This week on The New Stack Context podcast, we delve into the latest project from our resident hardware hacker, Dr. Torq, offer a summary of last week's ChefConf conference.

Last week, TNS Editor Alex Williams attended ChefConf in Chicago where he hosted a day of podcasting. We’ll hear his top takeaways from that event, including the latest on InSpec, Chef’s compliance automation tool. The company just announced an integration with their its version of Automate - the company’s automation platform. Williams says InSpec is really innovative and could be big for the Chef’s cloud native strategy going forward.

We also spoke with Dr. Torq, who has been writing for us regularly about his Raspberry Pi and machine learning project called Hedley, the robotic skull. This week he’s teaching Hedley how to talk with a combination of Arduino code and a standard, hobby-size servo motor. The goal is to eventually use a pre-recorded audio file to play through a speaker while sending data to the Arduino to move the jaw. And he can now speak into a microphone and the robot’s jaw will follow his voice fairly well.