66: As Simple as Possible

Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition came out today! Chris and Elecia talk about the changes, the writing, but not the eldritch horror. Then we talk about pianos and origami. 

The electronic version is available now on Amazon, ebooks.com, Google Play and where you get your ebooks. The paper copy will be out in about two weeks, you can preorder now. It is also available on the O’Reilly Learning System, here is a  30-day Trial.

See the Embedded.fm Origami and Flex PCBs newsletter, sign up for future newsletters here. 

Memfault is hosting its first launch week of the year! On Tuesday, March 12th, Memfault CEO François Baldassari will showcase how to evaluate the health and performance of your embedded devices clearly within Memfault's observability platform. Join the webinar to discover how simple it is to monitor three necessary device measures: stability, battery, and connectivity. Register today!

Where electronics meets music, there is a board called Daisy. Created by ElectroSmith, Andrew Ikenberry, the goal of the board is to teach computers to sing. Andrew joined us to talk about music, audio processing, instruments, product design, and electronic manufacturing. 

See the Electrosmith website, specifically the Daisy Seed. The electro-smith github repository is extensive (with many Daisy Examples). Also see their YouTube channel. Electrosmith is offering 5% off until mid-March for folks with the coupon code mentioned in the show.

We mentioned a number of synths but the CHOMPI is particularly nifty.

Daisy Bell - Wikipedia (and where you might have heard that before (and if that doesn’t give “teach computers to sing” a creepy vibe, I don’t know what will)).

Transcript

Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.

Helen Leigh joined us to talk about putting together conferences (including Teardown 2024), indie hardware producers (including via Crowd Supply), and building communities.

Teardown will be June 21-23 in Portland, OR, USA. More information about attending or presenting. Early bird tickets are available for a limited time! Teardown is put on by Crowd Supply, a company that helps hardware companies launch products.

Hardware Happy Hour Portland is a regular meetup that Helen organizes. Helen will be hosting a meetup in Oakland, CA, USA on Feb 15: Oakland Sound Hackers. She is also hosting a San Francisco, CA meetup on March 6: Open Hardware Happy Hour. 

Helen’s personal site is helenleigh.me. She has been on the show twice before in 355: Favorite Ways to Make Noises and 261: Blowing Their Fragile Little Minds.

Transcript

Memfault is making software the most reliable part of the IoT with its device reliability platform that enables teams to be more proactive with remote debugging, monitoring and OTA update capabilities. Try Memfault's new sandbox demo at demo.memfault.com. Embedded.fm listeners receive 25% off their first-year contract with Memfault by booking a demo here: https://go.memfault.com/demo-request-embedded

Chris and Elecia chat with each other about motor encoder reading methods, conferences coming up, soldering irons, schematic reviews, looking for a new job, and general life. 

Some conferences coming up in the embedded space:

• Embedded Online, April 29-May 4, virtual (Elecia will be speaking)

• Open Hardware Summit in May 3-4, Montreal, Canada

• Embedded World in April 9-11 in Nuremburg, Germany

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories was purchased by Bantam Tools!

Starter soldering irons? It seemed like small pen-style ones were more popular than big soldering stations. See the Adafruit USB C Powered Soldering Iron - Adjustable Temperature Pen-Style - TS80P. Or for much less (but you can write your own firmware!), the Pinecil. And one vote for the RT Soldering Pen on Tindie because it uses Weller RT tips (which are more expensive than the soldering pen but much less expensive than the Weller station that uses the RT tips). 

Embedded Artistry has excellent advice for the role of the firmware in schematic reviews. 

Adafruit Playgrounds looks like a neat place to write up your project. 

Transcript

Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.

Anders Nielsen joined us to talk about why the 6502 is the best processor. 

Anders also sells 65uino kits on his store: imania.dk. For more explanation of what they are, how they work, attaching peripherals, and programming in assembly, look at Anders’ YouTube channel @AndersNielsenAA, read his blog on abnielsen.com, or read about it on its Hackaday.io project page.**

We also mentioned Ben Eater’s 6502 Kit, Adrian's Digital Basement - YouTube, and Rodnay Zaks’ Programming the 6502.

** Anders was a two time semi-finalist for the Hackaday Challenge but we didn’t talk about that. Here is his Hackaday page.

Transcript

Memfault is making software the most reliable part of the IoT with its device reliability platform that enables teams to be more proactive with remote debugging, monitoring and OTA update capabilities. Try Memfault's new sandbox demo at demo.memfault.com. Embedded.fm listeners receive 25% off their first-year contract with Memfault by booking a demo here: https://go.memfault.com/demo-request-embedded.

Chris and Elecia talk about cars, fleeting moments of fame, their year, and the sorry state of tools in the embedded space.

Chris became internet famous for asking a car dealership’s chatbot (powered by ChatGPT) to generate Python code for fluid dynamics problems. After this, someone else asked the chatbot to sell a car for $1. 

Pass the Bricks is an organization that takes Lego bricks and turns them into sets for kids who don’t have any. Speaking of re-use, contact the show if you’d like to get in touch with Nelson.

Chris is on 4 tracks on Flavigula’s album Nine Sided Die. He also enjoyed putting together an EMSL Bulbdial clock kit. 

Elecia will be speaking at the Embedded Online Conference.

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Ralph Hempel spoke with us about the development of Lego Mindstorms from hacking the initial interface to running Debian Linux as well as programming Mindstorms in Python. Happy 25th birthday to Lego Mindstorms!

Pybricks is a MicroPython based coding environment that works across all Lego PoweredUp hubs and on the latest Mindstorms elements. The creators are David Lechner and Laurens Valk.

Ralph was the first person to boot a full Debian Linux distro on the brick, see EV3Dev, a Debian Linux for Lego Mindstorms EV3. 

BrickLink was originally a site for third party resellers of new and used Lego sets and elements. The site was purchased by the Lego Group a few years ago. It's still a great place to buy individual parts - for example a 4 port PoweredUp hub to run the new PyBricks on :-)

ReBrickable is a site dedicated to taking off-the-shelf Lego sets, and creating something new with the set. In particular see the MOCs Designed by LUCAMOCS, fantastic Technic vehicles as well as interesting designs for vehicle subsystems.

Yoshihito ISOGAWA - YouTube is an absolute genius at coming up with practical applications of new LEGO Elements. Ralph recommends his books as “awesome to read”.

LEGO uses 18 Cucumbers to build real Log House 

Ralph highly recommends Test Driven Development for Embedded C  by James Grenning (who has been on the show: 270: Broccoli is Good Too, 109: Resurrection of Extreme Programming, and 30: Eventually Lightning Strikes).

Origami Simulator and Elecia’s origami generating python code on github

Transcript

Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.

Yanina Bellini Saibene joined us to discuss teaching, localization, barriers to learning coding, and global communities. 

Yani works on Teach Tech Together (https://teachtogether.tech/) with Greg Wilson. It is a fantastic resource if you are learning to teach. It is available in English and Spanish. She also works on The Carpentries which teaches coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. 

Yani has a site (yabellini.netlify.app) that includes the courses she has online (for free). She is also the community manager of rOpenSci and is part of R-Ladies.

You can find Yani on fosstodon.org/@yabellini.

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Kevin Lannen is an embedded systems engineer making powered wheelchairs safer. This sounded interesting to us.

Kevin works at LUCI Mobility (luci.com). Check out their tear jerker introduction video as well as technical description of over-the-air update concerns on smart wheelchairs. We also talked about the app that goes with the system: LUCI View.

You can find Kevin on Twitter (@kevlan) and LinkedIn.

Go Baby Go - The Adaptive Sports Connection

Transcript

Memfault is making software the most reliable part of the IoT with its device reliability platform that enables teams to be more proactive with remote debugging, monitoring and OTA update capabilities. Try Memfault's new sandbox demo at demo.memfault.com. Embedded.fm listeners receive 25% off their first-year contract with Memfault by booking a demo here: https://go.memfault.com/demo-request-embedded