Embedded

What do you do after space debris, hacking dinosaurs, and judging robots? If you are Dr. Lucy Rogers (@DrLucyRogers), you build an organization devoted to promoting the Making industry: Guild of Makers (@GuildOfMakers)

Lucy’s personal site is lucyrogers.com. She wrote the book It’s ONLY Rocket Science: An Introduction in Plain English.

Guild of Maker’s Twitter hack chats are weekly on Tuesdays at 8pm UTC. They use the tag #MakersHour.

Lucy programs in Node-RED, a visual language.

Dan Saks answers many questions about C++ in embedded systems: where it works, where it doesn't, and a path to getting started. 

Dan Saks is the founder and president of Saks & Associates. He was a columnist for The C/C++ Users Journal, Embedded Systems Design and several other publications. He also served as secretary of the ANSI and ISO C++ standards committee in its early years. 

We touched on some of his articles:

Poor reasons for rejecting C++

Preventing dynamic allocation

Calling constructors with placement new

Andrei suggested Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day, Seventh Edition by Siddhartha Rao as a good primer for experienced C programmers reluctantly learning C++.

NOTE: The contest already ended.

Chris and Elecia answered some listener questions about dynamic memory and shared code. Then Elecia gave a presentation about ShotSpotter, the gunshot location system she worked on.

Elecia enjoyed The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone.

Ben is the editor of HackSpace, a new magazine about making (and hacking). It's produced by Raspberry Pi, but it's technologically agnostic. The first issue is free online.

The ShotSpotter presentation was originally given with Sarah Newman at the 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing.

Jan Jongboom (@janjongboom) of Mbed (@ArmMbed) joined us to talk about compilers, online hardware simulators, and inference on embedded devices.

Find out more about Mbed on mbed.com. The board simulator is at labs.mbed.com (Mbed OS Simulator). The code for the simulator is on Jan’s Github. Mbed Labs also has the uTensor inference framework for using TensorFlow models on devices.

You can see some of Jan’s talks and his blog on janjongboom.com.

Jan will be running a workshop at SxSW called Changing the World with Open, Long-Range IoT on March 10 in Austin, TX. Additionally, he will be hosting an IoT Deep Dive Workshop on LoRA on March 14 (also in Austin, TX).

For background on LoRA, check out the recent Amp Hour episode with Richard Ginus.

Roger Linn (@roger_linn) gave us new ideas about musical instruments, detailing how wonderful expressive control, 3D buttons, and keyscanning can be.

Roger’s company is Roger Linn Design. We talked extensively about the LinnStrument, some about the AdrenaLinn for guitar, and only a little bit about the analog drum machine Tempest.

A key matrix circuit is a popular way to handle a large number of buttons but it falls prey to n-key rollover. Roger adds force sense resistors to this (FSR example at Sparkfun).

If you have an idea for an instrument, Roger has already written his response to your request for a prototype. Roger gave a keynote address at ADC '16 about the LinnStrument, including showing the sounds it can make.

OHMI Trust is the one handed musical instrument society enabling music making for everyone.

Roger mentioned some other expressive instruments including:

Roli Seaboard

Haken Continuum

Madrona Labs Soundplane

Eigenharp

We spoke to author Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) about his books and near-future science fiction.

Robin wrote Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

Robin’s website is robinsloan.com. Go there for some short stories, sign up for his newsletter and check out his new ‘zine (also at wizard.limo). Oh! Don’t forget his blog, including a description of his neural net for audio generation and for writing.

Some books Robin suggested:

Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynshi

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Hild by Nicola Griffith

Embedded tells the story of another part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation--the question of whether President Trump may have obstructed justice by attempting to thwart the Russia investigation. It's a crime that could have been committed regardless of whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia in the 2016 election.

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Dustin Franklin of NVIDIA (@NVIDIAEmbedded) spoke with us about the Jetson TX2, a board designed to bring AI into embedded systems.

Dusty wrote Two Days to a Demo, both the original supervised learning version and the newer reinforcement learning version. In general, check out Dusty’s github repo to see what’s new. Also, The Redtail project is an autonomous navigation system for drones and land vehicles based on the TX2.

The NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference is in San Jose, CA, March 26-29, 2018. Your coupon for 25% off: NVCYATO

The Jetson TX1/TX2 ChallengeRocket contest ends February 18th.

You can find Dusty on on the NVIDIA forums.

Embedded tells the story of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. What contacts did people in Trump campaign have with Russia? What financial and business ties has President Trump had with Russia over the years? And what more can we expect from the investigation? Through new interviews, archival research, and a look at key moments — from Miss Universe in Moscow, to hacked emails and promises of "dirt" — Embedded pieces together the story that defined the first year of the Trump White House.

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Chris and Elecia chatted about listener emails, and other stuff and things.

Elecia wrote a book called Making Embedded Systems, if you want to see the chapter about interrupts and timers, hit the contact link on embedded.fm.

We also recommend our blog, Chris Svec wrote about the MSP430 from a microprocessor point of view (ESE101) and Andrei Chichak wrote about an ST processor with a more pragmatic and C focused view (Embedded Wednesdays).

You can support the podcast through Patreon.

Kalman filter explanation video with Pokemon

Ben Krasnow's Applied Science YouTube channel

Usbourne's books for teaching kids electronics and programming (the free '80s ones are near the bottom)

Formally verified microkernel: seL4 Microkernel

The first Pokemon games used every programming trick there is for optimization

STM bought Atollic and released TrueStudio Pro for free for STM parts