Steve Hinch wrote a book about engineering, innovation, and business. He shares decades of wisdom gleaned from his career at Hewlett-Packard and Agilent as an engineer, manager, marketing director, and general manager. 

Steve’s book is Winning through Innovation: Lessons from the Front Lines of Business. While mostly retired, Steve is an executive consultant, see his website to get in touch: Stephen W. Hinch.  

We also touched on some of Steve’s nature and hiking volumes as well.  While Elecia is reading My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir | Project Gutenberg, Steve suggested works by Edward Abbey might be of interest. 

Elecia and Steve both received copies of Bill Packard’s The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company while at HP.

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Mouser Electronics has a dedicated Empowering Innovation Together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is reshaping engineering—from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance. You’ll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you’re ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

William Griffin spoke to us about hardware-in-the-loop testing, simulation, terminology, learning complex topics, and books.

We don’t usually expand upon the show title but Wikipedia has a rabbit hole called Evil demon so there you go.

Books mentioned:

• Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos

• CMOS Cookbook

• How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character

• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

• Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time (though we then talked about a different Jeffrey Pfeffer book: 7 Rules of Power.

William Griffin and  Bailey Steinfadt (333) have started Spark Embedded, an embedded software and simulation consultancy. 

Transcript

Mouser Electronics has a dedicated Empowering Innovation Together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is reshaping engineering—from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance. You’ll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you’re ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

Chris and Elecia chat about books, courses, alternate podcasts, electronics, statistics, kidnapping Roo, and journaling failures. 

The Embedded Patreon book club is reading Data-Driven Science and Engineering: Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control by Steven L. Brunton, J. Nathan Kutz. PDF book and links to lectures are at databookuw.com. Some recent links of interest:

• Datasaurus dozen: a collection of different small data sets that have the same summary statistics. You can see all the graphs here. From Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors. 

• The I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird YouTube video was really neat, which led to AudioMoth ultrasonic recorders as well as making a $40 bird identifier with an RPi and some software (BirdNET-Pi). 

Chris is taking a course from Dogbotic. See their workshop list. We interviewed Kirk Pearson from Dogbotic on Episode 491.

Transcript

Mouser Electronics has a dedicated Empowering Innovation Together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is reshaping engineering—from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance. You’ll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you’re ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

Dmitry Grinberg joined us to talk about running Linux on small microprocessors (physically small and/or 4-bit). Dmitry does this by emulating a MIPS processor. Boot times vary between minutes and days, depending on the processor. 

Dmitry’s projects are on his website (dmitry.gr) including:

• 8-pin Linux (Cortex-M0+!)

• Linux on an 8-bit micro?

• Linux/4004

Dmitry recommended NandGame, an online game about building up a processor.

We mentioned Eric Schlaepfer of TubeTime. He was on the show on 419: Fission Chips, with EMSL’s Windell Oskay, talking about their book Open Circuits.

Transcript

Mouser Electronics has a dedicated Empowering Innovation Together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is reshaping engineering—from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance. You’ll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you’re ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

We spoke with Peter Griffin about Jumperless Breadboards, no-install GUI development, Excel, and puppies.

Jumperless Breadboard at CrowdSupply

• Colab GUI for Jumperless Breadboard

• Website GUI for Jumperless Breadboard

• Excel GUI for Jumperless Breadboard (though it has some USB DTR issues as noted in the show: Jumperless_V5_GUI (Shared).xlsx. Note Microsoft Datastreamer is a serial interface to Excel 

Teardown 2025 will have talks up soon!

Cory Doctorow wrote about ‘Enshittification’ in Wired. We didn’t bleep the word for this episode since it’s becoming an essential part of tech criticism.

The Flag of Maryland. You know what you did.

Joel Spolsky’s You Suck at Excel

Miso Come Here (Instagram, TikTok) shows puppy communication buttons.

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Mouser’s Empowering Innovation Together hub dives into all sorts of topics like renewable energy, energy-efficient systems, and sustainable design. Whether you’re looking for the latest in clean tech trends or just need some inspiration, you’ll find articles, videos, and podcasts all geared toward engineers who want to make a difference. Head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and check out their clean tech content.

It’s another episode with Elecia and Chris. This week they discuss people that have influenced their lives and careers, thinking about past career choices and regrets therein, identities, the Embedded Slack book club, and electronic projects.

Chris is currently taking Dogbotic’s DIY Rhythm Widgets course which covers making an analog drum machine from components. We had Dogbotic founder Kirk Pearson on the show on Episode 491.

Elecia mentioned the book that the Embedded Slack #book-club channel is working through, Data Driven Science & Engineering Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control, which you can find for free at https://databookuw.com along with code and examples. The group is two sessions in but if you want to join late, join the Slack group via Patreon or Ko-Fi.

You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

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Emily Lovell spoke with us about teaching how to contribute to open source, including her own experience creating the LilyTiny as a Master’s student and researching the impact as a PhD student. 

The LilyTiny work was done in conjunction with Leah Buechley (Embedded episode 382). See the paper The LilyTiny: A Case Study in Expanding Access to Electronic Textiles or watch the video.

UCSC Open Source Program Office (note this is different from the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) that we spoke about with Carl Maltzahn (Episode 285).

Emily recommended the curriculum from TeachingOpenSource.org. 

Emily’s other life is at EP Custom Pickups and Aberdeen Guitars. She spoke on a lutherie panel at NAMM.

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 Mouser’s Empowering Innovation Together hub dives into all sorts of topics like renewable energy, energy-efficient systems, and sustainable design. Whether you’re looking for the latest in clean tech trends or just need some inspiration, you’ll find articles, videos, and podcasts all geared toward engineers who want to make a difference. Head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and check out their clean tech content.

Chris and Elecia talk about Murderbot,  LLMs (AI), bikes, control algorithms, and fancy math. 

The website with the ecology jobs is wildlabs.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.

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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. Congratulations to the giveaway winners!

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)

• Hyena eating camara (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.

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If you’re interested in the intersection of neuroscience and engineering, you might want to check out what Mouser Electronics is doing with Brain-Computer Interfaces. It’s all about how you can control machines with your mind, and it’s one of the coolest areas of innovation right now. Mouser’s Empowering Innovation Together site has great content on BCIs, from videos to in-depth articles and podcasts that break down the tech. If this piques your curiosity, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and explore what’s happening with BCI and other exciting developments in the world of design and engineering.

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 contact info. She will be speaking on automated hardware in the loop test processes at the Embedded Online Conference. 

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!