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I am Elecia White alongside Christopher White. We’re here to chat about the interests, careers, and lives of engineers, artists, educators and makers. Our diverse guest list includes names you may have heard and engineers working quietly in the trenches. Either way, they are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and inspiring. We’d love to share our enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM).

413: Puppy-Like Glee 05/19/2022

413: Puppy-Like Glee Chris and Elecia chat about practice, software quality, and empathy for seemingly unmotivated team members. Elecia is teaching another cohort of Making Embedded Systems in the fall, starting late August. There will be reminders between now and then but if you want to sign up, . Support us on ! /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/23171456

412: Inductors Don't Have Feelings 05/12/2022

412: Inductors Don't Have Feelings Tom Anderson returned to the show to describe how transistors and passives work. We discuss everything from vacuum tubes to diodes to transistors (PNP and NPN) to resistors and capacitors. We search for synonyms among the confusing terminology of cathodes, plates, emitters, anodes, grids, bases, and collectors. This was a tech heavy episode so little bit of brushing up on terms may be useful before (or after): . /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/23095160

411: Batteries Get Upset 05/05/2022

411: Batteries Get Upset Ethan Slattery joined us to talk about animals, animal trackers, and how they work. Ethan works for . They use the for data transfer. He was previously at and worked with as an undergraduate. Ethan is also known as CrustyAuklet on and . He also has an . Things mentioned in the show you might want to know more about: is a streaming YouTube channel from an ROV exploring the oceans. They have periodic dives where you can ask scientists about what they are seeing, while they are seeing it. Watch discoveries happen in real-time. Or watch the highlight reels on . Ze Frank also has a channel about animals called True Facts that it is … not as scientifically minded. And sometimes NSFW. Start with the . (Note he did a ). by Jennifer Ackerman Penguin, , , , you might have heard about those but what about the cassowary? , , and . /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/23022350

305: Humans Have a Terrible Spec Sheet (Repeat) 04/28/2022

305: Humans Have a Terrible Spec Sheet (Repeat) Amanda “w0z” Wozniak spoke with us about her career through biomedical engineering and startups. Amanda contributed a chapter to . (A book we spoke with Alicia Gibb about in #.) Amanda’s chapter was titled Design Process: How to Get from Nothing to Something. For more information about the companies we discussed, check out . /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22946867

410: Emacs From the Future 04/21/2022

410: Emacs From the Future Chris and Elecia chat about tools, interrupts, and general happenings. Thank you to for supporting the show! The part that was not guessed was an RF FET: . Elecia found (Eric Styger)’s tutorials on Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M (). Embedded has a where you can get access to the Slack group. The book club is starting by Alan Cohen. Wokwi Raspberry Pi Pico projects from Elecia: and Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry and Tyler Hoffman from Memfault are kicking off a quarterly embedded discussion panel. This month is about building embedded systems at scale using device metrics: Jonathan Beri from Golioth created instructions on . . . Thank you to Newark for sponsoring this episode of Embedded! /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22872443

409: A Better World 04/14/2022

409: A Better World Dr. Shirley Davis spoke with us about her book: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion For Dummies. Dr. Davis is a speaker and consultant on diversity, equity, and inclusion topics; her website is . Dr. Davis’ books include: /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22800161

295: In the Key of Lime (Repeat) 04/07/2022

295: In the Key of Lime (Repeat) This week we talk about CircuitPython with Adafruit's Kattni Rembor and Scott Shawcroft. The suggested first board is with LEDs, sensors, and buttons. CircuitPython is also available for many other boards including the (NRF52832). For a basic introduction take a look at and . To dig a little deeper, check out the many resources in . The whole thing is open source so . If you are thinking about contributing (or just want some fun chats), get in touch on the CircuitPython channel of the Adafruit Discord server: Many of the language’s design choices favor ease-of-use over ready-for-production. Imagine teaching an intro to programming class without worrying what computers will be used or how to get compilers installed on everyone’s machines before time runs out. One final note: Kattni did a project that gave us the show title: . After we finished recording, Chris asked her why she didn’t add a kiwi fruit to her mix… Kattni explained she had limes and they were small. Chris only wanted a different fruit so she could rename it Piano in the Kiwi of Lime. It is always sad when we stop recording too early. /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22722020

408: Room In Your Heart for Your Robot 03/31/2022

408: Room In Your Heart for Your Robot Machine learning engineer and science fiction author S. B. Divya joined us to talk about artificial intelligence, robotics, and humanity. Divya’s first full-length book is which has been nominated for a (as was her novella ). You can find more about Divya on her website () or on her . Divya also co-hosted , a podcast of science fiction stories. /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22643006

407: Boards Are Like Sandwiches 03/24/2022

407: Boards Are Like Sandwiches Mihir Shah of Royal Circuits joined us to talk about how PCBs are fabricated and how companies are funded. Mihir was CEO of InspectAR before they were acquired by Cadence. Mihir works for and runs a newsletter called We talked about InspectAR on with Liam Cadigan. This episode is sponsored by , a leading international distributor of industrial and electronic components. From design and testing to production and maintenance, discover why so many choose to partner with Newark! /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22562759

406: R2D2 Is a Trash Can 03/17/2022

406: R2D2 Is a Trash Can Jorvon Moss (Odd Jayy) joined us to talk about making robots, steampunk aesthetics, uploading consciousness to AIs, and the importance of drawing. You can find Jay on Twitter () and Instagram (). He’s been moving his Hackster projects over to Digikey’s Maker.io space: . Jay’s projects are collected . Elecia brought up the science fiction book by S. B. Divya. Jay returned with Martha Well’s . Jay mentioned , open source voice assistant. Jay was interviewed by Make Magazine (). He was on the cover of the magazine; the was heartwarming. /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22485875

405: Bacta Tank for Your Brain 03/11/2022

405: Bacta Tank for Your Brain Chris and Elecia talk about burnout, a SPI + RTOS bug, newsletters, receiving feedback, Elecia’s class, and listener projects. Elecia’s is starting a new cohort on March 19th. She gave a live talk related to the class about looking beneath the surface of Arduino (). She’s excited about the . Want more interesting email? is a weekly email about engineering, infrastructure, and manufacturing news Elecia was by which is a weekly email about manufacturing and engineering Embedded.fm has about topics related to the engineering focused podcast (and transcript) Chris Lott wrote about episode with Reinhard Keil. Elecia enjoyed by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. Serial Wombat peripheral expander for Arduino will be on soon Chris wanted machine readable datasheets, listener Nick responds with . Infineon (previously Cypress) PSoC () is a chip/FPGA thing. We talked with Patrick Kane about it in episode /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22411271

404: Uppercase A, Lowercase R M 03/04/2022

404: Uppercase A, Lowercase R M Reinhard Keil joined us to talk about creating the Keil compiler, the 8051 processor, Arm’s CMSIS, and the new cloud-based Keil Studio IDE. is a new free-for-non-commercial use, not-code-size restricted version of the Keil compiler (+ everything else). is a set of open source components for use with Arm processors. The signal processing and neural net components are optimized for speedy use. The SVD and DAP components are used by tool vendors so . Keil Studio is Arm’s new cloud-based IDE with a debugger that connects to boards on your desk: . Reinhard talks more about the advantages of cloud-based development in . Arm Virtual Hardware has multiple integrations, the official product page is . The MDK integration and nifty examples are described in . Reinhard mentioned the processor for neural networks. /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22330700

403: Engineers Are a Difficult People 02/25/2022

403: Engineers Are a Difficult People Shawn Hymel spoke to us about creating education videos and written tutorials; marketing by and for engineers; and bowties. You can find Shawn teaching FPGAs, RTOSs and other interesting topics on . Shawn also has two embedded (free!). Or start at his personal site: where you can find written tutorials like . Shawn talked about by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. Macmillan. He referenced by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne Elecia enjoyed by Jason Barron Embedded has: A where you can support us and get into the Slack community that sends you a weekly email about the show and little notes that you can use to look things up or follow along if the speakers are unclear If you’d like to help the show grow, please write a review. Or share it with a friend. Or send it to your school’s Dean of Computer Science and/or Engineering and tell them it should be part of the curriculum to see what engineering lives and careers are like. Or send it to your company’s Director of New Hires and say it is important for techy folks to stay current and engaged in embedded systems. /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22248056

402: We Are a Lazy Species 02/18/2022

402: We Are a Lazy Species Chris Svec of iRobot and Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry join Christopher and Elecia to talk about the hows and whys of estimating software schedules.. The article that started the discussion was . You can participate in these sorts of discussions on the Embedded Slack Channel by supporting . On Phillip’s you can find a , hundreds of , and . Their current focus is developing two new courses: and . There are also many . /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22175066

278: Bricks’ Batteries Last Forever (Repeat) 02/11/2022

278: Bricks’ Batteries Last Forever (Repeat) Matthew Liberty shared good advice for lowering power. We talk about different ways to measure current (Matt has a ) and things software can do to decrease power consumption. Sleeping is critical, of course, as is choosing your clock speed and setting the GPIOs to good states. Everything is fine until you start getting into the microamps, then your multimeter measurements may start to fail you. (EEvblog explains why in his .) Eventually, you may want to measure nanoamp sleep states along with amp-consuming wake states. Matt’s is a tool to do just that (), automatically moving between 9 orders of magnitude of dynamic range and graphing the results on your computer. Matthew’s consulting company is . We mentioned Colin O’Flynn’s which uses differential power analysis for security attacks. We also talked about Jacob Beningo’s post on . Find Matt on Twitter as . Elecia is giving away a chapter of her O’Reilly book, . It is Chapter 10: Reducing Power Consumption. Hit the if you want a copy. /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22098107

401: Oil and Water 02/04/2022

401: Oil and Water Miro Samek joins us to discuss designing systems, state machines, and teaching courses. Miro’s company is Quantum Leaps () which provides commercial licensing for QP Real-Time Embedded Frameworks. It is an open source project, the code can be found on github: One of the key concepts is an which aids in real-time system development, especially in the areas of state machines and concurrency. Miro’s (amazing) Modern Embedded System Programming series can be found on . You can also find Miro on Twitter: /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/22017866

400: A Really Long Time 01/28/2022

400: A Really Long Time Christopher and Elecia celebrate their 400th episode by discussing what has (and hasn’t) changed in embedded systems over the last 9 years /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21927431

399: Hey, What's Going On? 01/21/2022

399: Hey, What's Going On? Jen Costillo joined us to talk about voice acting, reverse engineering, podcasting, and dance. Jen’s podcast is the , found in all your usual podcast places. Jen and her co-host Alvaro were on . Find Jen on Twitter at (also and ). has her blog and is her site devoted to dance (including the mentioned about dancers and the pandemic). by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn Jen is studying voice-overs at Jen has been on the show many times in the past. Some of our favorites include about security and privacy about movies that influenced their path to engineering about interviewing about RF and manufacturing consumer products about C keywords /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21843503

398: Clocks Get Into Everything 01/14/2022

398: Clocks Get Into Everything Tom Anderson explains radio frequency electronics (RF). Elecia and Christopher try to keep up. We also took a detour into bass guitar electronics. One confusing jargon part is that radio power (in dBm) is discussed as though it is voltage. For example, 10 dBM is 2V peak-to-peak; there is an implied 50 ohm resistor in the P=V*V/R calculation. The the for more about decibel-milliwatts. Tom talked about dollhouses, aka Smith charts (). (We also talked about Bode plots ().) Light travels about 1 foot in 1 nanosecond (11.8 inches, 30 cm). Admiral Grace Hopper is well known for . The guitar company Tom mentioned working with is . Find Tom’s writing on and the . He is on Twitter as and was previously on . /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21769556

290: Rule of Thumbs (Repeat) 01/07/2022

290: Rule of Thumbs (Repeat) We spoke with Phillip Johnston () of about consulting, writing, and learning. In the Embedded Artistry , there is a list of Phillip’s favorite articles as well as his most popular articles. Some of Phillip’s favorites include: We also talked about code reviews and . The Embedded Artistry newsletter is a good way to keep up with embedded topics. You can subscribe to it at /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21701486

397: Owl 12/31/2021

397: Owl Chris and Elecia ring in the new year with a discussion of projects, hobbies, origami, DMA, music, and the new-and-improved Embedded.fm newsletter... Pepto Bismol can be converted to metal bismuth () which can be turned into . Chris liked his new book, by Piers Bizony. Elecia liked hers, by Ekaterina Lukasheva (Kickstarter) Elecia’s will have a second cohort starting in March 2022. Sign up for the newsletter if you want an announcement (at the bottom of the page). /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21637775

293: Skateboard Tricks (Repeat) 12/23/2021

293: Skateboard Tricks (Repeat) of spoke with us about engineering, education, and business. Some new boards we talked about include the and (which also has a ). , an open and tiny USB stack from Hathach. In addition to the many excellent tutorials there are some interesting business related posts on : and Want to get more involved with the extensive, wonderful, and supportive Adafruit community? Join their or on Wednesdays 7:30pm (ET) followed by at 8pm. /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21590696

396: Untangle the Mess 12/17/2021

396: Untangle the Mess Uri Shaked shows us Wokwi, his board and processor simulator. We checked out Arduino code in GDB and then looked at his simulator for the Cortex-M0 Raspberry Pi Pico. First, you should totally look at . As Christopher noted, signing up for an account shows you many other things. Then you can go look at the processors written in TypeScript in Uri’s Github repos: . Find Wokwi on Twitter (, Uri is ). You can also find Wokwi on . Uri live-coded development of the Pico’s RP2040, it is on . You can find out more about the RP2040 or the AVR core in the ATMega family by taking his free courses on Hackaday: (Scroll down for courses.) Uri’s homepage is . You can find there as well as some of his other projects. He has a as well as at . /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21512675

395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong 12/10/2021

395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong Tyler Hoffman joined us to talk about developing developer tools and how to drag your organization out of the stone age. You can use GDB and Python together? . And it will change your debugging habits. (You can find many other great posts from including one about .) Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault (), a company that works on IoT dashboards and embedded tools. On Twitter, Tyler is and Memfault is . Control-R is a history search in shell commands (magical!). The fuzzy search tool discussed is (probably even more magical!). XKCD comic referenced: /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21437939

394: Being Four-Year-Olds 12/03/2021

394: Being Four-Year-Olds Professor HyunJoo Oh of GeorgiaTech spoke to us about paper machines, paper mechanical movements, paper sensors, paper tiny Jansen Strandbeests, and paper art. HyunJoo is a . She is the director of the group. Some of the projects we spoke about can be found on the . has demonstrations of different mechanical movements as well as FoldMecha which shows you what cardboard you need to cut out to make your own mechanical movement, including ( (wikipedia) made the Strandbeest). HyunJoo recommends two books for exploring further: The book as a way to explore more mechanical movements by Rob Ives With , HyunJoo is exploring sensors that can be made with copper tape on paper. The introduction video: /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21360884

393: Don’t Drive My Baby Off the Table 11/19/2021

393: Don’t Drive My Baby Off the Table Professor Carlotta Berry from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology joined us to talk about robotics, PID tuning, engineering education, ethics, her book, and standing up in front of a classroom. Carlotta’s book is . She has a as well as a and a consulting site (). She is an advocate for . On Twitter, Carlotta Berry has a personal account () and a professional account (). She is also the coordinator. An explanation of with pros and cons. /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21214700

286: Twenty Cans of Gas (Repeat) 11/12/2021

286: Twenty Cans of Gas (Repeat) Colin O’Flynn () spoke with us about security research, power analysis, and hotdogs. Colin’s company is and you can see his video as an intro to his training course. Or you can and go through his extensive tutorials on the Some FPGA resource mentioned: (Python!) /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21137831

392: It Was C++ the Whole Time! 11/04/2021

392: It Was C++ the Whole Time! Debra Ansell joined us to talk about making light up accessories, patenting ideas, and sharing projects. Debra’s project website is , she’s @geekmomprojects on and . Her github repo uses the same ID: . We talked about using coin cell batteries as switches. Many other accessories do this but one of our favorites was the . Debra’s company is . She holds patents and . /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/21056780

391: The Lesser of Two Weevils 10/28/2021

391: The Lesser of Two Weevils Chris and Elecia chat about their current projects and ideas. Elecia is teaching . The course is based on her book with lectures to extend the information, quizzes, homework, mentors, synchronous classes, and a final project. Starting Nov 13th, the first cohort is full but you can join the waiting list. The second cohort starts in February. Elecia is also giving ! It is Friday Nov 19 and Saturday Nov 20. Tickets are free, ! Jeremy Fielding will be the keynote speaker on Saturday. Hopefully, she’ll have figured out how to use spaghetti sharing as a metaphor for stacks and heaps by then. The EP for Chris’ 12AX7 album is coming out soon: #ihateeverything. The cover art is generated with a GAN from Terrible Halloween jokes are collected on Twitter under the tag . If you’d like to support Embedded, check out . If you’d like to sponsor a show, click the . /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/20976683

390: Irresponsible At the Time 10/21/2021

390: Irresponsible At the Time Tyler Hoffman joined us to discuss the issues associated with embedded devices at consumer scale. We talked about firmware update, device management, and remote diagnostics for millions of devices. Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault (), a company that works on IoT dashboards and embedded tools. (We will invite Tyler back to talk about embedded tools but someone was preparing a lecture on firmware update and device management.) Tyler writes for Memfault’s which has excellent advice including the mentioned article about . You can also find him and Memfault on Twitter: , . Elecia is teaching , a high-quality MOOC with video lectures, quizzes, exercises, synchronous discussions classes, and a portfolio-worthy final project. The alpha cohort starts in early November and the course will run again in Q1 2022. /episode/index/show/makingembeddedsystems/id/20898899

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