Embedded

Want to learn how to get from idea to schematic, through layout, all the way to physical boards? Elecia spoke with Chris Gammell about his Contextual Electronics course to teach the missing steps between what an EE learns in college and what an design engineer's job entails. Chris is co-host of the excellent electronics podcast The Amp Hour and author of Chris Gammell's Analog Life. On twitter, contact Chris via @Chris_Gammell or ask questions about the course @ContextualElec. We mentioned UT Austin's online embedded systems course which starts soon as well. Contextual Electronics includes some in-depth KiCad instruction. Some intro (and free) KiCad tutorials: Chris' Getting to Blinky Series teho Labs Wayne and Layne Curious Inventor

Elecia describes to Christopher how to design and create a firmware update mechanism. Hilarity ensues. 4k PC emulator Making Embedded Systems, the book, on O'Reilly (coupon in last 2 minutes of the show) or on Amazon. Christopher tries to pay his bugs to go away.

Alison Chaiken (Google+) and Elecia discuss what you need to know to get into development for the automotive market. Check out Alison's she-devel site for a big list of links and resources or go to a Silicon Valley Automotive Open Source Group meetup to say hello. A small subset: Open source engine management system on DIYEFI Car hacking site MP3 Car Vehicle standards ISO-26262

Patrick Kane (@PSoC_Nation) is the director of the Cypress University Alliance, working with colleges to provide development kits and information to college (and high school) students. Happily, Patrick brought Elecia a new dev kit: CY8CKIT-042.

Producer Christopher (@stoneymonster) joins Elecia to look through their mailbag and talk about gift ideas. Podcasts we like: The Amp Hour 99% Invisible Radiolab 5x5 network’s Back to Work Accidental tech Splendid Table (food) Some listener suggestions on where to get small run boards made: http://www.cadsoftusa.com http://www.seeedstudio.com/service/index.php?r=site/pcbService http://www.pcbcart.com/ http://oshpark.com/ Gift ideas (specifics): Dropcam and Dropcam Pro Nest thermostat and smoke alarm Online automatic backup services: Crashplan and Backblaze Books: Thinking Fast and Slow, Quiet, and Kraken The BUS Pirate serial bus logger and injector Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones for noisy offices Gift ideas (stores): Shapeways 3D Printing on demand Think Geek Find a kit or component for someone: Sparkfun, Adafruit, or Maker Shed

James Grenning (@jwgrenning) joined Elecia to talk about how to be a good programmer using Test Driven Development (TDD). James' excellent book on how to use TDD: Test Driven Development for Embedded Systems Take a class from Renaissance Software Manual test is not sustainable blog post, from James' blog Legacy code challenge from Github SOLID design principles Iterative and Incremental Development article by Craig Larman Untapped: the beer drinker's twitter To get the signed copy of James' book, email (show@embedded.fm), tweet (@logicalelegance), or hit the contact link on embedded.fm with your number between 0-99. First one with the correct number wins the book (if no one is correct, the closest number will be selected 12/25/13).

Kathleen Vaeth of MicroGen Systems (@MicroGenSystems) spoke with Elecia (@LogicalElegance) about energy harvesting using MEMS devices. Some introductory videos: BOLT™ Micro Power Generator An energy harvester enables TI eZ430 with Linear LTC3588 While we missed it on the show, Kathleen also wanted to mention MicroGen Systems' finite element modeling partners: SoftMEMS and Open Engineering.

Author Laura Lemay (@lemay) spoke with Elecia (@logicalelegance) about writing books, APIs, code, and science fiction. Laura wrote many of the Teach Yourself ... in 21 Days books: her bibliography on Amazon. Laura's blog includes short stories. November is National Novel Writing Month, see the NaNoWriMo site Edward Tufte wrote the amazing Envisioning Information (among many other beautiful and informative books) Neal Stephenson wrote Diamond Age Laura suggests Patrick Ness' The Knife of Never Letting Go

From the MEMS Industry Group Executive Congress: Ivo Stivoric, co-founder of the Body Media which was purchased by Jawbone CEO Sam Guilaume and Dave Rothenberg of Movea Stephen Walsh, ISKN – iSketchnote, one of the pitches in the MEMS Elevator Pitch Session From the 2013 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference: David Peter works with New Life International. His paper was “A Simple Algorithm for Chlorine Concentration Control”

In this in-depth technical discussion, Dr. Ken Lunde helps Elecia understand how to internationalize her (memory constrained) device. CJVK Information Processing, Ken’s excellent O’Reilly book on internationalization [Note: there is a 40% off print and 50% off ebook coupon in the show.] Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) Images of the bone ideograph that is different between Chinese and Japanese (U+9AA8) can be found on Wikipedia. Other sources of information: Ken’s CJK Type Blog at Adobe Unicode specification, surprisingly readable though large​ An introductory tutorial​Elecia found helpful Open source type faces Source Sans Pro OpenType font family (for UIs) Source Code Pro OpenType font family (for programming environments) Adobe’s open source projects and Ken’s contribution to those: Adobe Blank is a special-purpose OpenType font, making webpages wait to load fonts until they have the correct one AGL and AGLFN (Adobe Glyph List) maps glyph names to Unicode values CMap Resources are used to unidirectionally map character codes CSS Orientation Test are lightweight and special-purpose OpenType fonts that map all Unicode code points to glyphs that indicate their orientation based on the writing direction. Kenten Generic OpenType Font provides glyphs suitable for typesetting emphasis marks in Japanese. Mapping Resources for PDF are used to derive content from PDF files that include CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) information. You can also reach Ken via lunde "at" adobe.com

​Jen Costillo surfaced briefly from her startup-induced blackout to share her wisdom about manufacturing consumer products. They discussed new product development and working from (and making modifications to) Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA. Jen and Elecia pined for this (probably not really a two pack) microscope.

Listener Jim Gf posed an interesting question about how to tell if you are a good embedded software engineer. Producer Christopher White joins Elecia to fail to give an answer. While they mention the embedded C test, they devolve into "why would you ask that question?", impostor syndrome, and methods for dealing with it. (Normally our podcasts are recorded during the day but this one was after a long, fairly grueling day for the co-hosts. You may hear the clink of glass as we drank a nice Pinot Noir from Hahn Winery.) ​

​Jeri Ellsworth joins Elecia to talk about about co-founding Technical Illusions and their virtual and augmented reality product CastAR. Jeri gives an in-depth introduction to virtual reality, augmented reality and motion sickness. They also talk about hardware engineers working with software engineers, the CastAR's Kickstarter, children's toys, and tagging sharks for science.

​Jordan Hart from Digital Media Academy joined Elecia to discuss ways to make science, technology, and engineering fun for kids through Minecraft, Arduino robotics, and music. DMA video: Robotics and Electrical Engineering with Arduino​ Ted talk: The child-driven education which describes the "method of the grandmother" teaching style. Georgia Tech online CS Master's degree Sincere apologies to fans of Gottfried Leibnitz, he had a truly amazing career that went well beyond calculus, read about it on Wikipedia.

Rob Mitchell and Elecia discuss management, what they like about project schedules, and lessons learned on the path from engineer to manager.