Embedded

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: Micronium: a tiny resonator making music 2-stroke gas engine Pinball machine

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: Ferrari World, view from satellite Cloud Atlas (on Netflix) DIY Robotics from Chris Anderson: DIY Robocars Kwabena worked on the CMUCam (version 3) The Amp Hour had a good episode about MicroPython Elecia likes this introduction to linear algebra, matrix operations, and singular value decomposition (SVD) OpenMV on Hackaday.io and for sale at SparkFun The future of OpenMV might include Google’s MobileNets Kwabena gave a talk about the OpenMV manufacturing difficulties at the Hackaday Supercon 2016 and he plans to be there for Supercon 2017 (Pasadena, November 11th and 12th)

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: 30 Pitfalls for Real Time Systems (part 1 and part 2) Rules for defensive C programming Why are you still using C What every computer scientist should know about floating point arithmetic The Power of Ten -- 10 Rules for Writing  Safety Critical Code . 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! Asimov Robot Series Anthropornis (giant penguins) Ice crystal structure Ice streams GeoPebble Propeller Programming (Book) 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). Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories with their online and Sunnyvale store. This is run by Lenore (40: Mwahaha Session) and Wendell (124: Please Don’t Light Yourself On Fire)  Joe Grand (58: Use These Powers For Good) John Schuch (74: All Of Us Came In Sixth) Alvaro Prieto (130: Criminal Training Camp and 200: Oops) Some fiction for you: Black Mirror (Netflix) Feed by Mira Grant [Everything by Mira Grant / Seanan McGuire is on my “devour immediately” list! -El] MiTel SX Technician’s Handbook 

Phoenix Perry (@phoenixperry) spoke with us about physical games. Phoenix is CTO of DoItKits (@DoItKits) and   More about Phoenix: Bot Party Her site: PhoenixPerry.com Goldsmith’s page She enjoyed Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin    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: Catt Small Lynne Bruning (http://etextilelounge.com/) Helen Steer (http://doitkits.com/) Perla Maiolino Rebecca Febrink  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