Carl Bugeja makes actuators out of PCBs, puts them to work flapping origami bird wings (or moving robot rovers), and takes videos of the whole process. Oh, and get this, self-soldering circuits. 

First, origami: flap actuators video. Your source for the PCB actuators: flexar.io

Carl’s YouTube channel is filled with hardware, software, successes, and misses. Check out his tiny foldable rover and the self-soldering circuit. His projects are open source so you can find the information on github.com/CarlBugeja

Carl has a site (carlbugeja.com) and shows his projects on Instagram instagram.com/carl_bugeja

Elecia worked on a zero-heat-flux, deep tissue temperature measurement system.

Transcript

We spoke with Chris Gammell about IoT, podcasting, relaxing, and learning. Chris works at Golioth.io. They have a neat blog that talks about reference designs, Zephyr RTOS, and making products.

We talked about ESP chips which are made by Espressif. The ESP32 line is RISC-V.

Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)

Some YouTube channels we discussed:

• Wendover Productions: explaining stuff

• CGP Grey, especially the recent one about vexillogy and US state flags

• Blacktail Studio: Soothing woodworking

• Adam Neely: music theory

• Shawn Hymel on Digikey’s channel explaining continuous integration and delivery: Intro to CI/CD

• The H note in music

Want to know more about self-paced Making Embedded Systems? Sign up for the waitlist at Classpert. Want to learn electronics? Check out Chris Gammell’s Contextual Electronics.

Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk about ChatGPT, conferences, online compilers, and Ardupilot.

Compiler Explorer: godbolt.org (and function pointer example)

Jupyter Notebooks with colab: colab.research.google.com/ (and one of Elecia’s origami pattern generator collabs)

Sign up for the Embedded newsletter! Support us on Patreon.

Conferences and happenings:

• Hackaday Prize

• Embedded Online Conference : late April, online

• Open Hardware Summit 2023: end of April in NYC, NY

• Teardown 2023 | Crowd Supply: late June in Portland, OR

• SEMICON West: July in San Francisco, CA 

• embedded world North America: October 2024, Austin, TX

Transcript

We spoke with Charlyn Gonda about making things glow, dealing with imposter syndrome, and using origami.

Charlyn’s website is charlyn.codes, the projects we talked about are documented there. You can find her on Instagram (@chardane) and Mastodon (https://leds.social/@charlyn).

Adafruit came up a lot in this episode. 

• NeoPixel Jewel

• DotStar High Density 8x8 Grid

• SAMD21 QT Py and RP2040 QT Py

• Adafruit IO 

Jason Koon’s Fibonacci displays are mesmerizing. Check them out on Jason’s website www.evilgeniuslabs.org or acquire them on Tindie. It can be controlled with the Pixelblaze.

Sonobe modules in origami

Transcript

Peter Griffin spoke with us about operant boxes, juggling many projects, getting into embedded systems, and bottle rockets. 

When we talked about 3D printing, Peter mentioned the Maker Muse Clearance and Tolerance 3D Printer Gauge.

The book we mentioned was Hot Seat by Dan Shapiro (Embedded 125: I Like Cheat Codes).

Peter on Github

Transcript

Please note that Peter Griffin spoke with Embedded.fm as an individual and not as representative of Slalom Consulting or any other organization.  All views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are his own and not necessarily those of his employer or any other organization.

Chris and Elecia talk about photons, comets, patterns, other flying objects, and cameras.

Chris uses PixInsight for processing  and has an Ioptron Sky Tracker. Apologies to our southern hemisphere listeners because Polaris is not visible there. There are (of course) other ways to align and even in the northern hemisphere more modern trackers don’t necessarily need Polaris.

Star Exterminator: who cares what it does it has an awesome name. Though it does what it says (on photos, no real stars were harmed in the making of this podcast).

Jupyter Notebooks on a Circuit Python board.

Elecia’s Yoshimura sine pattern generating Python colab. Also, Rigidly foldable origami gadgets and tessellations is an excellent article about Miura-ori and other rigidly foldable patterns. You can see her patterns over on Instagram. (You can see some of Chris’ photos on his Instagram.)

Transcript

Adafruit’s Liz Clark (BlitzCityDIY) spoke with us about MIDI, music, and tutorials. 

Liz’s Adafruit Tutorials include

• MIDI for Makers

• CircuitPython Trombone Champ Controller

• Mini LED Matrix Audio Visualizer 

• CircuitPython MIDI to CV Skull

Liz sometimes hosts the Adafruit Show and Tell which is Wednesdays 7:30pm ET. Speaking of Adafruit videos, we mentioned the Fusion 360 tutorial on Snap Fit Cases.

Liz’s BlitzCityDIY YouTube channel shows her building instruments including her mentioned Melody Maker. She also has many 3D printables and github repositories under github.com/BlitzCityDIY

Christopher notes that there are browser extensions that allow a person to stop auto-playing GIFs.

VCVRack is a Eurorack simulator for synthesizer modules.

Sadly, Mutable Instruments has shut down.

Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk with Mark Smith (aka SmittyHalibut and N6MTS) about amateur radio, interconnect standards, and podcasting.

Mark is a host of the Ham Radio Workbench podcast. His company is Halibut Electronics (electronics.halibut.com). He’s been working on Open Headset Interconnect Standard and Satellite Optimized Amateur Radio (SOAR).

Find Mark as SmittyHalibut on YouTube, github, and Mastodon.

Chris talked about getting into WSPR in 197: Smell the Transistor but we first talked about it in 76: Entropy is For Wimps

Chris has spec’d out his intended project at QRP Labs, the QCX+ 5W CW Mini.

Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk to Jeff Gable and Luca Ingianni of the Agile Embedded podcast, discussing the definition of Agile, agreeing about some things, and disagreeing about others.

Agile Embedded can be found in your usual podcast locations or get it from the source: https://agileembeddedpodcast.com/

Jeff’s website is jeffgable.com and Luca’s is luca.engineer

Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk about house maintenance, blinking LEDs, paper engineering and more. 

Cutting Mobius Strips Video: Tadashi Tokieda cuts various combinations of loops and Mobius loops - with surprising results.

festi.info/boxes.py generates boxes for laser cutting (or other SVG consuming device). Boxes.py is a python module that lets you programmatically generate the SVGs. (Github repo)

Amanda Ghassaei’s Sugarcube is a MIDI instrument using this SparkFun button pad. We also talked about the Mikroe 8800 Retro Click.

Elecia is taking Paper Engineering with Kelli Anderson. Chris is taking songwriting courses from School of Song.

Transcript