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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Carles Cufí spoke with us about Zephyr, Nordic, learning, open source development, and corporate goals.

Carles had some great suggestions for learning Zephyr:

• Memfault Interrupt Practical Zephyr blog series

• Nordic's Developer Academy

• Zephyr's Discord server

• Zephyr's YouTube channel (@ZephyrProject), sorted by views

• Macrobatics term is from Zephyr Devicetree Mysteries, Solved - Marti Bolivar, Nordic Semiconductor

There is also the Zephyr website for a full picture. And various Nordic tutorials (see nRF5340 Audio applications).

Carles was an author on Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy: Tools and Techniques for Low-Power Networking. The cover animal is a mousebird.

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Jan Rychter joined us to talk about building a company, electronic components, and software design.

Jan is the founder and engineer at PartsBox.com. If you are interested in the meta-analysis of the data, check out his article on the Top Ten Hobby Parts and the Electronic Component Database,

You can find out more about Jan through his website (jan.rychter.com), LinkedIn, or Mastodon.

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Kwabena Agyeman joined Chris and Elecia to talk about optimization, cameras, machine learning, and vision systems.

Kwabena is the head of OpenMV (openmv.io), an open source and open hardware system that runs machine learning algorithms on vision data. It uses MicroPython as a development environment so getting started is easy.

Their github repositories are under github.com/openmv. You can find some of the SIMD details we talked about on the show:

• 150% faster: openmv/src/omv/imlib/binary.c

• 1000% faster: openmv/src/omv/imlib/filter.c

• Double Pumping: openmv/src/omv/modules/py_tv.c

Kwabena has been creating a spreadsheet of different algorithms in camera frames per second (FPS) for Arm processors: Performance Benchmarks - Google Sheets. As time moves on, it will grow. Note: this is a link on the OpenMV website under About. When M55 stuff hits the market expect 4-8x speed gains.

The OpenMV YouTube channel is also a good place to get more information about the system (and vision algorithms).

Kwabena spoke with us about (the beginnings of) OpenMV on Embedded 212: You Are in Seaworld.

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Elecia is giving a free talk for O'Reilly to advertise her Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition book. The talk will be an introduction to embedded systems, geared towards software engineers who are suddenly holding a device and want to program it. The talk is May 23, 2024 at 9:00 AM PDT. Sign up here. A video will be available afterward for folks who sign up.

Lee Wilkins joined Chris and Elecia to talk about The Open Source Hardware Association, the Open Hardware Summit, and zine culture.

The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) provides certification and support for creating open source hardware. The Open Hardware Summit is happening May 3-4, 2024. It is in Montreal, Canada. It also has many online components including a Discord and online Unconferece. All videos are available for later watching on YouTube.

Lee's personal page is leecyb.org. Their zines are available in their shop.

Elecia mentioned enjoying There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.

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Chris and Elecia talk about the Embedded Online Conference, their experience learning Zephyr, and some listener questions.

Elecia will be presenting on Creating Chaos and Hard Faults at the Embedded Online Conference, Apr 29 - May 3, 2024. Some other talks that look interesting:

• The Power of a Look-up Table by Nathan Jones

• Zephyr Tools To Debug Hardware by Chris Gammell

• Breaking Good: Why Virtual Hardware Prefers Rough Handling by Uri Shaked

• Beyond Coding: Toward Software Development Expertise by Marian Petre

Use the EMBEDDEDFM coupon for a discount (or if your whole team is going, check out the group discounts).

Elecia's book (Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition) is shipping (Amazon or Bookshop.org).

Zephyr is pretty amazing.

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Logic gates and origami? Professor Inna Zakharevich joined us to talk about Turing complete origami crease patterns.

We started talking about Turing completeness which led to a Conway's Game of Life-like 2D cellular automaton called Rule 110 (Wikipedia) which can be implemented with logic gates (AND, OR, NOT). These logic gates can be implemented as creases in paper (with the direction of the crease indicating 0 or 1).

The paper describing the proof is called Flat Origami is Turing Complete (arxiv and PDF). Quanta Magazine has a summary article: How to Build an Origami Computer.

Inna's page at Cornell University also has the crease patterns for the logic gates (pdf).

Inna is an aficionado of the origami work by Satoshi Kamiya who creates complex and lifelike patterns.

Some other origami mentioned:

• Origami Stegosaurus by John Montroll YouTube Folding video (Part 1 of 3)

• Ilan Garibi's Pineapple Tessellation (PDF instructions)

• Eric Gjerde Spread Hex Origami Tessellation (This also has the equilateral triangle grid needed to fold Inna's gate logic)

• Peter Engel

• Amanda Ghassaei's Origami Simulator (Mooser's is under Examples->Origami)

Some other math mentioned:

• Veritasium's Math's Fundamental Flaw talks about Goerthe's Incompleteness Theorem

• Physical Logic Game: Turing Tumble - Build Marble-Powered Computers

• Mathematics of Paper Folding (Wikipedia)

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Philip Koopman joined us to talk about how modulo 255 vs 256 makes a huge difference in checksum error detection, how to get the most out of your checksum or CRC, and why understanding how they work is worth the effort.

Philip has recently published Understanding Checksums and Cyclic Redundancy Checks. He's better known for Better Embedded System Software as well as his two books about safety and autonomous vehicles:

• The UL 4600 Guidebook: What to Include in an Autonomous Vehicle Safety Case

• How Safe Is Safe Enough?: Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety

Phil's YouTube page has a number of videos with great visuals to go along with his books. He also has three(!) blogs:

• Safe Autonomy

• Better Embedded System SW

• Checksum and CRC Central (including a post on checksum speed comparison)

Currently, Phil is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (his page there). You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Elecia read (and give 2.5 stars to) Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature by Marcus du Sautoy: "Interesting but uneven, I kept reading to find out what horrible things math profs do to their children in the name of fun. Worth it when I finally got to a small section with Claude Shannon (and Richard Hamming). It didn't help with this podcast but it was neat."

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Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.