Robb Walters of Flybrix (@flybrix) spoke with us about LEGO-based drones. We graciously let him leave with all his hardware. This time. For a limited time, you can get an Embedded.fm tshirt: teespring.com/embedded-fm. Order by the end of June or miss out. (More info about the shirts.) You can order your Flybrix kit and or read their controller code on github (or their controller app code). Robb mentioned a C++ book he liked, it was Effective Modern C++: 42 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of C++11 and C++14 by Scott Meyers. He also noted LEGO bricks resale sites: Brickowl and Bricklink. LEGO Digital Designer looks like a fun way to design builds. Cascade PID controllers are on Wikipedia (though I found this tutorial a little easier). The congratulations offered at the top of the show were to Meshpoint.me for winning the Best Humanitarian Tech of the Year at the Europas Conference.

Jeri Ellsworth (@jeriellsworth) spoke with us about the latest developments at CastAR, hiring engineers, and her favorite engine. Embedded.fm T-Shirts are available until the end of June on Teespring (more info). CastAR is making an augmented reality system. They are in Palo Alto, CA, USA and they are hiring. They work with Playground. Jeri was last on Embedded.fm episode 23: Go For Everything I Want.

It's happening all across the country, for complicated reasons: Schools are closing. And this is disproportionately affecting poor, black students. Shereen Marisol Meraji and Chris Benderev go to Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania to ask kids, parents, and teachers what it's like when the neighborhood school that's been there for more than a century is about to shut down. Follow Kelly McEvers @KellyMcEvers, Shereen Marisol Meraji @RadioMirage, and Chris Benderev @cbndrv. Email us at [email protected].

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Jonathan Bradshaw spoke with us about working with hardware engineers, schematic reviews, and FPGAs. At the end of the podcast, Jonathan made a pitch for folks to submit proposals for the IEEE Southern Power Electronics Conference in Auckland in December. The FPGA boards Elecia mentioned were the XLR8 board and the Papillio platform (more on the latter in show #66). By the way, The Amp Hour is our “enemy podcast” but we actually like their show quite a lot. It is a joke. But do feel free to tweet their shameless advertising tweet with the link replaced with one to our show. And weta are neat! (Image, wiki)

Reporter Rebecca Hersher spent three months in Greenland trying to understand why that country has the highest suicide rate in the world. And then, the story came to her. Follow Kelly McEvers on Twitter @KellyMcEvers and Rebecca Hersher @rhersher. Email us at [email protected].

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Jeff Keyzer (@MightyOhm) joined us to talk about consumer manufacturing, how to solder, and having a full time job and a kit company. Jeff's blog is on MightyOhm.com. The Geiger Counter kit is available at MightyOhm.com/geiger. The really, really useful Soldering Is Easy comic book is MightyOhm.com/soldercomic. At Valve, Jeff worked on the Steam Controller (hardware specs at bottom of the Valve page or for sale on Amazon). There is also a neat video showing the manufacturing automation in action. We mentioned Glowforge, Dan Shapiro was on episode 125 (and if you are going to buy one, please consider using our referral link!) Elecia and Chris have a Hakko FX-888 soldering iron. Jeff suggests Kester 186 flux which you can get in smaller-than-giant containers on eBay. No, not the pen on Amazon. Or maybe the MG Chemicals 835 (which is in little bottles on Amazon). Flux seems like a very personal thing.

Medicins Sans Frontieres is also known as MSF, or Doctors Without Borders. They are the first ones to arrive when there's a war, an earthquake, an outbreak, or a famine. And increasingly, they are coming under attack. We spend a week inside one MSF hospital in South Sudan to find out what life is like for the people who do this work. Follow Kelly McEvers on Twitter @KellyMcEvers and Jason Beaubien @jasonbnpr. Email us at [email protected].

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Patrick Yeon of Planet Labs spoke with us about making satellites. We discussed a method of using orientation to control drag to control speed. While Patrick wasn't sure what he could say about GPS receivers on satellites, another site describes them as part of the flock. Sign up to get access to the huge Open California data set. Planet has many applications and their blog shows off some interesting finds, such as identifying illegal gold mines encroaching on rainforests, quantifying ports with computer vision, counting trees and classifying agriculture crops, fire mapping, and cloud detection. They are still hiring, apply using the email embeddedfm at planet.com will earn us (err, not you) more free tshirts.

When you play basketball in the NBA's minor league – it's called the D-League — the stands aren't full, the schedule is grueling, and the pay can be as low as $13,000 a year. Compare that to the NBA, where the profile is high and the salary is way higher. Playing in the D-League is a moonshot for every player, just waiting to get that call-up to the NBA. We follow two players through the highs and lows of an entire D-League season. You can follow Kelly McEvers on Twitter @KellyMcEvers, Uri Berliner @uberliner and Tom Goldman @TomGoldmanNPR. You can email us at [email protected].

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Chris and Elecia chat about hobbies and respond to listener feedback and questions. Chris was on an episode of Let's Drone Out, you can listen to it here or search in your favorite podcast platform. It is recorded and broadcast live every Thursday at 8 P.M. (UTC+1) on Powering On. Chris' new quadcopter is a Vortex 285. It runs Clean Flight, an open source flight controller software package. While we had various opinions about RTOSs, we were both interested in the one Alvaro suggested to us: Zephyr Project. As for other embedded podcasts, of course you know about The Amp Hour. And we had Saron of CodeNewbie podcast on, that show is mostly software and people. How about Macrofab Engineering? Or O'Reilly's HW podcast?