Embedded

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 advertisement 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

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.

Adrienne 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.

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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.

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Photo of Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS), taken from Seacliff Beach in Aptos, CA by Chris White

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.

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.

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: Designing 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.)

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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 roadmap 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. 

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 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.

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.

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Professor Colleen Lewis joined us to talk teaching pointers with stuffies, explaining inheritance through tigers, and computer science pedagogy.

Check out her YouTube channel to view her videos explaining CS concepts with physical models. These are also collected on her website: Physical Models of Java.

If you are an instructor (or thinking about teaching CS), check out Colleen’s CS Teaching Tips. You may also be interested in some other research:

• John Edwards Study on Syntax exercises in CS1

• Daniel Willingham on why learning styles aren’t a real thing

• A Beginner's Guide to Teaching with Algebra Tiles

Colleen is an Assistant Professor at University Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. You can find her papers on Google Scholar (including studies on teaching and learning). 

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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.

Chris and Elecia talk about their current adventures in conference talks, play dates, and skunks. 

Elecia’s talks are available on YouTube:

• Creating Chaos and Hard Faults: An introduction to hard fault handlings, stack overflows, and debugging hard bugs

• Introduction to Embedded Systems (O'Reilly Expert Webinar): An introductions to… well, embedded systems

• These are both advertising for the 2nd edition of Elecia’s book, Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software. You can also find it on O’Reilly’s Learning System and probably read it with your 30 Day Trial (here). 

Chris got a handheld game console, the Playdate (play.date), and has been writing a game for it. There is an interesting looking MicroPython port for it.

We also mentioned Tiny Tapeout Demoscene which sounds pretty neat. And KiCanvas where you can see KiCAD schematics without loading KiCAD.

Our newsletter has been off but will be back to normal next week. The RSS feed is probably not fun to look at but Elecia’s Rebloginator shows some Python tools for parsing feeds. 

Neither the dog nor the skunk seem contrite.

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Jerry Twomey spoke with us about his new O’Reilly book Applied Embedded Electronics which covers embedded topics such as EMI, signal processing, control systems and non-ideal components.

Jerry is also the principal engineer at Effective Electrons. His articles are linked from there and you can contact him via the site.

Here is a 30-day trial for the O’Reilly Learning System. You can take a look at Jerry’s Applied Embedded Electronics and Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems as well as hundreds of other books about software, hardware, engineering, and origami. 

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