Chris Svec joined us to talk about kids programming and how well the Joel Test has held up. Svec’s son (“The Kid”) developed an interest in programming by playing games. Most of his programming desires are around building games of his own.  Any time we talk about kids and programming, Scratch comes up. It really is that neat and is The Kid approved. Some resources to get you started (actually, getting started is easy, you may want a book to do more than the basics):    The Everything Kids' Scratch Coding Book: Learn to Code and Create Your Own Cool Games! by Jason Rukman     Scratch 3 Programming Playground: Learn to Program by Making Cool Games by Al Sweigart (hey, we know that guy!)   griffpatch on YouTube    Digipen.edu had two courses The Kid (and Svec) took. Both are free on YouTube:    Introduction to Game Design Lessons    DigiPen Basic Game Development Series   Finally, in a shockingly unrelated twist, we talked about the  Joel Test for determining the health of a software development organization. No determination was made on how good The Kid finds his current position. Transcript

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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

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  

474: It's All Chaos and Horror

    Philip Koopman joined us to talk about how modulo 255 vs 256 makes a huge difference in checksum error detection, how to get the most out of your checksum or CRC, and why understanding how they work is worth the effort. Philip has recently published  Understanding Checksums and Cyclic Redundancy Checks. He’s better known for  Better Embedded System Software as well as his two books about safety and autonomous vehicles:    The UL 4600 Guidebook: What to Include in an Autonomous Vehicle Safety Case    How Safe Is Safe Enough?: Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety   Phil’s YouTube page has a number of videos with great visuals to go along with his books. He also has three(!) blogs:   Safe Autonomy    Better Embedded System SW   Checksum and CRC Central (including a  post on checksum speed comparison)   Currently, Phil is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (his page there). You can follow him on LinkedIn.  Elecia read (and give 2.5 stars to)  Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature by Marcus du Sautoy: “Interesting but uneven, I kept reading to find out what horrible things math profs do to their children in the name of fun. Worth it when I finally got to a small section with Claude Shannon (and Richard Hamming). It didn’t help with this podcast but it was neat.” Transcript          Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.    

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