Embedded - 106: I Am a Scientism

Episode Date: June 24, 2015

Chris and Elecia talk about satellites, survey results, and entertainment. ESP8266 has an Arduino IDE (thanks, Karl!) Elecia will be speaking at Solid June 25th and ESC July 22nd. To celebrate the first 100 episodes, Elecia made a spreadsheet of all the guests and topics. Chris read and recommended Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. He was ambivalent about the latest incarnation of battlebots.

Welcome to Embedded FM, the show for people who love building gadgets. I'm Eliseo White, here with Christopher White. Today we're going to chat with each other. Assuming we can actually talk for longer than five minutes. Ah, come on. That horrible cold you gave me is almost over. Sounds like it. So satellite entries, conference talks, battle bots, or 100 episodes. Where do you want to start?

I guess satellite entries. So, we had that Planet Labs contest, and I announced the winners last week, but I didn't really talk about what entries we got, because we got some pretty neat satellite descriptions. Stuart, who won the grand prize of Carball Space Program... It was pretty grand. It was a grand prize.

He said he would put a camera in a satellite, although he admitted that was sort of boring. But he wanted to put an open-MV camera, get it to perform face tracking, and take snapshots of all the landscapes that look like faces from space. Oh, I misread that one the first time. I thought he was all the landscapes that look like faces from space. Oh, I misread that one the first time.

I thought he was going to look at all the faces from space. Oh, I see. Which I thought would require optics that wouldn't necessarily fit in a Planet Lab satellite. He said he did have a few other ideas and shared a couple. But then he said, I can't share all my mission ideas with you. You might tell Planet Labs. So, yeah. And then there was Shane who won one of the books.

And he said he wanted a swarm of satellites to go into space with their mission to observe pollution and radiation in the atmosphere using a spectrometer. And he wouldn't really measure the visible spectrum. That was kind of interesting because that's a lot of what Planet does. Yeah. I wondered. But when I talked to him later, it was apparent that was a coincidence. No, it's usual remote sensing stuff.

It's the same kind of thing they do for Mars orbiters and things, so sure. He wanted the swarm to move based on optimal atmospheric conditions versus optimal solar power method. And I thought maybe he needed Kerbal Space Program because moving a swarm is not easy. Well, if you'd read Seven Eves from Neil Stevenson, you'd understand more about swarm behavior.

It's on my list. You liked it, didn't you? Yeah, I did, to go on a complete tangent, but it's a really good disaster book. Near sci-fi. Yeah, definitely near sci-fi. Disaster kind of story for the first two-thirds, and then not so much for the last two-thirds. The first two-thirds, I was talking to a friend from college,

and he said the first two-thirds weren't talking to a friend from, from college and he, he said the first two thirds weren't really like a normal Stevenson book because it was a lot of action and, uh, very kind of downer. And, but then the last third was really the, the high tech Stevenson playing around with the consequences of things and typical Stevenson non-ending at the end of that one. Um, no real spoilers here, but it's kind of... I mean, the moon blows up, and that's not a spoiler.

It's kind of a spoiler, but I guess it happens pretty early in the book. It happens on the first line. Does it? Yeah. I can't remember. I haven't even read the book, but yes, it's in all the description. The moon blows up, what happens after that? The moon blows up, and it's in all the description the moon blows up what happens after that moon blows up and it's bad um and then it's a lot of the consequences of that and how it's kind of a

story of how with the technology we have right now if we had two years to save ourselves to get off this planet to basically get off the planet what could we do and i thought it was a pretty i mean he definitely took some liberties with what would be possible. But it was an interesting exploration of that problem. Not exactly uplifting, at least the first part. I'd like to believe that we're pretty ingenious when it requires us to do something or die. But part of the idea was we're not going to be able to invent new launch vehicles in that time. We're going to have the launch vehicles we have now.

We can make a lot of them, but they're going to be what we've got. So what can you launch on the existing rocket technology? Because you have no time to come up with anything else. So it was good. And once they were in space and doing stuff, there was some really clever ideas about, about things and the things you were talking about swarm behavior. So I highly recommend it, especially for people into, into space and even kind of the embedded systems world,

because he did, it was kind of, he did talk about technology pretty deeply. He does a good job talking about technology. Neil Stevenson. Yeah. Well, in this one, it was better than the previous book, where it was just kind of part of the book, but not the focus. This was more survival technology, I guess, which was interesting. And yeah, I'd compare it to The Martian in terms of how the technology was addressed.

You didn't give it as many stars as Martian, though. Yes, I did. Oh, you did? Yeah. Why have I been slacking on reading that book? Because it's really long. Well, and the stupid cold you gave me. Yes, it has stopped you from reading.

Wait a minute. It has stopped me from reading anything good. I'm totally in the, this book is total junk, and I don't care how anything happens. So yeah, it's a good book. People should read it, but not if they're depressed. But not if they're depressed. Great. So the last winner satellite was from Jonathan and he wanted to have a satellite to carry a bunch of tiny ESP8266 modules with batteries in a parachute and release them so they land scattered around a desert or

somewhere where people aren't expecting Wi-Fi and they can broadcast to networks. There's a Doctor Who reference that didn't really make sense to me, The Bells of St. John. I don't remember that episode. Where a bunch of people turn up like Burning Man-ish and get a disturbing list of alien Wi-Fi points to connect to. Okay.

It was, you know, I guess if you're going to draw something from space, that's pretty cool. I can see dropping them over North Korea. How are they going to re-enter without burning up? I don't think that logic has a role in this. But that does lead me to ESP8266. And I had a show about that.

But one of the things one listener emailed was that there is an Arduino IDE you don't have to go through the pain of setting up the whole toolchain on your own so I'm going to link to the Make article about setting up the Arduino IDE to program for the ESP8266 seems like if you're going to use one of those really cheap nifty Wi-Fi modules

you shouldn't go through the pain and suffering of a whole toolchain setup. Yeah, that makes it a lot easier. Yeah, and it does some of the Arduino features. It's got some of the Arduino libraries. But once you've used Arduino a couple of times, you kind of get bored of that, and then you're ready to go through the tool chain setup. Well, that means you could integrate into a robot pretty easily, especially if you've already got some sort of Arduino thing going on. Yeah.

So that was cool. I also got a link to the NRF-52, a new Bluetooth module for even lower power BLE. But I haven't looked at that, so I don't know what I'd say about it. Let's see. We had Andre. Andre responded to the satellite. You know,

Andre was on, so I'm not sure he qualifies anymore. And yet he has a number, so he must have gotten into my random number mix. I don't think we disqualify anybody based on previous... Having been on the show? Yeah, I don't think we disqualify anybody based on previous... Having been on the show? Yeah, I don't think you said that.

No, and definitely, like, if you're in my family, you can't participate because, you know, I think your dad listens to the show, but I'm not sure anybody else does. He doesn't want Kerbal Space Program, anyway. He would. And he's already got a copy of my book. So Andre.

Andre wanted combustible gas detectors, which sounded boring. But he has a theory. The sun spews space stuff, his words, every time we have a solar prominence. And shortly after, about 70 hours after, it rains on Earth. And you can Google solar activity and rainfall correlation. Isn't it always raining somewhere? Well, it was funny. He goes on to say there's a dude in Britain

that predicts weather by watching solar activity and has much better accuracy than meteorologists, people. I'm like, it's Britain. It's going to rain. I mean, the only other place you could do is like Wales where it's like, oh, just wait five minutes and the weather's different. I've never been to Wales. I think that's what you said about Maine.

Oh, I probably said it about Scotland, too. And so he wants the combustible gas detectors to look for the sun pushing off oxygen and hydrogen in the solar wind and then use that to determine when water on earth is happening uh uh okay he lives in canada i think he cares about the weather a lot more than we do i'm not sure what combustible gas has to do with it uh that's hydrogen so yeah well okay but and oxygen yeah i understand that although that's that's an oxidizer not a combustible gas um is the theory that they're going to combine when they reach the earth

and drop water is it like water from the sun is that the idea or is it nucleation sites that are being i think what actually happens i think you would have to rain all over the world. I think what actually happens is the solar wind particles come through and they create nucleation sites as they go through the atmosphere, if there was an actual correlation. Wait a minute, are you using science here?

Science. I'm a scientism. Yeah. I think that's going to be the title. We have to be nice to Andre, though, because... I'm being nice. I'm just thinking about it. Oh, all right. That's fine. But we still have to be nice to Andre.

Because I posted a Linker article about measuring power. And while it wasn't grossly wrong, I was clearly feverish when I wrote it. It had some pretty big holes to drive trucks through. And Andre was so nice. And even the parts where I generally just want to measure power. I don't really care about all the details as long as nothing's exploding. And Andre took a lot of time to set me straight on

how to do the power calculations for how big your resistor needs to be and how much power it needs to be able to suck. So I need to update my linker post. Oh, I thought you already edited that. I took out the one awful part and Andre pointed out that this didn't make sense and I realized that I hadn't copied a couple of paragraphs over.

I'm not as pleased with that one as I was with the BLE one. Well, you have an excuse. It was feverish. I'm going to put that at the top of the post now. Just make it the title. That's good. Simon wanted to put aquaponic robots in space to study fish and plants

in space. Wait, what? He wanted to put aquaponic robots in the satellite to study fish and plants in space. Wait, what? He wanted to put aquaponic robots in the satellite to study fish and plants in space. So to study the fish and plants in space, not from space. In space. Okay. Because he wants more data on how to grow stuff there

so he can travel further. So that goes back to getting off this planet. Okay, so he's going to launch little farms. Well, Wesley had a very similar idea that he wanted to send one of those closed ecosystems in a jar. Oh, that's a good idea. Make a little tiny Earth 2. I think we should actually do that as like a hundred satellites and make little tiny closed ecosystems and send them all over the world so we can see the world. Wait a minute, this was a Star Trek episode.

Oh. Anybody who's waiting for the technical part of the show probably should just give up. It's very technical. We've talked about science and scientism. Scientism. Ada wanted a mind-controlled cockroach

flying the spaceship. Have you seen those little, you can use a chip to-controlled cockroach flying the spaceship. Have you seen those little, you can use a chip to control the cockroach? I find that a little weird. Well, that I understand, but a mind-controlled cockroach would imply that you're controlling the cockroach with your mind. Oh, I thought it was just the cockroach's mind was being controlled. Okay. And that's okay. Because we have the technology.

Maybe we should come back to some more of these. All right, all right. And there are a few more. We'll put a pin in that. Yeah. Okay, so what else did you want to talk about? What was on the list here? Conference or 100 episodes.

I don't care about 100 episodes right now. Let's talk about conferences. The Solid will be half over when this is posted. Though if you're there, if you're in San Francisco and going to Solid, my talk is Thursday afternoon. We're giving away books, my book, at lunch on Wednesday. But again, the show will probably be posted by, you know, in such a time that you would have to listen

and then immediately present yourself to receive a book. Which is not out of the question. People are strange. Well, and you have to post it pretty early because we have to go. That's fine. I'll post it. Maybe even Tuesday. So, what do you want to see at Solid? What do I want to see? That was a question for you. What do you want to see at Solid? What do I want to see? That was a question for you. What do you want to see?

I know you're giving a talk, but what do you want at Solid? Solid I'm kind of excited about. It's the internet of things and hardware and software and last year I sort of thought it was weird and not really a real conference because it couldn't decide whether it was hardware or software or business or processors.

But this year I'm excited about that. I don't really know why. Is it because you've been beaten down? No. I've had a really light workload recently. No, I mean by just so much exposure to everything about the Internet of Things and things that you're either excited or you get out of the business. Yeah, maybe. No, you know, Chris Gamble will be there.

He had to talk about, I don't know, cloud data and parts IO and hardware. Yeah, I think it's sort of a loosely connected to parts IO and talking about how big data, supply chain and stuff can work together. Yeah, so I'll probably go to that. And there were a lot of talks about little robots. I want to do more moving things. Well, yeah. I mean, that's one of the reasons I got into embedded

and I haven't done that in a while. It's like seeing stuff actually move and affect the physical world. Yeah. I don't know about solid. I, I, I do worry that it's a little bit,

what's the word I want to use without being mean. I can't say it's non-technical. A little bit hypey. I mean, it's so technical. A little bit hypey maybe. It is a little bit hypey. It is a little bit hype-y. It is a little more business, market-y side.

Yeah, I think that's what it is. So I haven't really looked at the other collection of sessions and stuff. I'm pleased. My talk is the inertial, intro to inertial. That's pretty technical. Yeah, you got the preview of that. Right. When we went to go do it when I was really sick.

And, you know, I go through inertial sensors and Kalman filters and quaternions and trigonometry in like 35 minutes. Maybe less, because you talk about some other stuff for at least 15. Really? Yeah, well, you talk about coordinate systems and which sensors are which. Yeah, yeah. The math part jammed into about 10 minutes. Every time I give the talk, it makes me want to laugh, and it makes me feel like my brain is slightly full.

So I don't know if anybody else is going to get a lot out of the talk, but it's going to amuse me to no end. So have you looked at the other sessions? Are there other talks of that order? There were a few other talks, but I haven't spent a lot of time looking at the sessions. I tend to be really a butterfly when it comes to conference talks. I care more about if I know the person talking and if the chairs are comfortable than about the actual material. I figure most of the

material is good, but I don't want to have to limp all day. I know, my conference attending is kind of strange that way. But I'm going to meet people, so a lot of my time will be spent wandering around. All right. And then ESC is coming up a couple of weeks later. A month after? About a month, yeah.

And you're giving a talk there on, I forget because there were three and now you're switching between them. Oh, Faker to Maker in 45 minutes or less. The talk is sort of in response to working with people who are sort of afraid of the Maker community, who are tentative about what that means for real engineering. So like old school business people or engineers who got into the business when that didn't exist? Yeah, you know, I had a manager a little while ago, not that long ago even, who was just really tentative about whether or not he was a maker and really tentative about hiring people who had extracurricular things on their resume.

He thought that that would take away from their actual careers, which is such a different mentality from the other half of people who are like, if you don't have that on your resume, I don't want to talk to you this talk was sort of to bridge that gap but i it's kind of an odd topic for esc because esc is such a such an industry i i thought they would take one of the technical talks yeah instead they took this one are they trying you think to branch out to address the maker community more yeah because um every every time I go there, I get a little bit more depressed. Well, and it's smaller this year in Santa Clara, and that's a far more depressing problem. It's not the size, really.

It's just that it seems like it's always the same companies with the same booths selling the same products. I mean, I remember going there in, I want to say, 99. Definitely, we went in 99. I was trying to decide between a couple of jobs at that point and you know we went last year and the year before and whatever we go every year but it really just doesn't seem any different i feel like i'm seeing the same products over and over again even ones that you know i saw 15 years ago yeah sure there's more single board computers and they're smaller and they have more power. But it's a difference between industry trade group and the kind of thing that Solid is,

which is kind of an advocacy. Yeah, Solid is about advocacy and they're advocating the Internet of Things, which is a strange thing to advocate. But when you think about O'Reilly wanting to sell books and content, it makes sense for them to want to advocate for But when you think about O'Reilly wanting to sell books and content, it makes sense for them to want to advocate for a whole industry.

And ESC is more a trade where it's the processor vendors and the hardware vendors getting together with the engineers in a more technical orientation. But I feel like there's room to do both at ESC and make it a better conference because you've got the nuts and bolts there.

So I hope with things like adding topics like you're talking about, that that'll help a little bit. And I have, I mean, there have been good stuff there. I mean, Jack Gansel spoke there last- He speaks there a lot. A lot. He's usually pretty fun to listen to.

I'm probably being too hard on it, but- No, they've had some changes I'm a little tentative about ESC this year I'm a little tentative about my talk because it's sort of fluffy and it's probably 20 minutes of material wrapped up in 45 minutes Yeah, and who the audience is

Who the audience is is the hardest part Because a lot of the people there are those sales reps and sales engineers and people there are those sales reps and sales engineers and people who are making deals booth to booth, and they aren't necessarily people who are going to go to a lot of talks on stuff. I don't know. We'll see who comes.

Maybe somebody who wants comfy chairs and a reasonably amusing beach. Yeah, and maybe somebody will set me straight and say, no, yes, he is cool because of this. You should go and talk to these people instead of these people. Well, there's always the beg for dev kits, but right now I've actually got plenty. So I'm not even begging for dev kits

right now. Yeah, I can't fit my podcasting computer on the desk because of the stack of dev kits, which is kind of falling down. It's less a stack and more a pile right now. My desk is really bad. I didn't even know some of these had been opened. Oh, they've all been opened.

Some of them are leaking out of their boxes. You can see that one there. It's escaped. You should start doing YouTube unboxings of dev kits. Yeah, except all I would do would be unbox it, look at it, and think, oh, wait, I forgot to use ESD on it. Use any ESD protection on it.

Oh, well, I'll put it back in a box. I'm sure it still works. You just touch every point, and then the ESD is spread all over. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm going to go on 100 episodes. We don't have to stay there. We can wander back and forth.

We've had 100 episodes. Well, no, I did that big spreadsheet where I actually listed out all 100 episodes, who the guests were, I put tags on it, and then I didn't know what to do with it. I was so excited because I finally had a list of where you should start and people's favorite episodes, and instead of even telling people that this sheet existed, I just sort of... Well, you should pick 10 episodes and we should put it on the website. Oh, well, I have that because it's in the sheet, actually. All right. You should send it to me and I'll put it on the website.

I'm going to link the sheet in the show notes. Yeah, but if you wanted to start a pack, it could be done. Oh, okay could be done. Okay, all right. But as part of the whole 100 episode things, I did the survey. Right, the survey. The survey. That was the exciting part. I mean, she is cool because it makes it look like we've done a whole lot of things,

but the survey was pretty hilarious. So what prompted you to do this? Well, we were doing 100 episodes, and I just kind of wanted to know. It was a good, you know, here's, it was a line in the sand. You know, and then I wanted to know what the best show title was. Should I be saying Embedded? Should I be saying Embedded FM? Should we go back to making embedded systems?

And then the tagline, because that had been changing, I had been saying, the show for people who love gadgets, but it isn't really who love gadgets, it's people who build gadgets. And then I found out a lot of you hate the word gadgets. Sorry about that. I don't think I can change it at this point. What? It's true.

That was one of the comments. Why can't you change it? Well, because I don't think I can change it at this point. What? It's true. That was one of the comments. Why can't you change it? Well, because I don't know what else to say. The show of people who love building embedded systems sounds really dorky. Thingies. Thingies? Who love making thingies. Maybe we should change it so every week it's a different word.

If you don't like gadgets, then you're going to have to deal with some other word. That's worse. Widgets. Dinguses. Dinguses. Dingus. Yeah. We had a long conversation about the etymology of dingus this week. The definition of dingus is doodad.

Right. Look it up. Yeah. So we could just change it to a random series of words. Although one of the survey responses for what should we do different is quit changing the intro because it makes people crazy. What's changed about the intro? Oh, I say the words differently

and I introduce you slightly differently every time. That makes people crazy? I don't know. It was pretty funny. I thought it was too samey. Well, the other thing was the outro. I got a lot of comments about it being too abrupt. I'll put a ding at the end or something. The final thoughts seem to be a lot like the cat episode.

People either loved it or despised them. Oh, there was the comment that you could talk more. I will talk as much or as little as I feel necessary. Sorry. I wondered if you were going to add to that. Oh, people don't like the sticker. People don't like the design of the logo. All right. If you want to design a logo for us, you are welcome.

If you want to do free work for us, we'll accept it. Yeah. work for us we'll accept it uh yeah i you know i'm with the sticker design it was harder than i thought it would be i'm happy with how it came out design is very hard art is very hard art is very hard and i have ideas for a better logo but i just don't have the time on my computer that isn't spent doing other things well i think neither of us are really artists in that space. Yeah. And then I started to design this logo, and I realized it looked just like the contextual electronics one.

So that was sort of bad. We'd have to shut them down. Exactly. If we got a trademark on it first, then we go after chris oh that's a good idea yeah all right don't tell him right so the survey results were as you would expect a mix of people saying i like this and i hate this all about the same this so there's nothing we can really do well there was more cowbell more willhamhelm Scream. Unless people who liked one thing. And more dance numbers.

Right. Right. I can do more cowbell. Maybe we could end the show with a cowbell and make people happy. All right, we can fix the outro and the cowbell at the same time. Yeah. Or we could end it with a Wilhelm Scream. They wanted our favorite musical band, the Ballistic Kitten.

That's not a band. To record a techie intro music for the show. We have intro music for the show. And it's techie. I don't understand the question. I wanted outro music. Yeah, I'll get to that someday. You just didn't like how I described what I wanted.

Because it was over-constrained and impossible. Techno surf lullaby. Sleepy techno surf lullaby, yeah. I don't know why that's not perfectly imaginable surf usually has drums and lullabies usually do not

and techno usually has electronic instruments and surf music does not I'm the artist I'm the visionary here just make it so in the survey results we had a question I'm the artist. I'm the visionary here. Just make it so. In the survey results, we had a question.

Is there a role for an embedded software engineer at NASA? Of course there is. Of course there is. There are so many. Everything they do, all of the robots are embedded software. All the robots, the landers, the space... They're all running real-time operating systems. They're all running on embedded processors. Yes, that's all there is. Well, I mean, they have some pure software too.

Sure. But yes, there's so much at NASA you could do as an embedded software engineer. Although if it were me, I would go to SpaceX. I don't know. I don't know, because, well, SpaceX isn't really doing anything beyond launch vehicles right now. Right now.

Yeah. I suspect they've got... But if you go to NASA, you're going to get to work on things that are going to Europa soon, and other probes that go to Mars. I mean, you get to send stuff that drives around on a real planet. That would be really cool.

Not that Earth isn't a real planet. Whereas SpaceX, you're pretty much, you know, you're doing guidance systems and flight control systems, which are really cool, but I don't know. I also think that hours at SpaceX likely exceed those at NASA by a fair margin.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like a place you can go and slack. I heard that the interns that work there, of which they have hundreds, get to choose whichever 80 hours of the work week they want to work. Wow. That doesn't really sound like fun. It's flex time. It's flex time. You can get all your work done

Monday through, say, Thursday by working continuously. And then you've got three days off to sleep. That makes sense to me. Yeah, I'm not sure I want overtired people working on flight control systems. Critical systems, yeah.

Some people wanted less art, less business, and less education stuff. I have to tell you, that's not going to happen. Yeah, that's pretty much our thing. SparkYep podcast gets pretty technical and stays there. So does Amp Hour. I think I'm happy with basically talking to people who I find interesting,

which tends to be more of a range. I think it's going to be a mix. Some shows are going to be very technical and some are going to be completely off the wall. Yeah. And we won't do another cat show, I promise. It was hilarious. Yeah, we have two dogs though.

One last comment. EVC needs a PR30 and Chris needs a PR40. Yeah, okay, whatever. I don't even know what those are. Those are Heil microphones. One last comment. EVC needs a PR30 and Chris needs a PR40. Yeah, okay, whatever. I don't even know what those are. Those are Heil microphones. I see. But there was a question about what the gear and software we use.

I know you're not that interested in having a show about the show, but could you run it down real quick? I can run it down. My microphone is a Shure SM7B, which is a normal broadcast mic. Yours is a Rode Pro caster which we probably should replace at some point although i'm not sure your voice matches hiles we'd have to figure out what the best mic was uh the mics go into a focus right dual mono mic pre isa 2 which is just a microphone preamp. Those go into a Focusrite Scarlett audio USB interface, and that goes into my computer. And then I use Logic software from Apple to edit.

And we have guests who call in on Skype. We have a separate computer for that entirely, a little HP Stream Mini that goes straight into the Scarlett audio interface. So we have Skype on a separate track, and guests don't have to fiddle with their own

software. If they have Skype and they have a mic, they're good to go. And we send them a mic sometimes. Yeah. Other than that, that's pretty much it, but that's actually a lot for most podcasts. I've probably gone overboard with equipment. Well, and part of that is because you are a musician, and you had some of this equipment.

Right, the microphone preamp I use for music. And now that we're using this for the podcast, and the podcast is advertising for the company, now you can write off all this stuff. So we have better stuff. And my mic's a good kick drum mic. I've used it for on tracks. Yeah, as far as the mic question, mics are very personal to voice.

So I haven't been really itching to switch anything. I kind of like how mine sounds on this mic. Maybe other people don't. Mine sounds better when I'm not sick. Yeah, right now is not a good time to evaluate. I do know Dan Benjamin was selling some Heil PR40s from his studio, and I thought about it, but there's still 400 used.

On the other hand, if you work for Heil, and you'd like us to try your microphones, please send them with a self-addressed stamped box and i sure sure uh anything else on the survey that was interesting or funny or about what you expected not what you expected how many responses did you get i got 173 responses um which was a good number. Most of them I got in the first two weeks of it being open. And I got a list of what is your favorite episode and which episodes do you recommend to someone who's never heard the show? And that fed into the spreadsheet.

So people who liked episodes a lot, or episodes that a lot of people liked, ended up having more. Let's see. I guess one of the interesting things was the question, professionally, what describes your primary role? Unsurprisingly, a quarter of you are embedded software engineers. I guess it is sort of surprising because I thought more of you would be. 20% are hardware engineers. 11% are non-embedded software. We have a few managers out there and a few students. And then a whole quarter, again, are other.

From sysadmins to retired to all sorts of people. That's a good mix. It is. It's a good mix, and it tells me that we talk about software, we talk about embedded, we talk about hardware, but talking about other stuff is good too. Let's see. I don't know.

Why do you listen to the show? Most of you listen for the interesting guests and the useful information. Most of you do not listen for the cat interviews. Listen, I got that, okay? I got all the comments that said no more cat interviews. I agree. A good quarter of you are confirming your confirmation bias, so that was pretty amusing to me. And more people listen for Chris's pithy statements and jokes

than for me to snort laugh. Was that too much pressure? No, I just find, I mean, I did write the form. So,

you know, there might've been some confirmation bias with the form. Just struck me as an odd choice of things since there's rarely either. You often have pithy statements. And I think I snort laughed on one with Jen. Who hasn't been on in a while, and we will have her on again soon. Really? I guess the last time was...

It really has been a long time. It's been Bia. No, she was on with the 100 episodes. Oh, she was on with the 100 episodes. Oh, she was on with the 100 episodes. It was like five episodes ago. Oh, yeah. But we had Star, too, and we talked a lot more to Star because we hadn't talked to her. But yes, we'll have Jen back.

So you wanted to talk about BattleBots, and I know everybody likes to listen to us talk about our TV viewing habits. This is a TV viewing habit that's appropriate to embedded people. What did you want to say about BattleBots? Was it about Scorpion? Because I remember how much you liked Scorpion. No. So we watched BattleBots last night.

Over the last couple. Okay. And we went to one of the actual competitions years and years ago. Years and years ago. When they were doing them. And we almost went to this one. Right, and I don't remember what channel they were on before, but it was like maybe sci-fi

or Discovery or something like that. And I don't really remember how the show was organized back then. But this felt really weird. And so I'm happy there's a show that's kind of showing off robotics and fun stuff that the maker community is doing.

I think that's great. I think it'll get kids interested, even as it is now. But the whole thing felt a little strange to me. And I think I tried to put it into words last night, and I said something like, it's like you're having Dungeons & Dragons, and the jocks in high school and the jocks and the cheerleaders burst into the room and started doing color commentary.

And at first you're thinking, well, this is pretty cool. I'm kind of into this. And then a few minutes later you start thinking, wait, are they mocking me? And that's how I felt with the show because they had, they had the commentary people were a mixed martial arts guy. Yeah. And some other guy from maybe football or something. I don't know who he was.

And a woman who seemed like she was also a sportscaster type. And they had the whole NFL broadcast excitement with the fancy graphics and the swooping camera movements in the studio, not looking at the robots, looking at the commentators. And the whole thing just felt like, we're going to pretend this is football. We definitely had a very, very sports mentality. We're going to pretend this is sports because, and here's the problem I get into, we're going

to pretend this is sports because otherwise it's not interesting. But that's not true at all. Not to me. I mean, it was interesting without the fluff. That's what I thought. And I would like to spend more time seeing how they're built and how they work inside than, I mean, they even use some of the same phrases. You know, the tail of the tape goes to, let's go to this.

And it just sounded like you're pretending. It seemed like they were pretending because they were pretending i don't think those people were really excited about robots at all and you could tell the people who were excited about robots they had boback uh i can't say his last name for for dowsey the nasa guy uh who there's one of the judges briefly yeah he was one of the judges and Briefly, yeah, he was one of the judges. And they briefly talked to him and he walked around while they were working on the robots. And they had Allison Hayslip,

who was, I think, from G4, which was kind of a technical channel way back when they talked about computer stuff. So they had some people who were kind of... But they were kind of sidelined to be the judges who you never talk to again. They just give the numbers and then... So it was very strange.

And I don't know how you felt about it, but I felt like it was the wrong way to go about it. And maybe this is what you have to do on ABC to get people interested in a show like this. But I felt kind of bad. I wanted a lot more looking at the robots, looking inside the robots. And you introduced me to Is is it a robot or not?

Robot or not, yeah, podcast. It's John Syracusa and Jason Snell. People talk about, is this a robot? And they came down on the side. World's shortest podcast. They came down on the side. The BattleBots are not robots. I don't think they talked about BattleBots,

but BattleBots would not be robots according to the other stuff they've talked about because they're just remote controlled. They don't have any autonomy. And that actually is what I was hoping for the new BattleBots. I was hoping that sure, you had control, but I wanted these robots to be smarter on their own. I wanted them to be more robots and that that would be far more interesting than basically an exercise in momentum, which is what most of those battle bots end up being. Yeah, they were all the same as last time, which was 10 years ago or roughly. You know, Grant and Mahara is the one that would come and shove an ice pick in you.

Yeah. That would still have won, hands down. They all had flippers, they had ones with spinny things they had some fire but there was nothing new there maybe that and maybe there's only so many things you can do with physics in that arena to move and destroy better yeah so that yeah that was kind of disappointing to me so i don't know if they're mostly disappointed not in the technology no because i think it's still that abc is mocking your brotherhood. I don't think they're mocking exactly, but it feels like it. They might be.

Somebody there probably is. It just felt like, here's the thing. The juxtaposition between the people who are competing and the people doing the presenting is so stark. stark because you have these athlete people and then you have group and you have that family from wisconsin who are just farmers and uber nerds who this is what they do in their spare time in their in their in their barn and they weren't cool people and yet they they did the the little background tape on them and they tried to make them seem super cool and dynamic with the zooming. I mean, they had the cows come up, and it was like, they're cows. It's a farm.

This is not edgy. If you showed me the tools they used to harden their parts and to actually look at what they did with their motors and even to tell me some of the rules. I know that these robots have to be, or these BattleBots have to be a certain weight limit. And you have to be able to turn them off remotely in a way that puts them into a safe mode. That sort of stuff I'd find interesting. But would other people find interesting? Would the mass market find that interesting?

I don't know. I think our listeners would find that interesting yeah i don't know so i don't want to belabor this point but i just felt like it was more weird than it had been when it was on discovery even on discovery i do remember it was kind of amped up and yeah definitely but it didn't feel like such a weird dichotomy of well we're gonna truck in these people who have nothing to do with anything that you're doing and we're going to put you side by side and they're going to pretend that they think it's cool and you're going to pretend that you are cool and we're going to make a show about it and and in our community

those people are cool but i don't think that mainstream america necessarily thinks they're cool and i'm going to get hate for this. Because I'm not coming down on the people who are competing. I'm really trying to say the whole thing just smacks of a contrivance to me. Well, you know, we've been watching World Cup soccer, the Women's World Cup.

And you would never have a mixed martial artist do the color commentary for soccer. Right. You would not even have a football star be. Yeah. Yes, I think you're getting to what bugs me. Is that they've brought in people outside the community to comment on the community.

I would far rather see Chris Gamble and Dave from EEV Blog doing the color commentary because that would be hilarious. Oh, yeah. from eev blog doing the color commentary because that would be hilarious oh yeah and they would ask good questions and you know add in a couple other people lenore and from evil mad scientist and jerry ellsworth were already there pick those people up and have them talk about the robots and and maybe some of those people aren't on-camera kind of people, but there are people who are dynamic within the community who would make it interesting. And maybe the argument back is, well, nobody knows who those people are. I don't know who those other people are.

I've never heard of the mixed martial arts guy. I've never heard of any of the other commentary people. The only people I have heard of were the two judges you don't talk to. Well, you recognize the woman who was on Warehouse 13? No, she wasn't. I looked it up. Oh, it wasn't the two judges? Yeah, she to. Well, you recognize the woman who was on Warehouse 13? No, she wasn't. I looked it up. Oh, it wasn't? Yeah, she was from G4.

Okay. But she was more from the community than the other people. Yeah. And I'm not trying to be a gatekeeper, but come on. Mixed martial arts and robots, there's really... But it's battle-y, and there's flames, and there's fighting, and there's judging, and this is... Yeah, it was a metaphor.

I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what, if, if it doesn't sound, if this doesn't sound weird to you, then have us do this Superbowl next year. You know, somebody's going to email and say,

yeah, you two should do the Superbowl live. And then they stopped and they're standing around. Oh, but they're going to have a play. Yes, there was a play. It's over. It's all over. I actually like football.

Go to commercial. Well, we would mostly comment on the commercials, I think. So I don't know how you felt about BattleBots. I demanded we skipped through a lot of it so we could just get to when the robots were fighting. So, yeah. I wasn't that thrilled. I don't know that we'll continue.

Yeah. I would rather watch Jeopardy. Well, that's a personal problem. More satellite entries. Kevin Fitch suggested a teapot filled with spaghetti and meatballs, which I have to admit was one of my personal favorites. He had a more serious idea involving LIDAR, but who cares about that? Spaghetti and meatballs don't go in teapots.

I know, it was all kinds of surreal. That's what I liked about it. Imagine if an alien found that. I know. It's been decades trying to figure out what it meant I know what is this writing that they use it's very squiggly

it's organic and squiggly they'd probably think it was an actual being well yeah because the meat yeah there's all kinds of cool stuff in there and the teapot is this the actual shape of the satellite? It's a space exoskeleton. It's a space-faring creature.

And that's the exoskeleton. Yeah. John Lehman had a good idea involving radar to do fine-time analysis of earthquakes using a technique known as INSAR, interferometric synthetic aperture radar. He does work on earthquakes for his PhD. We got to talking about ShotSpotter, actually.

I replied to John and said that ShotSp spotter had a whole bunch of data where they've had those sensors sitting in like oakland and in san francisco collecting data for years about their position and so they have really accurate positions and they have the time change of the positions you know this month versus last month month. And when I worked there, there were a couple of us who wanted to spend a good chunk of time on that data looking to see if we could find out about movement profiles of LA to San Francisco to Oakland.

And that's all GPS-based? That's all GPS-based, but over long periods of time. Unfortunately, ShotSpotter does not tell you where their sensors are, and any paper written thereof would not be publishable, so it was all a pointless waste of time that we didn't get to spend anyway. It was sad. Antun van Breda wanted satellites to look up.

They wanted to make a radio telescope by having a whole flock of satellites. Yeah. Wasn't that in the plan at some point? Not for a planet, but isn't there a space radio telescope that was weirdly large with small satellites? It rings a bell. I know they're thinking about that for infrared visible. Well, not visible, but for infrared telescopes where you can do that sort of array of small things that you know exactly where they are.

So you can do interferometry with them and create a virtual huge telescope, which gives you really fine resolution. So instead of having a gigantic actual mirror, you have small mirrors at the edges of where the gigantic actual mirror is, and then you do magic between them to integrate the signal you get from all of them.

And that gives you, basically, it doesn't have the same light gathering, but it does have the same resolution as a large mirror. But it's hard to do at certain wavelengths because you have to have them at accurate positions within quarter wavelength or half wavelength or something. So the higher the energy you go, the smaller the wavelength you go,

the more accurate your positioning has to be. So that's why infrared is possible, but visible light hasn't really happened much. And radio is really easy. Well, comparatively. Really easy. Let's get on that today. A lot of people wanted to build satellites to make satellites more accessible. Sounds like the stuff that Stuart was doing. Yeah, actually Stuart, our grand prize winner, does work on satellites.

He makes little cube satellites. Pocket cube. Pocket cube. He had an article recently where he was interviewed about making his pocket cube. Yeah, I saw a tweet to that effect. It was ABC Australia or something. It's pretty cool. I think he'll be on the show. We'll ask him about making his own satellites.

I liked this one. Send up a satellite that's covered with LEDs. And everybody could just see it going across the sky. And that's how you introduce people to the concept of how satellites move. And advertising. You have enough of them. Right. In a segment array. Well, actually, so that one was from Chris May. There was another one from Dave Wilson, who wanted small mirrored satellites that can swarm and use the mirrors to form a dot matrix display in the sky.

Oh, see? I skipped ahead. He was going to print hello world as the first message. That's funny, actually. And Max wanted to make modular sensors that you could change around into a programmable micro, and then multiple people can upload their code to the satellite to monitor different things.

Scheduling interface, chips to talk to sensors. What do you want to send up? The little dog who woke us up at 6 a.m. this morning. Is that our dog? Yeah. Oh. Huh.

I must have a better idea than that, shouldn't I? I would like to look at different things on Earth. And planets have been doing some of that. That was one of the reasons I liked talking to them. Different wavelengths and what it means. Not necessarily looking at people. I don't want to look at people's faces, although they do have optics for that.

They've had that for a long time. I want to look more at the effects we have that are not necessarily in the visible spectrum. Some of that's pollution, but a lot of it's heat. The way humans change the heat is

strange and kind of cool. It's not the same as light pollution, although there is some overlap. I think they have those. I think there's a lot of satellites monitoring temperature now. Yes, but I don't have any of them. I don't know.

I'd want to send up something. If things got truly cheap where you could send up, where it wasn't a major, major project to send up a satellite, I'd like to start testing some of the weirder ideas that people have had about space, like solar sails. I know they just sent something up that wasn't, I don't think it was really testing its sailiness, just whether it could be deployed.

Oh, I thought they were monitoring the energy gathering of this. I'm sure there were some, but it wasn't doing actual, it wasn't going anywhere or being, I don't know, they were actually testing its propulsion capabilities. Stuff like that,

or, you know, there've been ideas about, and actually this was in Neil Stevenson's book, but I'd read about it before, where you tether two objects together and spin them around to make artificial gravity in each node, like two capsules on the end of a cable.

I would like to see the inertial measurement readings from both of those. That would be really cool. Yeah, so stuff like that. And, you know, testing ideas about space elevators, well, I don't know how you do that at this point. But I'd like to mix things up and have people start exploring some of the crazier ideas from science fiction. Because a lot of the ideas from science fiction became reality.

Arthur C. Clarke, I think it was Arthur C. Clarke, basically invented the idea behind geosynchronous satellites or telecommunication satellites. It was either Clarke or Asimov. I'm not sure which, but I think it was Clark. Yeah. I think we should start being crazier. But that does mean a lot more junk up there,

which could be another option. Figuring out ideas for how to clean up some of the junk. Yeah, I thought there was a contest about that recently. I guess I'll have to go look. One of the entries, although I don't have it in front of me, was about having a small shower for Sandra Bullock as she wanders

from place to place as she deals with gravity. That movie. I liked the idea that they were really bringing that piece of science forward. Hot hygiene in space? No, no, no.

Someday our satellites are going to have a serious problem. And it's going to wipe out a lot of them. Well, it's already happened. Not to that scale. Yeah, almost. The Chinese blew up a satellite. That was a while ago. But it was a problem.

Oh, yeah, it still is. And then I think another couple collided amazingly, which is if you think about how vast space is the idea that two satellites actually would run into each other just randomly is pretty terrifying in its rareness but yeah um yeah i don't want to get on another pop culture rant about the movie, but that's not how anything works. I'll just leave it there. Yes.

Don't read The Martian and then watch Gravity, because the difference between them might make your head explode. But they're doing a movie for The Martian. Yep, yep, yep. They are with Matt Damon. I didn't, it looked okay. It looked okay so far, the trailer. It was okay. It looked okay so far. The trailer was fine. I think, I don't know how they're going to do the science without dumbing it way down.

Or just doing it quickly. Just gloss over it? Yeah. Do the science properly, but do it so quickly that you're only pandering to the 3% who care. Kind of like how I code. I don't understand how to take that. I just do it so quickly that nobody can tell what I'm doing. I don't do a good job, just a quick job. I've stunned you into silence or you're having a stroke.

I don't think that's true. It doesn't make any sense. No, it doesn't make any sense. But neither did gravity. Really? That was like the brick joke? You're just setting me up for this long. Thank you for that.

Oh, maybe after I'm sick, maybe after ESC, I'll be looking for work. What do you want to do? I want to do something a little mathy. Mathy? Yeah. I kind of miss the motors. I miss PID controllers.

I miss signal processing. I've been doing a lot of Internet of Things that don't require a lot out of me other than reading data sheets. You know, it's got a lot of motors. BattleBots.

I hope somebody emails and says, you know, there is an autonomous BattleBots. Oh, I'm sure there is. And it's so much cooler. Although I think they, I'm not sure that there are autonomous BattleBots where they fight. There's definitely, you know, FIRST Robotics where they play soccer and stuff.

Well, and there's the DARPA Grand Challenge. The DARPA Grand Challenge, yeah. They talked about it on the Amp Hour last week or the week before, one of the two. And they had the video, and I haven't gone to watch it. I'm really, really interested in looking at that. Because it was apparently, you know, they had the ones that were

autonomous vehicles, but this was actually humanoid robots this year, and they had to go through a set of tasks. And a lot of them missed on that doorway and fell down. All right. Well, I'll go watch it. That was a good video. Yeah.

I still, and I think Chris mentioned this, but I still don't understand. Why are we making humanoid robots? There are lots of reasons. One is that we're humans and we like that form factor because we think it is somehow somehow superior it'll be friendly when they come to come to take over um but i don't really know why you'd choose that over a four-legged other than uh that cat one that boston dynamics did was terrifying to look at a cat it was more of a hellhound all right whatever it was it was just i don't want it near me and the the people-shaped ones are a little easier to have near you but the yeah but we're so terrible at moving around we've evolved into this weird two-legged standing upright thing that doesn't even really work that great for us. I know. Do you know how long it takes people to learn how to walk upright?

That's like years. Millions of years. Yeah. So, say you want to work on motors. I want to work on motors or signal processing or even looking at big data in embedded systems. I mean, ShotSpotter was very much a math haven. I miss math.

Okay. And yet, I probably will do another Bluetooth low-energy wearable thing. That's where all the work is, and all the math's been done. That's not true. No, but it feels like it. Since I've been doing this talk with the inertial sensors and talking more about Kalman filters, I've

been thinking about making one. A Kalman filter? Yeah. To put on top of the Adafruit IMU. That would be great, and people would really appreciate that, I think. I know, but they're so hard to tune, and you have to tune it in your vehicle. So you'd have to provide some reference designs. These are the constraints for this kind of thing,

a four-wheeled robot, a quadcopter. And there was a project to do this with UAVs. Right. But it didn't look like they ever really finished. They got started. They got a decent way through. And then I think it just... Well, you'd have to treat it as not a drop-in.

Here's a Kalman filter. Here, you plug your sensors in and go. It would be an educational thing. Yeah, you'd have to treat it as not a drop in here's a Kalman filter, here you plug your sensors in it would be an educational thing here's how you can explore this and you'd have to learn what this means and how it works in order to integrate it into your system I've been thinking with my I have the little light box

it's accelerometers and gyros and magnetometers in different modes and it lights up according to the mode. I'm thinking about making it so that it showed the quaternion with multiple LEDs so that you could see how the quaternion is related to 3-space. It's such a mind weirdness to think about putting 3-space stuff into a 4-space quaternion. But it's not really that bad. You get a feel for how things change.

Useful. I'll do that and maybe Kalman eventually. We'll see. It seems like most of the business out there lately has been, we need this kind of thing. So you go pick our modules for us

and plug them together and write the code that drives all the modules and you're done. Well, I mean, lately I've been doing tiny startups with proof of concepts or coming in and closing it. Getting a project that's stalled

for some reason and getting it out the door. And those are fun, but they're three- and six-month contracts, which don't quite give me enough time to dive into cool stuff. Maybe August. Yeah, that's when I'm retiring. Shall we retire now? I think so, because if I talk anymore, I'm going to have to stop for another fit of coughing.

That will make our third, fourth, sixth? I'll just count. Yeah. All right, well, do you want to put the cowbell in here? Would you like me to scream? I can pretend to be the Wilhelm Scream. The Wilhelm Scream? Man! Do you want me to leave that in? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The Wilhelm screen. Man.

Do you want me to leave that in? Okay, so a lot of people don't believe that I stutter. And I thank Christopher for that. But in fact, I was a stutterer. I have always been a stutterer. I had many years of speech therapy for stuttering. And for my inability to say S's. Etheth.

Etheth. The Wilhelm Scream. Would you like me to try it? Go for it. No, I'll just cough. I'm going to call that enough of an intro to the outro. All righty then. Thank you, as always, to Christopher White for co-hosting and producing,

and to you for listening. If you'd like to contact us, Embedded FM. Hit the contact link on Embedded FM or email us, show at embedded.fm. Have a good week. We'll talk more next week. I think we'll be talking about learning embedded systems and whatever we learn at Solid, assuming I survive Solid. My final thought for you this week

comes from the classics for those of you who really believe in what the Romans taught us. This one's from Seneca. There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more in apprehension than reality.