475: Stuffed Animal or Colleague
Embedded
Chris and Elecia talk about the Embedded Online Conference, their experience learning Zephyr, and some listener questions. Elecia will be presenting on at the , Apr 29 - May 3, 2024. Some other talks that look interesting: Use the EMBEDDEDFM coupon for a discount (or if your whole team is going, check out the ). Elecia’s book (Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition) is shipping ( or ). is pretty amazing.
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474: It's All Chaos and Horror
Embedded
Logic gates and origami? Professor Inna Zakharevich joined us to talk about Turing complete origami crease patterns. We started talking about Turing completeness which led to a Conway’s Game of Life-like 2D cellular automaton called (Wikipedia) which can be implemented with logic gates (AND, OR, NOT). These logic gates can be implemented as creases in paper (with the direction of the crease indicating 0 or 1). The paper describing the proof is called Flat Origami is Turing Complete ( and ). Quanta Magazine has a summary article: . also has the crease patterns for the logic...
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473: Math Is Not the Answer
Embedded
Philip Koopman joined us to talk about how modulo 255 vs 256 makes a huge difference in checksum error detection, how to get the most out of your checksum or CRC, and why understanding how they work is worth the effort. Philip has recently published . He’s better known for as well as his two books about safety and autonomous vehicles: has a number of videos with great visuals to go along with his books. He also has three(!) blogs: (including a ) Currently, Phil is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (). You can follow him on . Elecia read (and give...
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472: Field of Boxes
Embedded
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 , , 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 . See the Embedded.fm , sign up for future newsletters . Memfault is hosting its first launch week of the year! On Tuesday, March 12th, Memfault CEO François Baldassari will...
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471: Bicycle Built For Two
Embedded
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 website, specifically the . The is extensive (with many ). Also see their . 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 is particularly nifty. (and (and if that doesn’t give “teach computers to sing” a...
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470: Upping the Chaos Level
Embedded
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 or . Early bird tickets are available for a limited time! Teardown is put on by , a company that helps hardware companies launch products. is a regular meetup that Helen organizes. Helen will be hosting a meetup in Oakland, CA, USA on Feb 15: . She is also hosting a San Francisco, CA meetup on March 6: . Helen’s personal site is . She has...
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469: Saving the World Is Not a Hobby
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: , April 29-May 4, virtual (Elecia will be speaking) in May 3-4, Montreal, Canada in April 9-11 in Nuremburg, Germany Starter soldering irons? It seemed like small pen-style ones were more popular than big soldering stations. See the . Or for much less (but you can write your own firmware!), the . And one vote for the because it uses Weller RT tips (which...
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468: Designed to Kill All Humans
Embedded
Anders Nielsen joined us to talk about why the 6502 is the best processor. Anders also sells 65uino kits on his store: . For more explanation of what they are, how they work, attaching peripherals, and programming in assembly, look at Anders’ YouTube channel , read his blog on , or read about it on its .** We also mentioned , , and Rodnay Zaks’ . ** Anders was a two time semi-finalist for the Hackaday Challenge but we didn’t talk about that. . Memfault is making software the most reliable part of the IoT with its device reliability platform that enables teams to be more proactive...
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467: Temporary Axolotl
Embedded
Chris and Elecia talk about cars, fleeting moments of fame, their year, and the sorry state of tools in the embedded space. . After this, someone else asked the chatbot to sell a car for $1. 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 . He also enjoyed putting together an . Elecia will be speaking at the .
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466: Attacked by a Goose on the Way to the Office
Embedded
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! 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 , a Debian Linux for Lego Mindstorms EV3. was originally a site for third party resellers of new and used Lego sets and...
info_outlineRalph 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
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