We spoke to Evan Shapiro, CTO and cofounder of Knit Health (@KnitHealth), about baby monitors, IoT security, neural nets, and professional poker. The Knit Health Kickstarter ends November 17, 2016. Evan recommended Google Tensor Flow and Python's Theano for an introduction to machine learning. (If those sound familiar it is because Kat Scott mentioned them as well.) Evan also suggested that if you'd like to know more about the history of neural nets, check out this post by Audrey Korenkov. If you'd like a gentle introduction, check out a Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule. Evan mentioned some videos he did about poker, they are on Card Runners (NOTE: it is a paid site with free tastes). Final quote was from Neil Gaiman's excellent Graveyard Book.

George Stocker (@gortok) spoke with us about software, Jewelbots (@Jewelbots) and learning embedded systems to ship the product. Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems. George also recommended Getting Started with BLE and Programming Pearls. The processor we talked about was the Nordic nRF51, a BLE system on a chip.

James Cameron of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) tells us about Forth, science fiction, and laptops. We have some tickets for ARM's mbed Connect conference is Oct 24, 2016 in Santa Clara. Will you be in the area? Want to go? Contact us if you want one of our free tickets! (There are still some tickets remaining.) One Laptop Per Child is one.laptop.org. Some getting started information on Forth: Mitch Bradley's Forth and Open Firmware Lessons James has been writing about putting C Forth on a Teensy (more on the Teensy from the creator's site). He also has a post on using Forth to snoop the Milo Champions Band's BLE. James is Quozl on most sites that require a unique ID (such as Github: https://github.com/quozl). This is from a book called Quozl by Alan Dean Foster. The other older-sci-fi reference was to the Pern books by Anne McCaffery, specifically to the White Dragon.

Kelly's here for a quick assurance: Yes we are working on more episodes at this very moment, and we'll tell you more as soon as we can. But in the meantime, check us out LIVE on stage in Anaheim, CA on Saturday October 29th at the Now Hear This Podcast Festival. There'll be tons of other great podcasts there all weekend long: Pop Culture Happy Hour, How I Built This, The Moth, WTF with Marc Maron, The Gist, Criminal and much more. Get tickets and more info at nowhearthisfest.com.

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Saar Drimer of Boldport (@boldport) spoke with us about the crossover of art to electronics and building a business around it. Monthly, the Boldport Club ships aesthetically-pleasing electronics kits. We discussed past projects include The Lady and Touchy on the show. The seahorse board is on the blog. Micah Scott (@scanlime) has entrancing videos of putting together the first club project (Pease) and second one (Superhero). Saar uses PCBMode to create his circuits. He also wrote the tool. It is open source. Cratejoy is used for the sales and shipping logistics.

Elecia tries to get Chris to do her homework in preparation for her "Embedded Software: The Tricky Parts" presentation at IEEE-Computer Society meeting in San Jose, CA on Oct 11, 2016. If you register, you can attend, in person or online! And for free! We have some tickets for ARM's mbed Connect conference is Oct 24, 2016 in Santa Clara. Will you be in the area? Want to go? Contact us if you want one of our free tickets! (There are still some tickets remaining.) Also: their unit test framework is GreenTea (not whatever Elecia said).

After a few new announcements, we replayed the episode where Jack Ganssle shared his wisdom on being a good embedded software engineer (hint: it takes discipline). The new announcements include: Book giveaway contest deadline Oct 1st ARM's mbed Connect conference is Oct 24th IEEE CS talk by Elecia iRobot has internships (and other jobs), check their job site and if you want to apply, email csvec. Jack's website is filled with great essays and new videos. He's also written the Art of Designing Embedded Systems and The Embedded Systems Dictionary (with Michael Barr). We covered a lot of ground, here are some of the highlights: Spark language Capers Jones on high quality software and associated statistics Joel on Software test for good teams LDRA unit test tool James Grenning's Test Driven Development for Embedded C

John Leeman (@geo_leeman) spoke with us about geophysics and associated technology. John is one of the hosts of the Don't Panic GeoCast (@dontpanicgeo, iTunes). Some episodes you may like: What if you calibrated your candles differently? Out of the Country (Brad Jolive on moon rocks) "Rock Drills and Beer" Undersampled Radio John is teaching a course at Penn State called Techniques of Geoscientific Experimentation. The information and textbook is online! It uses the SparkFun Inventor's Kit. John has a website with a blog. He has some Cheerson CX-10 tiny drone posts (my favorite, also Alvaro's repo and my posts). John also has a consulting company: Leeman GeoPhysical. Python! Lots of Python was discussed. Jupyter notebooks (here is a good tutorial) Example of reproducing a figure from a paper John's friction model (repo and talk he gave about it at SciPy2016) Neat SciPy talk about open textbooks SciPy is a Python conference in Austin, TX in July Finally, in lieu of rock puns, here is a neat animation showing many different waves from earthquakes. Contest! Contest ends October 1st and now there are more books! In addition to the ones Bob Apthorpe is sponsoring, John's consulting company will sponsor: Earthquake Storms: An Unauthorized Biography of the San Andreas Fault by John Dvorak and The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder.

Briana Morey from MC10 (@mc10inc) spoke with us about stretchable electronics, Tesla coils and lasers. She works at MC10, creators of the L'Oreal My UV Patch as well as the BioStampRC. MC10 is hiring! They are in Lexington, MA, US. The embedded software position is filled already but the EE position is still open. Briana mentioned an excellent science fiction book she'd read recently: Too Like Lightning by Ada Palmer.

Chris and Elecia chat about Bayes Rule, aliens, bit-banging, VGA, and unit testing. Elecia is working on A Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule. ACM has a code of software engineering ethics Toads have trackers (NPR story) An introduction to bit-banging SPI (Arduino, WS2812) We talked to James Grenning extensively about testing on 30: Eventually Lightning Strikes (and about his excellent book Test Driven Development for Embedded C). We spoke with James again on 109: Resurrection of Extreme Programming. We also talked about unit testing with Mark Vandervoord on 103: Tentacles of the Kraken. A neat TED Talk involving octo-copters, still four short of dodecahedracopter. Neat Z80 based very minimal computer kit