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Chris and Elecia talk about Murderbot,  LLMs (AI), bikes, control algorithms, and fancy math.  The website with the ecology jobs is willdlabs.net from 501: inside the Armpit of Giraffe with Meredith Palmer and Akiba..  The algorithm Elecia mentioned was from Patent US7370713B1. The Control Bootcamp YouTube series is a great introduction to control systems beyond PIDs There is also a book from the same folks (with matlab and some python code): Data-Driven Science and Engineering: Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control. Finding bad AI interactions is too easy. Copilot PR mess that was discussed. Lawyers letting ChatGPT hallucinate precedents. Fake (hallucinated) citations in a high-profile report on children’s health. Transcript

We spoke with ecologist Dr. Meredith Palmer and embedded engineer Akiba about lions, terror, and technology.  Akiba works for FreakLabs.org on global conservation projects. We talked about their Boombox which Meredith uses to create experiments to map the landscape of fear in predator/prey relationships. While this may look like pranking animals with jump scares, well, there is real science being done.  What would it look like to be smooched by a lioness? (Video) Bird hears lion, decides to go over there (Video) Checking the reflexes of some zebras and other critters (Video) These are lots of fun to watch and you can find the freshest ones and help out science by categorizing some at Snapshot Safari. Or skip to using the data on Lila.science (Snapshot Safari 2024 data). Check out Meredith’s website for more github and Data Dryad links to data and science.  If you want to get involved, Wildlabs.net has discussions around conservation technology. There is also a Slack group by Sara Beery focusing on AI for conservation. Elecia mentioned David Quammen, an author who writes a lot about biology and ecology. And now, a guy gives birth to a botfly.  Transcript

Komathi Sundaram spoke with us about her enthusiasm for tests and test automation. We talked about the different joys of testing vs. development, setting up CI servers, and different kinds of tests including unit, hardware-in-the-loop, and simulation. It may sound dry but we had a lot of fun. Komathi’s site is TheKomSea.com which hosts her blog as well as info. She will be speaking on automated hardware in the loop test processes at the Embedded Online Conference.  Transcript

We spoke with Janet Hansen about the world of professional costumery (with electronics) and becoming an artist. Janet’s business is Enlighted where you can find custom illuminated clothing as well as Janet’s ready-made art. Janet’s personal site is janethansen.com which is more focused on her artistic pursuits. Janet mentioned Seeed’s MSGEQ7. We talked about Janet’s light up pillow with Debra Ansell on 494: All Tech Is Wearable — Embedded. Transcript

At the end of this week’s show, Elecia reads a Winnie the Pooh poem as Cookie Monster death metal. Before that, Chris and Elecia chat about mental health, journaling, personal projects, and listener questions.  Please sign up for the Nordic Giveaway!  You can also sign up for the Embedded newsletter. Maybe now with job postings? Elecia’s journaling notebook is this one on JetPens (which is where she gets her nice pens and some of her stickers and washi tape).  From discussing some listener messages, we mentioned: Matt Keeter’s talk on debuggability in production where you don’t have access to the system that is faulting (video and slides) Letter boards (in the Adirondacks), see those in action here Wokwi simulator is a great place to get more embedded experience without buying all the kits. Christopher has said that there will not, definitely not, under any circumstances, be a whole death metal album of Winnie the Pooh poems. Elecia is practicing anyway.  Transcript

OpenMV has a new Kickstarter so CEO Kwabena Agyeman chatted with us about more powerful (and smaller!) programmable cameras.  See OpenMV’s site for their existing cameras. See their (already funded!) kickstarter page for the super powerful N6 and the ridiculously small AE3. Note that OpenMV still is committed to open source. See their github if you want to know more. Edge AI is the idea of putting intelligence in the devices (instead of in the cloud). There is an advocacy and education foundation called Edge AI Foundation. This organization was formerly the TinyML Foundation. Edge Impulse and Roboflow are companies that aid in creating and training AI models that can be put on devices.  ARM talks about their Ethos-U55 NPU (and how to write software for it). Transcript

Professor Shimon Schocken spoke with us about teaching computer science from NAND logic gates to arithmetic units, micro assembly, virtual machines, compilers, operating systems, and the Tetris games. We also talk about good design, good interfaces, and good tests. Shimon’s book is Elements of Computing Systems and the website with the course lecture notes, slides, videos, simulators, and everything you need is nand2tetris.org.  Shimon mentioned his work with teaching math, that is www.matific.com. You can find out more about Shimon’s other projects on his site shimonschocken.com (including his fascinating TED talk: The self-organizing computer course). Shimon’s co-author is Noam Nisan who also wrote about understanding logic systems (look, anytime we can bring up Gödel's incompleteness theorems, we will). We talked about Tim Bell’s CS Unplugged, teaching computer science concepts without a computer. It comes in Classic and Modern flavors. Transcript

Professor Cindy Harnett spoke to us about new and different sensors and actuators, primarily designed for soft robotics and fabricated with relatively low cost materials. Cindy is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Louisville where she runs the Harnett Lab. The papers we discussed are here. You can find a longer list of Cindy’s papers on Google Scholar. The video of the SESAME actuator is especially interesting. Transcript

Debra Ansell ed us to talk about finding friends and exchanging neat gifts, accidentally tricking people into making unmanufacutable boards, and happy, blinking lights. Debra is usually known by the moniker GeekMomProjects (also her website is geekmomprojects.com). She has been writing for Make Magazine.  Debra won one of the SuperCon badge add-on awards so her poseable Bendy SAO will be available at SuperCon Europe.  Some other things we mentioned: Seeed Studio XIAO board Adafruit QT Py Debra’s Remoticon talk about PCB structures Martin Oehler is Maketvee on YouTube and Mastodon Janet Hansen is on Mastodon and has an incredible Enlightened Designs wearables website. #makergiftexchange on your favorite social media platform And some events that promise to have lots of LEDs: Teardown 2025 | Crowd Supply (Jun ‘25) Portland Winter Light Festival (Feb ‘25) Transcript

Elecia and Chris talk with each other about the state of Chris’ mind, what makes an embedded developer stand out, “LEGO block” based design, unit tests, and astronomy. Whew! Elecia was recently on the Changelog podcast, talking about the world of embedded systems. Chris has been working with Micropython (we talked with Damien George about Micropython on episode 456). He’s using a Pyboard to start, but is looking to move on to this board from Sparkfun. Wikipedia has a nice reference on what the pulse-per-second signal is all about. Elecia talked about her experience using CFFI to drive unit tests. She also talked about some facts from Information is Beautiful. Chris’ telescope is the ZWO Seestar S50. There’s also a smaller Seestar S30 now which has a wider field-of-view. Title reference (Chris and Elecia both thoroughly enjoyed The Good Place, the TV show this is taken from.) Transcript

Nathan Jones chatted with us about his proposal for a computer architecture book based on a 4-bit computer.  Nathan found the 4-bit computer in the Hackaday SuperCon 2022 badge and was amazed by some of the ideas that folks implemented (see SuperCon Badge Hacking Awards Ceremony). Nathan spoke at Hackaday SuperCon 2023 on the processor architecture, highlighting some of his ideas for a book. If you’d like to try your hand at the badge, find it on Nathan’s Voja4 Tindie page.  Nathan also spoke recently at the Embedded Online Conference (Building a Simple CLI, OOP in C, and The Power of a Look-up Table) and the Teardown Conference (Making Your Own MCU Boards and Building a Simple CLI). If you have an idea you’d like to propose, check out O’Reilly’s proposal for a book or class. While you may not go with them, the proposal is a good place to get all of your ideas down. We mentioned a few other computer architecture books as competitors for Nathan’s proposed book: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson  Introduction to Computing Systems: From bits & gates to C & beyond by Yale N. Patt and Sanjay J. Patel The Elements of Computing Systems, by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken (MIT Press) with ing material and simulator on nand2tetris. Nathan also did a survey of the Embedded Slack community. You can gain access by becoming a Patreon or Kofi er. Transcript

Chris and Elecia spoke with Kirk Pearson about running audio-electronic-art workshops, interesting sounds, and their book Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos.  Find the book and a whole kit of parts on the Dogbotic Merch page. A few clicks from there you can find the Workshop List (don’t forget the coupon in the show audio).  We also mentioned The Thing (a sneaky listening device), Elliot Williams’ writing on CMOS synthesizers (a series called Logic-Noise) and the videos of Sebastian Tomczak (YouTube: littlescalemusic). Transcript

Nikolaus Correll spoke with us about robots, teaching robotics, and writing books about robots.  Nikolaus is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, see his lab website (or his Wikipedia page). We discussed Nikolaus’ Introduction to Robotics with Webots Specialization Coursera course (or YouTube Playlist). These go along with his Introduction to Autonomous Robots (which can be compiled from source from github). Masters of Computer Science online via University of Colorado and Georgia Tech. While the Arcbotics’ Sparki is no longer in production, Nikolaus also mentioned the Amazon Racer. Transcript

Chris and Elecia discuss her origami art show, ponder PRs for solo developers, attempt to explain GDB debugging, and make a to-do list for getting rid of Kanga. Elecia is having an Origami Octopus Garden art show at the Aptos Public Library for the month of November, 2024. The postcard ment is below. There are more pictures on her Instagram (@elecia_white). The python tessellation generator is here. Memfault’s Interrupt Debugging Firmware with GDB post is a much more considered explanation of GDB and includes pointers to other resources (including using Python with GDB). Transcript

Andrienne Braganza Tacke spoke with us about her book Looks Good To Me: Constructive Code Reviews. It is about how to make code reviews more useful, effective, and congenial.  Adrienne’s book is available now as an ebook at manning.com or a paper copy later in the year (Amazon link). Check out the example Team Working Agreement from Appendix A. Adrienne’s personal website is adrienne.io. Transcript

Chris and Elecia chat about simulated robots, portents in the sky, the futility of making plans, and grad school.  A problem with mics led us to delay the show with Shimon Schoken from Nand2Tetris (co-author of Elements of The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles). Look for that later in the year. Elecia is playing with Webots, a robotics physics simulator. Simpler than ROS’s Gazebo, it also can run in an online mode where you can run it on a browser, selecting between many different robots.  Chris talked about processing his photos of Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) using PixInsight and Siril. Then we talked about grad school (including Georgia Tech’s reasonably affordable CS Master’s Degree). Tony sent in this insect detector: Mothbox. If you want links like this or de facto letters to the editor, please sign up for the Embedded.fm newsletter. Transcript

Antoine van Gelder spoke to us about making digital musical instruments, USB, and FPGAs.  Antoine works for Great Scott Gadgets, specifically on the Cynthion USB protocol analysis tool that can be used in conjunction with Python and GSG’s FaceDancer to act as a new USB device.  While bonding over MurderBot Diaries was a given, Antoine also mentioned NAND2Tetris which Elecia countered with The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles, the book that covers the NAND2Tetris material. Transcript

Alan Blackwell spoke with us about the lurking dangers of large language models, the magical nature of artificial intelligence, and the future of interacting with computers.  Alan is the author of Moral Codes: Deg Alternatives to AI  which you can read in its pre-book form here: https://moralcodes.pubpub.org/ Alan’s day job is as a Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge University department of Computer Science and Technology. See his research interests on his Cambridge University page. (Also, given as homework in the newsletter, we didn’t directly discuss Jo Walton’s 'A Brief Backward History of Automated Eloquence', a playful history of automated text generation, written from a perspective in the year 2070.) Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk to each other about setting aside memory in a linker file, printing using your debugger, looking around a new code base, pointers as optimization, choosing processors, skill trees and merit badges. Elecia’s Creating Chaos and Hard Faults talk and slides. STM32 Application Note AN4989 microcontroller debug toolbox includes semihosting. Memfault’s Interrupt blog has a good Semihosting post. Elecia and Steph’s Embedded Skills Tree. A far more detailed one pointed out by a listener: A comprehensive roap for aspiring Embedded Systems Engineers, featuring a curated list of learning resources.  The most influential book Elecia has never read is You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook for Grown-Up Girls.  Transcript

Rick Altherr spoke with us about high-speed control, complicated systems, and making quantum computers. If you want to know more about building quantum computers, take a listen to Rick’s MacroFab episode: The Nuts and Bolts of Quantum Computing. If you want to make your own quantum circuit simulator, it only takes 27 lines of Python: A Quantum Circuit Simulator in 27 Lines of Python. What about if you actually want to know about quantum computing? Rick suggests Quantum computing for the very curious while we look back at Embedded.fm 344: Superposition, Entanglement, and Interference with Kitty Yeung, talking about her Quantum Computing Comic book and Hackaday lecture series.  Rick works for IonQ where they do trapped-ion quantum computing (there are different physics methods for making ions dance to the tune of quantum computing). If you want to talk to Rick, maybe to get his advice about your resume or career prospects, he sets aside a few hours each week to share his wisdom: https://calendly.com/mxshift You can also find Rick on Mastodon and LinkedIn. He was also the guest on 311: Attack Other People's Refrigerators about security hacking and mentoring. Transcript