Jen Costillo joined us to talk about voice acting, reverse engineering, podcasting, and dance.

Jen’s podcast is the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, found in all your usual podcast places. Jen and her co-host Alvaro were on an episode of Opposable Thumbs podcast.

Find Jen on Twitter at @RebelbotJen (also @unnamed_show and @catmachinesSF). Rebelbot.com has her blog and Cat Machines Dance is her site devoted to dance (including the mentioned video about dancers and the pandemic).

The Hardware Hacking Handbook: Breaking Embedded Security with Hardware Attacks by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn 

Jen is studying voice-overs at VoicetraxSF 

Jen has been on the show many times in the past. Some of our favorites include

• 108: Nebarious about security and privacy

• 82: I Was a Chewbacca Person about movies that influenced their path to engineering

• 51: There Is No Crying in Strcpy about interviewing

• 25: Thunderdome for Antennas about RF and manufacturing consumer products

• 10: Hands Off, Baby about C keywords

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 wiki for more about decibel-milliwatts.

Tom talked about dollhouses, aka Smith charts (wiki). (We also talked about Bode plots (wiki).)

Light travels about 1 foot in 1 nanosecond (11.8 inches, 30 cm). Admiral Grace Hopper is well known for giving out nanoseconds.

The guitar company Tom mentioned working with is Alembic.

Find Tom’s writing on Medium and the Tempo Automation blog. He is on Twitter as @tomacorp and was previously on Embedded 379: Monstrous Cable Corporation.

We spoke with Phillip Johnston (@mbeddedartistry) of Embedded Artistry about consulting, writing, and learning.

In the Embedded Artistry welcome page, there is a list of Phillip’s favorite articles as well as his most popular articles. Some of Phillip’s favorites include:

• Embedded Rules of Thumb

• Improving SW with 5 LW Processes

• Learning from the Boeing 737 MAX saga

We also talked about code reviews and some best practices.

The Embedded Artistry newsletter is a good way to keep up with embedded topics. You can subscribe to it at embeddedartistry.com/newsletter

What are condition variables?

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 (YouTube) which can be turned into lovely sculptures.

Chris liked his new book, Art of NASA: The Illustrations That Sold the Missions by Piers Bizony. 

Elecia liked hers, Curved Origami: Unlocking the Secrets of Curved Folding in Easy Steps by Ekaterina Lukasheva 

Guitar Fart Pedal (Kickstarter)

Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course will have a second cohort starting in March 2022. 

Sign up for the newsletter if you want an announcement (at the bottom of the Embedded.fm Subscribe page).

Limor Fried of Adafruit spoke with us about engineering, education, and business. 

Some new boards we talked about include the PyGamer and PyBadge (which also has a lower cost version).

TinyUSB, an open and tiny USB stack from Hathach.

In addition to the many excellent tutorials there are some interesting business related posts on Adafruit Learn: How to Build a Hardware Startup and How to Start a Hackerspace

Want to get more involved with the extensive, wonderful, and supportive Adafruit community? Join their Discord chat server or Show and Tell on Wednesdays 7:30pm (ET) followed by Ask an Engineer at 8pm. 

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 Wokwi.com. 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: github.com/urish. Find Wokwi on Twitter (@WokwiMakes, Uri is @UriShaked). You can also find Wokwi on Facebook.

Uri live-coded development of the Pico’s RP2040, it is on Wokwi’s YouTube channel. You can find out more about the RP2040 or the AVR core in the ATMega family by taking his free courses on Hackaday: hackaday.io/urishaked  (Scroll down for courses.)

Uri’s homepage is urish.org. You can find The Salsa Beat Machine there as well as some of his other projects. He has a blog there as well as at Wokwi.

Susie Hansen - La Salsa Nunca Se Acaba

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? Yes, yes you can. And it will change your debugging habits. (You can find many other great posts from Memfault’s Interrupt blog including one about Unit Testing Basics.) 

Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault (memfault.com), a company that works on IoT dashboards and embedded tools. On Twitter, Tyler is @ty_hoff and Memfault is @Memfault.

Control-R is a history search in shell commands (magical!). The fuzzy search tool discussed is FZF (probably even more magical!).

XKCD comic referenced: xkcd.com/1319 

Fitbit’s Tower of Terror Bug

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 professor at GeorgiaTech. She is the director of the CoDe Craft group. Some of the projects we spoke about can be found on the CoDe Craft Projects page. 

PaperMech.net 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 making a cardboard walker using Jansen mechanism (Theo Jansen (wikipedia) made the Strandbeest). HyunJoo recommends two books for exploring further:

• The 507 Mechanical Movements book as a way to explore more mechanical movements

• Paper Automata: Four Working Models to Cut Out and Glue Together by Rob Ives 

With Unblackboxing Computers, HyunJoo is exploring sensors that can be made with copper tape on paper. The introduction video: https://vimeo.com/637626404/f670dff03e 

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 Mobile Robotics for Multidisciplinary Study (Synthesis Lectures on Control and Mechatronics). 

She has a page at Rose-Hulman as well as a personal blog and a consulting site (NoireSTEMinist.com). She is an advocate for BlackInRobotics.org.

On Twitter, Carlotta Berry has a personal account (@DrCarlottaBerry) and a professional account (@NoireSTEMinist). She is also the @BlackInRobotics coordinator. 

An explanation of Zeigler-Nichols PID tuning with pros and cons.