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 diver...
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 Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy MCUs and wireless SoCs since the early 2010s, and they offer solutions for low-power Wi-Fi and global Cellular IoT as well. If you plan on developing robust and battery-operated applications, check out their hardware, software, tools, and services. On academy.nordicsemi.com, you’ll find Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular IoT courses, and the Nordic DevZone community covers technical questions: devzone.nordicsemi.com. Oh, and don’t forget to enter Nordic Semiconductor’s giveaway contest! Just fill out the entrance form, and you're in the running. Good luck!
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1:01:57
494: All Tech Is Wearable
Debra Ansell joined 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 upcoming events that promise to have lots of LEDs: Teardown 2025 | Crowd Supply (Jun ‘25) Portland Winter Light Festival (Feb ‘25) Transcript Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
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1:15:57
493: Put the Peeps in the Chili Pot
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 Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy MCUs and wireless SoCs since the early 2010s, and they offer solutions for low-power Wi-Fi and global Cellular IoT as well. If you plan on developing robust and battery-operated applications, check out their hardware, software, tools, and services. On academy.nordicsemi.com, you’ll find Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular IoT courses, and the Nordic DevZone community covers technical questions: devzone.nordicsemi.com. Oh, and don’t forget to enter Nordic Semiconductor’s giveaway contest! Just fill out the entrance form, and you're in the running. Good luck! Here’s one of the astrophotos Chris has taken: The Horsehead and Flame nebulae in Orion taken from a Seestar S50
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1:20:34
492: Octopus Army
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 supporting 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 supporter. Transcript
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1:09:51
491: Oscillators Oscillating Other Oscillators
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 Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
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).
New Zealand