Dan White, CEO of Filament Games, spoke to us about educational games, how to make play part of learning, and simulating robots. We also discussed what makes a good (or bad) learning experience, the limits of games as educational tools, and the elements of fun. Roblox is a game platform and game creation system. Filament Games is developing a robot simulator called Roboco. Filament has many games out in the wild, check out their portfolio. If this sounds like fun, check out their careers page. Durf live streams game playing Transcript

420: Googly Eyes and Top Hats

I am Elecia White alongside Christopher White. We’re here to chat about the interests, careers, and lives of engineers, artists, educators and makers. Our diverse guest list includes names you may have heard and engineers working quietly in the trenches. Either way, they are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and inspiring. 

We’d love to share our enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM).

Technology

Tech News

Podcasting

Gadgets

Software How-To

Science

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. Transcript

478: The Map Is Not the Territory

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. Transcript 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.  

477: One Thousand New Instructions

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. Transcript

476: Sidetracked by Mining the Moon

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.  Transcript

475: Stuffed Animal or Colleague

   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)   Transcript       Memfault is making software the most reliable part of the IoT with its device reliability platform that enables teams to be more proactive with remote debugging, monitoring and OTA update capabilities. Try Memfault's new sandbox demo at demo.memfault.com. Embedded.fm listeners receive 25% off their first-year contract with Memfault by booking a demo here:  https://go.memfault.com/demo-request-embedded  

420: Googly Eyes and Top Hats

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