechen's first book is Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader

Kwabena Agyeman joined us to talk about making OpenMV (@OpenMVCam), an easy-to-use camera and control module with built-in machine vision functions, all interfaced via MicroPython.

To learn more about computer vision, Kwabena suggested looking at PyImageSearch or reading the April tags code as it is a good introduction to image manipulation and matrix operations.

Some other interesting links:

Dennis Jackson spoke with us about making the career shift from software to embedded.

Dennis buys James Grenning's Test Driven Development in Embedded C for his new hires and often recommends Elecia's Making Embedded Systems. His tip that everyone should know was "Learn make!" and he has a reference for that: Why Use Make.

He suggested Joel Spolsky's reading lists from Joel On Software, even the ones that don't obviously apply.

Additional suggested-reading articles:

In his previous appearance on Embedded (#25: Don't Be Clever), we talked about code complexity and measuring cyclomatic complexity. At that time he wanted a tool to monitor the code's status. He has since found one: pmccabe.

Dennis currently works at Element Science.

Alan Yates (@vk2zay) told us about his entries to the 2017 Flashing Light Prize. Alan's entries involved making a light bulb and dripping charge.

Alan works at Valve. He told us about making virtual reality hardware in Embedded episode 162: I Am a Boomerang Enthusiast.

Hackaday SuperCon is Nov 11-12, 2017 in Pasadena.

Pierre-Marie de Rodat (@pmderodat) joined us to talk about how debugger software works (and what compilers tell the debugger).

Pierre-Marie works for AdaCore on GNATcoverage (among other things). His github repo is pmderodat.

Note that the AdaCore sponsored Make with Ada competition is running right now but you still have time to enter! Last year's winner, Stephane Carrez with EtherScope, made an Ethernet monitor for an STM32 board (github).

GDB supports Python scripting!?!!!

DWARF is the most standard debugging data format. Before that it was stabs. To see this information in a Linux or Mac system, use objdump. (It is really interesting!)

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Elecia gave a talk about machine learning and robotics at the Hackaday July Meetup at SupplyFrame DesignLab (video!) and LA CrashSpace. She gives it again in the podcast while Chris narrates the demos.

Embedded Patreon

Embedded show #187: Self Driving Arm is the interview with Professor Patrick Pilarski about machine learning and robotics applied to prosthetic limbs.

I have also written more about my machine learning + robot arm on this blog. My code is in github (TyPEpyt).

My machine learning board is Nvidia's Jetson TX2. The Two Days to a Demo is a good starting point. However, if you are new to machine learning, a better and more thorough introduction is the Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera. To try out machine learning, look at Weka Data Mining Software in Java for getting to know your data and OpenIA Gym for understanding reinforcement learning algorithms

I use the MeArm for my robot arm. For July 2017, the MeArm kit is on sale at the Hackaday store with the 30% off coupon given at the meetup (or in Embedded #207).

Inverse kinematics is a common robotics problem, it took both Wiki and this blog post to give me some understanding.

I wasn't sure about the Law of Cosines before starting to play with this so I made a drawing to imprint it into my brain.

Robot Operating System (ROS) is the publisher-subscriber architecture and simulation system. (I wrote about ROS on this blog.) To learn about ROS, I read O'Reilly's Programming Robots with ROS and spent a fair about of time looking at the robots on the ROS wiki page.

I am using OpenCV in Python to track the laser. Their official tutorials are an excellent starting point. I recommend Adafruit's PCA9685 I2C PWM/Servo controller for interfacing the Jetson (or RPi) to the MeArm.

Finally, my talk notes and the Hackaday Poster!

Natalie Silvanovich (@natashenka) discussed reverse engineering hardware, working on security software, and the fantastic world of Tamagotchis.

Natalie's site and blog

Hardware Excuse Generator

Original CCC 2012 talk: Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation

CCC 2013 talk: Even More Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation

Natalie's upcoming BlackHat talk: Attacking ECMAScript Engines with Redefinition

Flash exploit article for Project Zero: One Perfect Bug: Exploiting Type Confusion in Flash

Tamagotchis are still available as are the works of Shel Silverstein (Snowball is in Falling Up).

Chris Svec (@christophersvec) has an idea about adding empathy to software development. It is a good idea.

His blog is Said Svec. He works for iRobot and they are hiring. (Chris' email is given toward the end of the show but if you hit the contact link here, we'll pass along info to him.)

Obligatory cat video

Embedded has an episode devoted to impostor syndrome.

O'Reilly's Head First book series is pretty awesome.

Elecia is still talking about Thinking, Fast and Slow as a great way to understand brains. Chris Svec also recommends Make It Stick.

The Richard Hamming quote came from his address to the Naval Postgraduate School. The whole lecture is available on YouTube.

Professor Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech joins us to talk about robotics including how androids interact with humans. Some of her favorite robot include the Darwin, the Nao, and, for home-hacking, the Darwin Mini.

Ayanna has a profile on EngineerGirl.org, a site that lets young women ask questions of women in the engineering profession.

Elecia has been working on a typing robot named Ty, documented on the Embedded.fm blog. It uses a MeArm, on sale in July 2017 at Hackaday.com, with coupon noted in show. (don't use PayPal to check out or you can't apply the coupon).

Other robots for trying out robots: Lego Mindstorms (lots of books, project ideas, and incredible online tutorials!), Cozmobot, Dash and Dot. Some robotics competition leagues include Vex, Botball, and FIRST.

This week, we mix things up a bit. This joint show with the Don't Panic Geocast. This episode explores what happens when electrical engineering meets geoscience in cold places. We're joined by guest Dr. Sridhar Anandakrishnan of Penn State to talk about geopebbles, ice, climate, and more!

Fun Paper Friday: The Boring Company

This week we talked to Addie (@atdiy) and Whisker (@whixr), the Toymakers (@Tymkrs). They make electronics kits, videos, and conference badges.

Toymakers site (tymkrs.com) has a link to their IRC channel, videos, and Tindie store(including those amazing heart simulators, the easy to make Amplify Me, and Protosynth Midi).

Their reddit community is r/Tymkrs. It has a lot more information about the CypherCon 2017 badges. More about CypherCon at cyphercon.com.

Some of their ZombieTech podcast is available on YouTube (along with First Spin and Patch Bay, see the playlists to find grouped series). Note that Rabbithole is the name of their hackspace as well as the video series documenting project creation. Episode 200 has the violin we discussed.

We seem to have talked about a lot of other people on the show, especially shared friends and past Embedded.fm guests (some of whom were on ZombieTech).

Some fiction for you:

Phoenix Perry (@phoenixperry) spoke with us about physical games. Phoenix is CTO of DoItKits (@DoItKits) and

More about Phoenix:

Physical games are sometimes called Alt Ctrl such as at the Alt Ctrl Game Jam.

Phoenix co-founded Code Liberation with Nina Freeman (http://ninasays.so/) and Jane Friedhoff (http://janefriedhoff.com/). "Code Liberation catalyzes the creation of digital games and creative technologies by women, nonbinary, femme, and girl-identifying people to diversify STEAM fields." There is an 8-part workshop in London in Summer 2017 (more info).

Some other interesting people:

How to Get What You Want wearables site

Yoga Pants

AutoDesk Fusion360

I know you only read the show notes because you wanted this link: Velastat LessEMF has the supplies for ghost hunting!

Charlie Ladd (@csladd) joined us to give an overview of good hardware practices.

The oil quality sensor is from VSI Oil.

Recent fiction included Ready Player One, John Scalzi, and Matthew Mather.

To stay current, Charlie reviews the trade magazines: EEWeb.com, EDN, ECN, and EETimes.

A junior engineer's tale of woe.

Professor Alex Dean spoke with us about his ARM embedded systems books and @NCState courses.

Alex's page in North Carolina State University's department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

His book is Embedded Systems Fundamentals with Arm Cortex M Based Microcontrollers: A Practical Approach (ecopy available from the ARM Media site). It uses the FRDM-KL25Z as the example board throughout the text.

Alex also co-authored Embedded Systems, An Introduction Using the Renesas RX62N

His favorite RTOS is Keil RTX.

We also mentioned about Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin and Flush by Carl Hiaasen

Shaun Meehan (@logiclow) joined us to talk about robot arms and stealth rocket companies. Shaun's rocket startup is hiring; information about the job openings are below.

Shaun's robot arm is an ABB IRB-2000 (video of Fred). Elecia was reading How to Choose the Right Industrial Robot when Shaun emailed. He convinced her that the MeArm Pocket Size Robotic Arm is the likely best choice for her machine learning typer project (which needs a better name).

All this led to a discussion of inverse kinematics, robot operating system (ROS), and OpenAI. SparkFun has a nice guide to selecting the right motor if the DC, servo, stepper section went by a bit fast. Elecia mentioned the TI Piccolo line as good motor controllers, assuming you aren't building an FPGA controller from scratch on your own.

Repair cafes are a thing.

Shaun was on The Amp Hour 220: Doctiloquent Dove Deployer where he talked a lot more about his robot pets. For more about Fred, the robot arm, check out LogicLow.com. Also, see Shaun's github repo, Fun with Flip-Dots (on hackaday.io), his intended page for big servos (Not Your Hobby Servo, also hackaday,io) His personal site detailing new projects, motors, and fire-breathing dodo birds is ShaunAndKelly.com.

Shaun recently enjoyed The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Stealth Space Rocket Company Hiring Information

We are a small, highly entrepreneurial team of rocket engineers with deep technical expertise who love to build things and relish the idea of a grand challenge.

Building on over a decade of technology development in rocket propulsion, structures, and avionics funded by NASA and DARPA, we are applying a fast-paced, hardware-focused, agile approach to space launch.

Are you an engineer, hacker, maker, or physicist who has always dreamed of building rockets? Come help us build the hardware and launch the services that will open the frontier of space to the next generation of entrepreneurs.

The company is in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. If you want to apply, email Shaun: space at logiclow dot com.

Episode 200! Let's have a party (and a survey)! Former guests joined us in a panel-style celebration of working in embedded systems: Alvaro Prieto, Andrei Chichak, Elizabeth Brenner, Chris Svec, and Chris Gammell.

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) was a guest on 130: Criminal Training Camp.

Andrei Chichak writes Embedded Wednesdays and was on 99: You Can Say a Boat, 114: Wild While Loops and 139: Easy to Add Blood Splatter.

Elizabeth Brenner (@eabrenner) was a guest on 17: Facebook Status: Maybe Not Dead and 54: Oh, The Hugh Manatee,

Chris Svec (@christophersvec) writes Embedded Software Engineering 101 was on 78: Happy Cows and 139: Easy to Add Blood Splatter.

Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) was a guest on 35: All These Different Reasons Why You Might Want to Do Something as well as a co-host on the holiday Embedded/Amp Hour crossover episode 181: Work on It for Ten Years.

Fiction mentioned:

Episodes cited as favorites:

Tools discussed:

Notes: T-shirt sales are probably already over unless you hurry. March micro madness and Digilent Digital Discovery contests also end very soon.

Chris and Elecia answer listener questions about contracting (and consulting).

Reminders: T-shirts! Hat contest! Digilent contest announced in #197! It all ends around May 18th so get your entries in now!

The original discussion was on episode 4: Are We Not Lawyers?

Elecia's salary to rate conversion can be found as a Google spreadsheet.

Walter Stockwell spoke with us about the legalization of drones, UAVs, UASs, and UFOs.

Walter works at DJI which makes the Phantom. They have some jobs open.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Intel/Pepsi drone show at SuperBowl halftime

AOPA Facebook page

The amateur model aircraft organization discussed was the Academy of Model Aeronautics(AMA).

ASSURE UAS Ground Collision Severity Evaluation Final Report (also: press release)

Elecia mentioned the Madgwick Filter.

Embedded.fm t-shirts are available for a limited time! There are two distributors: one US based, one Europe based. Choose whichever is closest to you.

Elecia's TV appearance on The Jennylyn Show is on YouTube.

Digilent Digital Discovery contest ends May 19.

Chris and Elecia talk with each other about science fiction, advertising, ham radios, debugging tools, and programming languages.

You can buy Embedded.fm t-shirts until May 18, 2017. You can always buy Elecia's book: Making Embedded Systems. And don't forget we have a Patreon if you'd like to support the show directly.

Some science fiction we mentioned: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, Nightfall and Last Question by Isaac Asimov, and the All This Time video from Jonathan Coulton.

Digilent sent us goodies to review: one Analog Discovery 2 and two Digital Discovery units. So we did, though we didn't cover the high speed adapters and other nifty goodies. Check out Alvaro Prieto's Troubleshooting tools HDDG talk for some additional information on the devices. For the giveaways, rules are in the show, hit the contact link to enter. Contest ends May 19th.

Chris has been doing low-power ham radio contacts (WSPR) using an Ultimate 3S kit from QRP Labs. We talked about WSPR some with Ron Sparks in episode 76: Entropy Is For Wimps

Make with Ada competition is back! It start May 15, 2017. We talked the 2016 competition with Fabien Chouteau in episode 158: Programming Is Too Difficult For Humans.

Elecia is still fighting with Ubuntu before she can build her robot typist with her NVidia Jetson TX2 board.

Philip Freidin sent in Stanford CS department's reply to the lightning round question of "what language should you learn in the first college course?" Even better, he sent a link to a google spreadsheet showing how many schools answer the question.

Elecia was on the Jennylyn Show. (I'll update with a link to the specific episode on YouTube when it is available.)

March Madness ended with PyBoard as the champion, more info on getting your winner's hat soon.

Aditi Hilbert (@HilbertAditi) spoke with us about MyNewt, an Apache-licensed RTOS and bootloader.

MyNewt's Apache page is mynewt.apache.org and the github repository is github.com/apache/incubator-mynewt-core. In the README.md, check out the section marked browsing which points to the file system, ble stack, and assorted other source code goodies you may want to read. The secure bootloader code is also in there but as it is also a cross-RTOS effort (with Linux's Zephyr), you can find the MCUBoot repository at github.com/runtimeco/mcuboot

Aditi works for Runtime.io (@runtime_io), a primary contributor to MyNewt. They work with companies who want to use MyNewt on their products.

We talked about OIC (openconnectivity.org) and using UDP endpoints over BLE. Constrained http is actually called constrained application protocol: CoAP (coap.technology). We also mentioned MQTT, an older standard attempting to solve some of the same problems.

The Apache license is one of the most permissive of open source licenses: choosealicense.com/licenses

Assorted other links discussed in the show:

We discussed CubeSats with their co-inventor, Professor Jordi Puig-Suari, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at CalPoly SLO and co-founder of Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems.

The 2017 CubeSat conference is in San Luis Obispo, CA on April 26-28. More details at CubeSat.org.

Information about CubeSats at CalPoly SLO can be found at PolySat.org.

Tyvak is hiring for a number of different positions: tyvak.com/careers.

For more satellite goodness, we spoke with Patrick Yeon of Planet about their CubeSat-based platform and deployment mechanism in Embedded episode 153: Space Nerf Gun.

Thank you to Embedded Patreon supporters for Jordi's microphone!

Shulie Tornel (@helixpea) joined us to talk about the 2017 Hackaday Prize (@hackaday and @hackadayio).

Hackaday World Create Day is April 22nd, let them know if you want do a meetup so they can add you to the calendar.

Elecia gave away all of her potential ideas, trying to figure out which one would work best for entry. It was probably Maxwell except for its lack of novelty (Embedded shows #17 and #54and there is a SparkFun Tutorial).

Are you entering? The first phase (until May) is community driven (popularity contest). Post your entry here or tweet to us (@embeddedfm) and we'll like it. Also, it was Shantam Raj's Self-sustained Ultralow-power Node that we discussed in the show.

Neon Demons (trailer)

Embedded blog contributor Chris Svec was on the CodeNewbie podcast talking about robots and chip design. The following week Saron invited Elecia to record an episode about getting into hardware and embedded software.

Owen Anderson (@OwenResistor) joined us to talk about how compilers are written. We discussed LLVM, intermediate representation, clang, and GPUs.

As mentioned at the end of the show, Owen's current employer is hiring. If you are interested and would like to get the brownie points that come with being a friend of a friend, contact us and we'll connect you to Owen and he'll submit your resume.

Recent books Owen mentioned: Manager Path, Feminist Fight Club, The Laundry Files seriesby Charles Stross.

LLVM Language Reference

Teardown of what goes into rasterization

What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior

Terry Dunlap, CEO of Tactical Network Solutions (@tacnetsol), spoke with us about security in the Internet of Things.

The good:

The bad and the ugly:

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) answer listener emails.

Get your entries in for March Micro Madness, the matches start very soon.

The short story Elecia finds most memorable is All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury.

We mentioned Procopio who teaches microcontrollers at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education ITESM (site, wiki)

Hector sent up the IEEE Code of Ethics, a good high-level set of rules.

Matt Godbolt (@mattgodbolt) spoke with us about settling arguments with Compiler Explorer.

Compiler Explorer comes different flavors:

You can see the beta version by putting a beta on the end: https://gcc.godbolt.org/beta/

This a fully open source project. You can read the code and/or run your own version:

Matt works at DRW working on low latency software. Note that DRW is hiring for software engineers. You can read about the evolution of Compiler Explorer on their blog.

Matt's personal blog is xania.org. You might like parts about 6502 Timings. He also has several conference talks on YouTube including x86 Internals for Fun & Profit and Emulating a 6502 in Javascript. Matt was previously at Argonaut Games.

Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and his C++17 Commodore 64

Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? paper (with a nod to Don't Panic GeoCast's Fun Paper Friday)

Kari Love (@ikyotochan) spoke with us about creating soft robotics. You can see her edible soft robots talk from 33c3. Kari works at Super-Releaser. Her personal site (and blog) is Kari Makes.

Kari mentioned that the Super-Release intern Aidan had some picks for soft robotics on Instructables.

Super-Releaser created the Glaucus soft robot and Adafruit has an in-depth tutorial for how to make it.

Some videos of soft actuators and soft robots:

Super-Releaser Playing with Heat-Sealed Actuators (including the spiral)

Silicone gripper from a cardboard mold

Voxel Soft Robotic Simulation Evolution

Super Long Mylar Robot

MIT Tangible Media Group AeroMorph

Soft Exoskeletons

http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/11/12/wearable-power-assist-device-goes-on-sale-in-japan/

http://biodesign.seas.harvard.edu/soft-exosuits

http://www.roamrobotics.com/

Rat heart cell robot from Popular Mechanics

First Autonomous Entirely Soft Robot (Harvard Octobot)

VoxCad Tutorial for simulating soft robotics

Also, if you haven't seen Big Hero 6, you should. Consider it computer science homework. If you just want to see Baymax, here is a short video.

Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate (Elecia's latest octopus related reading, the previous one was called Kraken)

Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) of the Hanselminutes Podcast talks about technology podcasting and philosophy.

You can find Scott's blog on Hanselman.com/blog and his other podcasts on Hanselman.com/podcasts.

We talked about Hansleminutes' WebVR episode with Ada Rose Edwards and Alcohol and Tech with Victor Yocco. We also mentioned Scott's blog post from 2014 about what technologies he would learn if he had to start over.

Crossing machine intelligence, robotics, and medicine, Patrick Pilarski (@patrickpilarski) is working on smart prosthetic limbs.

Build your own learning robot references: Weka Data Mining Software in Java for getting to know your data, OpenIA Gym for understanding reinforcement learning algorithms, Robotis Servos for the robot (AX is the lower priced line), and five lines of code:

Patrick even made us a file (with comments and everything!).

Once done, you can enter the Cybathlon. (Or check out a look at Cybathlon 2016 coverage.)

Machine Man by Max Barry

Snow Country by Bokushi Suzuki

Aimee Mullins and her many amazing legs (TED Talk)

Patrick is a professor at University of Alberta, though a lot more than that: he is the Canada Research Chair in Machine Intelligence for Rehabilitation at the University of Alberta, and Assistant Professor in the Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and a principal investigator with both the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) and the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (RLAI). See his TED talk: Intelligent Artificial Limbs.

Indrek Rebane (@RebaneIndrek) spoke with us about the Garage48 Hardware and Arts hackathon, hardware incubators in Estonia, linguistics, hydrology, and startup investments.

Garage48 Hardware & Arts hackathon is February 17-19, 2017 at the Institute of Physics, University of Tartu (Tartu, Estonia). The event is organized by Garage48, University of Tartu and the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Indrek is CTO of Build It Hardware Accelerator and electronics engineer for Hedgehog Engineering.

Recommended book: The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

Other resources Indrek mentioned after recording:

While we planned to ask Andrei Chichak to podcast when he was in town for the Embedded.fm party, we spent too much time goofing off. So we are replaying Andrei's first appearance on the show where he spoke with us about MISRA-C and ethics. (Note that this is the same Andrei who writes the STM32 Embedded Wednesday posts for the Embedded.fm blog.)

Linker post: It's dangerous to go alone! Take MISRA-C

Andrei's has personal website (we failed to talk about his kite aerial photography, it is really neat though) and his company is CBF Systems.

Plum Hall C Compiler Validation

PC Lint

JPL Coding Standards for C (and the mentioned video discussing Mars Code)

ISO 26262 Automobile software standard

Cortex-R for high reliability systems (ARM's description)

National Society of Professional Engineers code of ethics and Canadian Engineering Guidelines on the Code of Ethics

Offline, Andrei recommended two books and another podcast about MISRA:

Debby Meredith (@DebbyMe) stops by to tell us what it is like being a venture partner and interim VP of engineering. Debby is a venture partner at Icon Ventures. Her website is DebbyMeredith.com. She was on a new podcast: Women Who Code Radio.

Computer History Museum's new exhibit is Make Software: Change the World. It opens on January 28, 2017.

After recording, Debby mentioned a book she likes: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.

January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP

Ben Krasnow (@BenKrasnow) spoke with us about prototyping, Patreon, and staying current. And a whole bunch of stuff.

January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP

Ben's YouTube channel is Applied Science. His recent videos have been shot with the high speed Chronos camera (whose creator David Kronstein was on The Amp Hour #325).

Ben has a Patreon page which funds randomness. (Embedded also has a Patreon page, for randomness and mics.)

Ben was previously on the show: 119: Do Your Neighbors Have Any Idea?

For BLE prototyping, Ben mentioned the OSH Chip by Philip Freidin (146: The Loyal Opposition) and using Processing for Android to make quick-n-dirty test applications.

We mentioned the Wazer desktop waterjet.

Chris brought up this video describing impedance with a mechanical model.

One of Ben's favorite videos that he did was the first one with an electron microscope, way back in 2011: DIY Scanning Electron Microscope - Overview.

Ben gets a lot of his news from Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/

Ben's Twitter criteria was that they didn't post updates often too often for his one-a-day check and that they focus on tech:

And some of his favorite YouTube channels (Ben said it was very difficult to distill as there are many great choices):

We also mentioned architect Frank Howarth of the urbanTrash channel.

Philip Koopman (@BetterEmbSW) spoke with us about making better embedded software. His Better Embedded Systems Software blog has lots of great information including links to his growing video library. Two posts noted in the show:

His company, Edge Case Research, performs design and code reviews and teaches how to do them. You can find out more about his course and background on his Carnegie Mellon University staff page. That also leads to the pretty amazing Vintage Aero paper airplanes.

Phil's book is Better Embedded Software, available via koopman.us and (more expensively) Amazon.

Fagan Inspection

Videos of robots being stressed

Also: Embedded.fm Jan 28th Party RSVPs on Eventbrite

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talk with each other about about a party, listener emails, and assorted questions.

RSVP for the Embedded.fm party!

The Embedded Blog is at embedded.fm/blog. Chris Svec wrote a post about picking a processor platform.

Don't Panic Geocast episode with Elecia

Elecia'a book: Making Embedded Systems

Compiler explorer is GodBolt.org

Imposter Syndrome: episode #24 is all about. And you might find #78 with Chris Svecrelevant. Also: Adam Savage talking about overcoming self-doubt.

The RSS feed for all of our shows (not only the most recent 100) is http://makingembeddedsystems.libsyn.com/rss

We have a Patreon fund that buys mics for guests (plus the occasional goodie for us and our blogging team).

Crunchy Frog

RTL-SDR: Software defined radio

BaoFeng's unusable Ham radio

ESA investigation on the Schiaparelli landing

Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) of The Amp Hour and Contextual Electronics joined Elecia and Chris for a holiday special Ampbedded (EmbHour?) episode.

Embedded will be having a Hats and Hacks party in Aptos, CA. You can come! RSVP on Eventbrite.

Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Analog Discovery vs Saleae

Embedded blog (with Andrei Chichak and Chris Svec) including a post on podcasts we listen to

Hemmingway App, useful for making writing clearer and simpler

Tweezer sets make excellent gifts

The Way Things Work Now is an update on a classic book

Flybrix is a LEGO drone platform for learning control systems and flight robotics. The founder was on Embedded #157.

Nordic nRF52

makexyz: 3D printing in your neighborhood

Fusion 360

Video of Tesla seeing two cars ahead, having an accident

The LDC1000 has never been attached to a Bluetooth sensor

Free calculus book online: Single Variable Calculus: Early Transcendentals. There are other online textbooks approved by the American Institute of Mathematics.

Raptitude's Maybe You Don't Have a Problem

Isaac Asimov is a great inspiration: Medium Post by Charles Chu

Have you ever wondered how your programming tool works? Piotr Esden-Tempski and Gareth McMullin have built the Black Magic Probe and joined the show to explain how it works.

Kickstarter for Black Magic and 1Bitsy ends December 29th. If you missed it (or need a Black Magic v2 instead of waiting for v2.1) go to the 1BitSquared Store. For more in-depth information about Black Magic, look at Gareth's github repo. For more information about the 1Bitsey dev board, look at 1bitsy.org.

Contest! Tweet to @1bitsquared.

The YouTube channel about electronic teardowns was Mike's Electric Stuff: youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff.

If you want to say other hellos to Piotr, try his personal account: @esden. Or you can contact Gareth via Black Magic's Gitter channel.

Embedded.fm Hats-n-Hacks party will be 2-5pm on Saturday, January 28, 2017 in Aptos, CA. More details soon, including how to RSVP.

Miro Samek (@mirosamek) of Quantum Leaps spoke with us about making better state machines through actor objects and hierarchical state machines.

Miro wrote a book: Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++: Event-Driven Programming for Embedded Systems. He has an excellent YouTube channel explaining embedded concepts. We discussed his video that describes how a stack overflow works and the related in-depth post on EmbeddedGurus.com.

Elecia enjoyed his object oriented programming in C PDF for both the OO and the UML refresher.

Miro mentioned the Software Engineering Radio podcast. We mentioned our favorite podcasts blog post. Also, we talk about Jean Labrosse's recent episode of Embedded.fm.

We spoke with Chris Maury (@CMaury) about using speech recognition to interact with devices.

Note: Please turn off your Echo and Dots as we invoke Alexa a lot.

Chris is the founder of Conversant Labs. They created TinCan.ai which can help you wireframe or prototype a conversational user interface. They can also help you build Alexa Skills, though if you are so inclined, you might try it for yourself: Alexa Skills Kit.

Chris will be speaking at the O'Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco, CA in March 2017, giving a tutorial on building voice based user interfaces. You can read more from Chris on his Medium posts medium.com/@CMaury.

CMU PocketSphinx

Some of the embedded devices Elecia mentioned:

We haven't gotten embedded.fm (or any podcast) to work with Alexa but we aren't sure why. Have you?