Embedded - 200: Oops

Episode Date: May 17, 2017

Episode 200! Let’s have a party (and a survey)! Former guests joined us in a panel-style celebration of working in embedded systems: Alvaro Prieto, Andrei Chichak, Elizabeth Brenner, Chris Svec, and Chris Gammell. Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) was a guest on 130: Criminal Training Camp. Andrei Chichak writes Embedded Wednesdays and was on 99: You Can Say a Boat, 114: Wild While Loops and 139: Easy to Add Blood Splatter. Elizabeth Brenner (@eabrenner) was a guest on 17: Facebook Status: Maybe Not Dead and 54: Oh, The Hugh Manatee, Chris Svec (@christophersvec) writes Embedded Software Engineering 101 was on 78: Happy Cows and 139: Easy to Add Blood Splatter. Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) was a guest on 35: All These Different Reasons Why You Might Want to Do Something as well as a co-host on the holiday Embedded/Amp Hour crossover episode 181: Work on It for Ten Years. Fiction mentioned: Authors Harlan Coben and CJ Cherryh Robopocalype by Daniel Wilson The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu (Translator) Trollhunters HTML5 in Easy Steps by Mike McGrath Episodes cited as favorites: 94: Don't Be Clever 53: Being a Grownup Engineer 111: Potty Train Your Tamagotchi 187: Self-Driving Arm 162: I Am a Boomerang Enthusiast 150: Sad Country Song Tools discussed: Software: Beyond Compare, Edit+, and Crossover Logic analyzers / small oscilloscopes: Saleae, Digilent Analog Discovery and Digital Discovery Other tools: JLink Pro debugger/programmer,  HP16C calculator (recommended  emulator is Nonpareil for Mac and for Windows and Linux) Notes: T-shirt sales are probably already over unless you hurry. March micro madness and Digilent Digital Discovery contests also end very soon.  

Welcome to Embedded. This is Elysia White. My co-host is Christopher White. And for all of those people out there who have wondered, when I ask people for their final thought, does that mean that we are killing them and eating them afterwards? I have repeat guests on this show for you. And by guests, I mean, oh my God, this is going to be so confusing, but it will be fun. Welcome to the Embedded 200th episode.

Yay! Woo-hoo. Is that what I was supposed to do? Yeah. Okay. I should have popped a balloon or something but i don't have it where's your drum set okay so i want to make sure you hear everybody's voices uh as i said i'm elicia christopher hello everybody should know what i sound like that's true uh elizabeth hello everybody andre how's it going, eh? Alvaro. Hello.

And Svek. Hi there. Did anybody else creep in? Oh, good. Good, good. So only the imaginary people in the area here. I don't know. I could go through your Skype contacts and just start kind of adding people to the call, if you like.

I was hoping the cat would join us for this one, too. I can work that in later. Yeah. Okay. So since we have such a big crew, and since many of you have been on the show multiple times, I want really short introductions. You know, hello, I'm such and such, and I do such and such, and I like such and such. Something pretty short.

Alvaro, do you want to start? Oh, sure. I'm Alvaro. I'm an electrical slash firmware engineer, and I like cheese. Good. Good, good. Alvaro Prieto, right? Yep. Okay. Andre, you're next. I'm going to take a while. Hello, I'm Andre Csicak, also known as Andre from the Great White North. I'm not an engineer, but I did stay on a holiday inn last month. I write programs for embedded computer systems, mostly in regulated industries like medical devices, petrochem, and automotives. for the Embedded.fm website and occasionally teach an introductory embedded systems class at a local makerspace in Edmonton, Canada.

I got my degree in computing science from the University of Alberta and have 22 years of experience in embedded systems and another nine in tech ops. I make kites for fun, mostly of ripstop, spinnaker cloth, and carbon fiber, and I'll stop. Wow.

Elizabeth. Hi, I'm Elizabeth. I work in embedded firmware, and I have been in the industry since the year one. Year one. All right. Svek?

I'm Chris Svek, and I've worked in embedded software since the year. I'm not sure what the reference is. I've worked in embedded software for a while. I worked on chip design since then, and so I guess I'm slowly working my way up the stack, very slowly. For fun, and don't you also have a blog? I do, I do do I forgot the fun part I write a series on the Embedded FM blog

which is called Embedded Software Engineering 101 which is sort of an introduction to embedded systems for people who maybe have some programming experience maybe have some software experience but definitely do not have any embedded systems experience. And for fun, I play bass and run. Okay, so... Run from what? Like physical move your body? Right, right. Oh, that's weird. That is really weird to do for fun. And all of these people have been on the show before, right? So we should mention that they've been on the show before and link in the show notes to all their previous shows.

I will link in the show notes to all their previous shows, and we may talk about their shows. Well, it was great to have all of you. Thanks for doing this. Bye. We have lightning round before we go. You're in a couple hundred more. So lightning round.

I think the only way to do this is for you all just to shout out your answers at some random interval offset sort of like ethernet and then we'll back off yeah something do we do collision detection it's a five second back off 10 second one second exponential okay the the first one. Cat. Penguins, pangolins, or terrapins? Penguins. Oh, terrapins.

What? I don't know what the middle one is. I'm not a guest. You're looking at me. Are you not going to answer? Oh, okay, I'll answer. The answer is penguin. What was the question? Penguin.

Penguin. What was the question? Penguin, terrapin, question? Penguin. What was the question? Penguin, pangolin, pangolin. Penguin. Penguin, pangolin, pangolin. Penguin. All right. All right.

Thank you, Sherlock. And I would choose pangolin. Fuzzy logic, digital logic, or analog? Digital logic. No. No? No. Okay. analog no no uh okay engineering or management or other engineering engineering other people people people oh yeah you have some theories about being nice and all of that so that must be sad it's never working for us.

No, no, no. I have theories as to what it takes to actually get products out the door, and it involves engineering and management and robots. It does involve robots. Okay. How many siblings do you have? Two. Two that I know of.

That's true. Okay. One that I know of. One that I'm pretty sure of. One that I know of. That's true. Okay. One that I know of. One that I'm pretty sure of. One that I know of and two that I don't. Last movie that you saw. Guardians of the Galaxy 2. The Man from Nowhere. What was the last Bond movie?

Whatever the Bond movie was, most recent one. Wow, that's a long time ago. I would never say never again. Moonraker? Moonraker. No, no no it was the last star wars wait rogue one or force awakens you have to be very specific here no oh jesus why why he said the last star wars oh and of course that would be rogue one Yeah. I'm up to 97 this year so far. Wow. I saw one at Christmas.

But the one you mentioned, Alvaro, is not new. So it's not like we knew that you, I mean, as far as I could tell, you hadn't seen a movie since like 19, what year did that come out? 70-something? Man from Nowhere is 2010. How could Alvaro have not seen a movie since the 70s?

I know. I was in a lot of fits. Yeah, I didn't ask for age, but maybe I should have asked for decade. Alvaro is the youngest, we all know. Oh, we all know, yes. And last one of these, and maybe we should go in order here a novel or some sort of fiction or movie that you saw in the last year that you found really cool Christopher you have to it's a lot of people you got it you got it I got a call on people okay this is just off the top of my head it's not

necessarily the best thing I've read but I read a young adult novel in the last year that was kind of amusing called The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness. And it is from the perspective of the high school students in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like situation who are not the heroes. Yes, it was really good. I recently read Robopocalypse, which was kind of like, okay, we'll get there eventually, and I hope that the robots don't kill us all. And then I started working on some machine learning stuff, and now I'm afraid, and I'm starting to stock up on weapons.

Elizabeth? I've been reading a bunch of Harlan Coben thriller mysteries and a recent CJ Cherry. None of them have any social value or anything like that, but it's entertaining. Pure escapism. Svek? Sci-fi, I read a book called The Three-Body Problem, which is actually, it's a trilogy of books. I read all three. It's by a Chinese science fiction author. And I don't think I've read any non-Western science fiction author's work before. And it was great. The books are great. I feel like it felt different than the science fiction that I'd normally read, which is all like Western, you know, Western science fiction. I wish I could have read the book not knowing that it was written by a Chinese author as opposed to an American

author. So I could trust my feeling that this seems like it was written from a different perspective than every other sci-fi book I've ever read. But obviously, I knew that it was, quote-unquote, an Eastern author versus a Western author, so I had that going into it. But fantastic books. All three of the Three-Body Problem trilogy were great books. Alvaro? Does this have to be a book or...?

No, it's some sort of fiction. Fiction? So, movies count. plays movies songs mimes youtube videos it's a netflix tv show but it's a troll hunters it's a little animated movies or well show that was a lot of fun by uh guillermo del toro trolls like the ones that you spin and their hair goes everywhere not from from Guillermo Totoro. It's not. Oh,

good point, but it's still kind of more for kids. Not, not as terrifying as some of his other work. Cool. Andre. Um, I'm going to take this down a notch,

um, for nonfiction. Unfortunately, it's the definitive guide to arm cortex Cortex-M3 and M4 Processors by Joseph Yu. No, that's fiction. No, for fiction, it's HTML5 and Easy Steps. Oh, man, Crystal, your joke. My reference stuff has just been stacking up, and I'm kind of plowing through that.

Chris Gamble? So, he said he might come, but I don't think he did. Oh. So, it's sort of sad. Could have had three Chrises. I asked him to record something ahead of time, and then I asked him to record something ahead of time. And then I asked him to just record, I have no comment. And we were just going to keep playing that.

But apparently he has a life or something. And I don't know, he's traveling. Moved to the big city and suddenly you got things to do. Exactly. Okay. So now I have questions about, I don't know, what we what we do i mean we all sort of work in embedded systems sort of who does this sort of apply to well the sort of work applies to me i mean there's sort of embedded there's sort of work, there's sort of work, there's embedded sort of, there's embedded work. It's a permutations thing.

So, how do you describe what you do to someone non-technical? Is this a free-for-all? Whoever answers first wins. And the points don't matter. Oh, I was about to ask what I win. I tell them that I program computers, but not the desktop kinds, the ones that you don't notice. Like the ones in your car or a thermostat. If I've done my job right, you don't even know that there's a computer involved.

Yep. They like that. Yeah. I usually tell them I'm a professional geek, and that's usually good enough if people seem a little more interested than I say, oh, I work for a company called iRobot, and if their eyes don't glaze over, I say, oh, we make this thing, it's like a vacuum cleaner, it's called a Roomba, and then either they will say, oh, I have one or something like that. Or again, their eyes will glaze over and then I'll move on.

Yeah, the eyes glazing over is the main thing for me. I can now say I work for Fitbit and people say, oh, I've heard of Fitbit. My mother loves her Fitbit. What do you do for Fitbit? And I say, I'm a firmware engineer. And then the eyes glaze over and we're done. Yeah, same thing for iRobot for me. It's nice having a product you can actually point to.

But yeah, you start talking about what you do and it's kind of like, well, moving on. It was much easier for me when I worked at Apple. It's like, what do you do? I can't tell you. Done. Yeah, I finally realized that it's easiest when my sister asks me things if I just say I can't tell you. It's like, so do you have a release date for your product? Yes.

What is it? Can't tell you. For me, it was they don't tell me these things. I'm not allowed to know. So you can ask me all you want. I don't know. Even better. So how not allowed to know. So you can ask me all you want. I don't know. Even better. So how do you describe what you do, Alvaro?

Yeah, I work on... I write code for tiny chips, basically, little computers that don't have an operating system necessarily kind of thing. But yeah, here in Silicon Valley, it's a little bit easier to explain. Yeah, are there any non-engineers in Silicon Valley? I've heard of rumors, yes. I live in an old blue-collar neighborhood, and what you do for a living is just not a conversation. It is sort of weird that that is a little bit how we define ourselves in this industry sometimes or maybe it's just how much i do it that my job and my identity are

overlapped so what much i think that's very very common it's just people in the neighborhood know my husband's a teacher and they know what that means. He's an elementary school teacher. So like half of them had him at some point in their lives. Or have a nephew or niece that did. That is absolutely true. old-fashioned enough neighborhood that there are a lot of neighbors that just it's never occurred to them that I do work, let alone that they're interested in what I might do for work. So the answer to where do you work tends to be San Francisco rather than, you know, anything about what I do or what company I work for, which is kind of cool. It's very different,

a very different environment from the environment at work. I wonder if in tech circles, the party question, oh, what do you work, who do you work for, where do you work, what kind of software, what kind of hardware, whatever, I wonder if that identity wrap-up in your work as your identity is more common in tech, or is it as common in other fields as well i don't know that certainly happens in tech here like that's the first thing people ever ask like what do you do and depending on where you are they'll be talking about funding and

vcs and all that stuff whereas in other places you might focus on hobbies or kids or whatever something else but the first question isn't what do you do that's true moving over from silicon valley to closer to the beach that is no longer the first question people ask you and it was a little odd because i mean that was you know it was my go-to and now i have to be like so do you have kids? Have you lived here long? You know, the random chit-chat. How's the weather? The weather's beautiful.

Look for yourself. And I do understand the eyes glazing over part. I worked for Crossbow making inertial measurement units. And I sat next to somebody on an airplane, and they clearly wanted to be one of these, let's chat the whole time people. And I thought about lying and saying I was an insurance salesman. And then I just admitted that I worked on inertial measurement units

and they didn't talk to me at all. The fact that I was going to Southern California to work on race cars and inertial measurement units, that part I left out of the story. Yeah, try to tell somebody you work on routing protocols sometime. Oh, yeah. You want to see eyes glazing over. I'm just so pleased that I now can go two sentences before the eyes glaze over. Right. Oh, I've seen those in stores. Fine. So one of the things that I like

about working in embedded systems is that it's not necessarily just a computer. It does more than that. And the applications are often interesting. And even the locations you end up with are interesting. Like that time I melted my hiking boots on the Mojave Desert

in the middle of a bomb range. I wondered if anybody else has any, I don't know, amusing stories that they can think of that goes along with being in the field or some application of what you're working on. Andre, do you have that? Yeah. I was working on this USB keyboard glove project for the computer gaming market and writing all the firmware for that. And at the same time, we were working on a competition project with DARPA. And we were at this big meeting in Raw Lake, North Carolina. And like you got people there from like, they're the DARPA researchers and people from our team. And the other team was from Lockheed. And a part of the project was to put together a hand gesture recognition system.

And, of course, we're the Canadians in the crowd, so we just sort of took the table at the back to stay out of the way. And I'm sitting there working on the code for the glove and trying to get the funky little LED effects going. Meanwhile, the Lockheed people have no idea what we're working on because a part of their project is to work on their own system. And we're these people from Canada, and I've got this glove on with wires sticking out all over it. And they have no idea what we're supposed to be, other than every time they were standing up at the front waffling about their progress, I'm making my little hand go blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, pew, pew. It was a fun meeting for us.

Sort of like when other people distract you in the middle of what you're focused on. Yeah, that would be good. Two can play at this game, Chauncey. All right. Who's next with the story? Svek, you're up. I spent most of my career working on either designing chips or writing software that goes in chips. And so I sat in my chair in a cubicle for most of my career.

That's hilarious. Oh, sorry. It really is. It really is. Open offices. Now, those are hilarious. Oh, don't. No.

No. Please, no. A shout from the dark. Please no. Elizabeth, you were, is sort of buttoned up to the neck and skirts halfway down their calves, but women standing there at the same place every day were in fact transvestite hookers. That took us several days to understand why nobody else was walking the route that we were walking to get from the hotel to the restaurant. I didn't know where this was going to go, but yes, that was a little unexpected. That's a little bit better than finding out that tantalum capacitors are polar by having one blow up in my head. I think it was my first job out of college.

We did a fingerprint filing system for New Scotland Yard and got to travel to New Scotland Yard to install it. And that was kind of cool. But of course, all I remember is being there. I don't remember anything about New Scotland Yard. And then I remember the stories about the previous system before I was there that was installed at the NSA or the CIA or one of those alphabet places. And before the team went to install it, there was somebody who came to explain what rules you had to follow. And for the period of time that you were involved in the installation,

you weren't supposed to interact with any of your friends or acquaintances who happened to be foreign nationals. And during the conversation, one of the engineers turned to the other and said, George, does that mean I can't talk to you for the next two months? Exactly. And the trainer was very distressed. Turned out that the people who were planning on traveling had to be reorganized. The one who was an American citizen but whose

parents were registered communists couldn't go. The one who was actually a Swiss citizen couldn't go. It was all very disturbing for the poor people from the alphabet agency. And then there was the pulp and paper industry show, where when we finally unpacked our giant, giant, giant display, because we were a relatively large company, there were two extra boxes. And they were labeled for booth 17C. And since I didn't have anything better to do, I wandered down to the square that was labeled 17C, where there was

two gentlemen from a small company who were sitting, looking very, very sad. So making their day better by telling them we had their boxes was the best thing about the entire trip. Mental note, skip the pulp. Yeah, maybe don't go to that conference. So, one of the things, oh, Chris, Chris, do you have a story? I have many stories. You do, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

And Alvaro didn't say anything. Oh, true, Chris, do you have a story? I have many stories. You do. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And Alvaro didn't say anything. Oh, true. Okay. Sorry. You're just skipping over two of us. You're right. He's a foreign national. Yeah.

I'm a U.S. citizen now. Yay. But yes, I am a foreign national. Perfect timing. Oh, sorry. So I'll condense two of my stories. Both of them have to do with people may not realize how difficult it was to hire engineers in 1999 because all the engineers had been hired right

pre-bubble um so this was a period i was working at a startup and we were interviewing i don't know hundreds of people and they were all the best people because that was who was out there looking for jobs in 1999 not so uh two two of them one of them got hired and i didn't interview this person uh he was subsequently escorted out of the building uh by the sheriff who came in with shotguns so that was that was the fun story is is looking up from your desk and seeing the sheriff there with the shotgun out escorting beef wellington which was his name which i don't feel bad saying because i'm that doesn't seem like a real name it it doesn't does it you'd think that maybe that wouldn't get through the first round of background checks but when you're desperate for chip designers you you hire beef wellington did he go by beef he did and uh he he was wanted on drug charges in colorado

so i assume that's where he went back to. And then the other time was when I was in a row. Sometimes when you interview people, they have little nervous tics and you don't know quite how to deal with them sometimes because they can be quite odd. And this man twisted his nipples throughout the entire interview.

It was extremely distracting. And I didn't know how to end the interview. Technically, he was also terrible because none of the people interviewing at that point were any good because everybody had jobs. But so yeah, so this was the 90s. So I'm not sorry to see that era kind of go. Wow.

My least favorite interview candidate was the one who took a bathroom break after every hour interview. I mean, you always offer a bathroom break. Oh, that's a good way to kill time, yeah. Yeah, mostly people, you know, accept once or twice. And he would go to the bathroom and he'd come back all peppy. Wow. Warning sign, warning sign. Was he sniffing a lot? I didn't. I did request an interview at Google, in fact.

I might as well name that name. I requested a bathroom break during an interview at Google, in fact. I might as well name that name. Or request a bathroom break during an interview at Google. And they didn't know where it was. Oh, no. Yeah, that was kind of bad. But it's not a boys club. It's very diverse. We had a person that we called in for an interview.

And I made the call. This guy had the highest grades in computing science that year. And it's like, hey, is Dave available for an interview? Oh, he hasn't got out of bed yet. Well, when he gets up, could you get him to give me a call? So eventually he gives me a call and is like, well, we'd like you to come in for an interview. Would nine o'clock be okay? And it's like, well, that's a bit early for me. It's like, well, that's okay. How about 10? 11? I should be able to make it for 11. So he finally rolls in and take a look at his resume. And it's like, you don't have anything for your summer job for last year. It's like, oh, yeah. Well, did you go on a mission or something? It's like, no, I just couldn't get motivated to look for a job. And it's like, okay. Asked him a couple more questions. And then it pretty much came down to, I don't want this guy to work for me.

I don't want to have to chase him every morning to get him into work. And there endeth the story. There endeth the story. And we still don't have a story from Alvaro. I mean, I can give you some interview stories not as terrifying but i i do remember a firm engineer candidate um i do some simple questions and some of them have to do with the size of a variable and i found out that that apparently a byte is four bits long and he was very sure

of this and it was it was terrifying and of course I think he made one more interview after mine and he was gone but it was fairly new at interviewing so I was just kind of like in shock

the ones that argue with you are the weirdest. I haven't had those. Stick around, kid. I've had the ones that are just quiet. I try to avoid interviewing if possible. It's not. Yeah, the ones that answer with one syllable for every question.

Those tend to drag for a while. Yeah. Actually, the story we were looking for was about being on location or the application of your job. I mean, application. He'd have to kill you. Yeah. Well, he can't talk about his current job. I know I got that.

Neither can I. So, you know so previous jobs, Apple I saw a lot of the stuff going around that I kind of worked on a little bit here and there but most of well I guess also satellites

are up in space from my previous job but nothing didn't travel much on site. We did have some on-site surprises, I guess, when we were demoing a board, and my boss was there, and his boss was there, and his boss was there, and then I blew up the board in front of all of them just because power supply use interface was unexpectedly bad. That always happens. I think you could spin that story a lot differently and it would be awesome well so i had um it was a kilowatt power

supply so it's a big big big one and the circuit is basically it had a safety that below i think like 17 volts it would be off and then after 17 it turned on and after 30 or something imagine it would turn itself off and we're trying to test the high end to make sure it still turns off and people are gathering around and i walk around and i step on a cable and i hear like kind of some i hear sounds that's weird. Well, I told them, like, hey, did you see that? I stepped on the cable, and it made these sounds. So I stepped on it just to be sure. And then we started smelling plastic burning.

And this is the power line. And then you stepped on it again to ground your heel into it. Well, no, we unplugged it immediately. And it turns out whoever spliced it had basically shorted it when I stepped on it. But anyway, we fixed it. And then I'm trying to do the demo. And the power supply had just one knob. And you could change the current or voltage.

And so I set the voltage, I start raising it, and once it gets to 17 volts, it stops going up. And I keep turning the knob, keep turning the knob, and it stays at 17 volts. Oh no. No, no, it's current limiting. Yeah, it's current limiting. And so I was like, oh, current limit.

So I just hit the current button, I raise it a little bit, and then the board goes pop. And then there was no... A few parts kind of flew off but yeah so the user interface of the power supply displayed the actual voltage not the setting by default and you had to hold the button down to see what the setting was which was my mistake and and i uh kind of got to do that in front of everyone you earned your sparky stripes that day. No, after a couple of days later, the name tag on my desk said Oops instead of Alvaro.

And it kind of became my nickname after that. Only I introduced you that way. Yeah, no, I had Oops at Apple.com was my email and everything. Excellent. There's my email and everything. Excellent. There's a few of those. Okay, so now I should move to the next question. Or should we go back to worst interview stories?

Because Svek didn't pipe up on that one. No, I was just thinking about having to test with actual human hearts and kidneys, but nobody wants to hear about that. Oh. Yes, we do. No, it's okay. No, no, go ahead. No, no no it's alright I want to hear about that I don't want to think about it anymore

this is related to embedded systems right I don't want to hear this this isn't something else no I had to test are we taking a vote or I had to test my embedded system on on on

on you know bits is this biology yeah well no I mean it was electronics jammed into biology okay

we can just move on. Next topic. Next topic. I'm squeamish. Oh, really? Tell us about that. Oh, no, just kidding. No.

Two of the best things about working on embedded systems for me have been seeing my products on Target's shelves because there's just something magical about pointing to it and saying, I made that. Even if you only wrote the firmware and one small section of it, it's still the ownership feeling and seeing it where people will buy it was just really awesome. was one of these on-site things where I was working on race cars and I was in the pit right before a major NASCAR event and I was in the car and all these other cars are going around really fast because they're warming up and I'm doing stuff in the car and people are clearly waiting for me to get out of the way. And there was just this life of knowing that my software was going to go get to play and that I was going to get to watch it.

And I love those two things. I like seeing my stuff in action, I guess, is what that boils down to. Is there anything that you really like about embedded systems? We whine about our jobs constantly. We hate our tools or the learning, the imposter syndrome. There's so many things we hate, but what do you like about embedded systems? When they work. Well, yes, when they work. Oh, no, no. There's one, a lot of my work has been either consumer electronics or that kind of stuff, which, yeah, it's nice.

But one of my internships was at a research institute in Switzerland with a proton therapy device, which is a cancer treatment thing. And that was super cool to, you know, get to work on something that's literally going to save someone's life. And I worked on a safety system so it wouldn't crush people and so the proton beam wouldn't be on when they open the door. But now that I think about it,

I do have a weird job story from that one too. So yeah, this is a 300-ton gantry. So it's electromagnets that spin around to aim the proton beam at the person. Yes, oops, tell us more. No squeamishness required. But I had to do a software simulator of the security system because the contractor that was going to do it wasn't ready.

So my boss was working on the control system for this thing, And I had to have a kind of a safety system behind it. And it required these networked relays. So it was just an ethernet and then two relays. So my boss was out that day, and I had to get this working. I got the relay, plug it into network, but I didn't know the IP address. So I didn't, I don't speak German. Everyone else was kind of out. So I decided, oh, let me just do a port scan of the entire network until I find this device because it's listening on some port. So I started it and I found a bunch of webcams and no device, no device, no device.

I think an hour later, a guy on the phone walks into the room and just says like, I found him. And so the guy goes, I found it. And then he hands me the phone and the guy's like, we're seeing a pink flood coming out from your computer. So apparently all their intrusion detection systems were just going nuts.

And they were looking around the building. The hack is coming from inside the building. Well, I forgot to turn off pinging. So I was trying to ping every device before it. Sure. But apparently this is a computer they had borrowed. So they looked everywhere else. And then they finally got in touch with the person who owned it.

And they're like, oh, so-and-so's intern is using it. And then they found it. But then I just told the guy, no, I'm just trying to find this. I don't know the IP address. He's like, oh, I'll just, what's the Mac address? I told him he gave me the IP address and it was done. But I was, I was freaking out a little bit. And from then on, they called you oops in Swiss German.

How do you say oops in German? Oops. Oops. But yeah, this was the particle physics kind of thing. We're a dosimeter. That was always fun. But yeah, that's my story. Oh, yeah.

Okay. Why do you like embedded systems or something on that order was the last story oh right yeah i keep not answering the question um i i like being able to it's a bad interview technique well no it worked out i mean i think his answer was was he likes not killing people with giant electromagnets if If you like a TV, it works great. But, sorry. No, I like firmware because it lets me, it's kind of a good medium between, like an in-between point of instant gratification and getting to move things. So it's not as fast as regular software, but I get to do things in the physical world.

But traditionally, mechanical or just pure W stuff sometimes takes a long time to get stuff working. With firmware, you can get going relatively quickly and see the results of your work. And that's always fun. Cool. Next. I'll go.

I've worked at iRobot for about three years now, and this is my first job in commercial electronics or consumer electronics where people can actually purchase, like real regular humans can actually purchase the thing that I work on. And so, like Lacey said, it's great to actually see it on Amazon and see it on Target and see it at Target or see it at random stores. And people can buy it. I went to a talk recently with Fred Brooks, the Mythical Man Month guy. And we went around the table introducing ourselves.

And I said, oh, I work for iRobot. And I work on the Roomba. And he says, oh, I have one. And I was like, oh was like oh cool and i said how do you like it he said i love it it's great and so i was like that that's fantastic fred brooks has my product he thinks it's great so that that was that was just a random little shot in the arm um the other thing i like about it is that i have a background in double e and you know i worked on hardware and software and working on embedded let's like the fact that it's hardware and software, the fact that it's, you know, you get to go as low level as the chip and maybe even lower some of the, you know, some of the stuff that the, some of the physics stuff that the chip is connected to all the way up to the software. And it basically is high in the software stack as you want to go that I kind of understand all of that and that I get to play in all of that every day.

I just, I just love the, the, the depth and breadth of the stuff that we get to work on. I totally agree with that. There's so many things you get to see. And working with little tiny companies, sometimes I get to see all the business stuff too. But the math and the science and the engineering and the software, it's just kind of neat to be able to try all of them. Yep. Yep.

Elizabeth, do you have an answer? I think I really like the degree of complexity. It's not too complex, and it's not too simple for my personal enjoyment. I like the interaction of lots of different threads and interrupts and trying to get my head around if this happens and then that happens, but not this, what's going to go wrong? So the problem solving is really, really fun. Great puzzles. Chris? Which Chris? Oh, really fun. Great puzzles. Chris? Which Chris?

Oh, he already answered. Yes, and I keep calling him spec, which isn't totally fair. You just keep changing it around. It's totally confusing. It's totally confusing. What am I answering? Whatever you want, really. I fell asleep.

No. Oh. Kidding, kidding. I'll go. What do you like about embedded systems no i i that echoes what everybody said uh but you know the first time i had a real embedded systems job instead of working on routers which are embedded systems but nobody cares uh it was a stupid product i think i've talked about this before but it had lasers and had motors and it had optics that you had to move from the software and it had

moving parts and cryptography and just all this. It was a medical device, but it had all these bits. And so it was so great to be able to learn about all these pieces of a system and be able to understand a whole complicated system, at least at some level, rather than just working on a little corner of some really, you know, so esoteric or large scale computer. That was really cool. And I learned a lot doing that. And that's kind of what I like about the whole embedded systems field is you get to make things happen, or you get to sense things in the real world instead of just taking input from a user and going out to a database and you know doing queries like that and that sort of thing and yeah so that that's

probably the one thing that i really like the most that got me into it um there's things i don't like well yes but this is our 200th show and it's all you know and the weird thing is i kind of like it takes me back to when i was first learning to use computers on Apple IIs and things because the kind of hardware we're using doesn't have, I mean, it's got more resources than an Apple II, but maybe not, you know, it's not so far removed from that. constrained and so like elizabeth said the problem solving of of fitting things together and and making it all work when you've only got five lego pieces instead of the whole box yeah there's something about having to work with one arm tied behind your back that's really appealing and that's probably psychologically questionable well you also get to save the day a lot of times when it's like oh there's a hardware bug oh but we can fix it in firmware which sucks for the firmware engineer but but it is cool where

you save the product because you know you can but but when people just assume like oh we don't have to worry about this because the firmware will save it that's not as fun i'd just like to point out that one arm tied behind your back is a horrific pun in this context. Oh, no. That's terrible. I would never have thought of that. Andre. You people are silly. No, it's very much the same thing.

The nice thing about embedded systems is you are working at the interface of hardware and software. And you're working on a team where that line moves around. So if something is hard to do in hardware, the hardware guy can just say, can we move this over two pins? Because then it'll make my job a whole lot easier. And it's like, yeah, yeah, we can do that. And with the software, it's like, you know, if you gave me this kind of a circuit in here, that would make the software tons easier. And, you know, your hardware guy, it's a great trade-off. But I think the thing that I like best is actually debugging. Because as you say, it's a lot like solving puzzles. I mean,

the circuits and the code are sitting there and they're giving you data about what's going on, but you've got to spot the patterns, figure out what the thing is doing, and then figure out how to tame this damn thing, because it's never been done before. And another thing I really like, right when I started, let's see, it would be just before year 2000, I was working on this device that zapped people's legs to make them walk again. And a lot of people got... You're going to have to explain that just a little bit more, just one more sentence. Okay. Because we all are all picturing things that don't quite work.

Right now I'm picturing Jesus. Yeah. I'm picturing Jesus. Yeah. I'm picturing Frankenstein. Yeah. Okay, we're getting there. Okay, so this is people that have had strokes and they end up with a condition called drop foot. So they cannot lift up their foot anymore when they walk. So they sort of drag their foot anymore when they walk. So they sort of drag their foot

along the ground. So what we were doing was putting electrodes on their shin. And at the appropriate time, we would zap the muscle and it would make their foot involuntarily lift. So yes, Frankenstein. So a whole bunch of people that have, like, they are now handicapped. We were helping them walk and make their life a little bit more normal. So of course, this company had to die. And it did. And we all got laid off. And the thing floundered this question was about liking embedded systems and suddenly we're down to companies that die i i'm not really sure that's episode 300 is a complaints episode you want me to bring this around no it's you want me to bring this around now okay so so one of my friends has got MS. And as it turns out, somebody bought the IP for our product and took it to market. And my friend who I build kites with has one of these devices and uses it on a daily basis. And I said, I helped build that. This is really cool. This is actually helping not some abstract person.

This is helping one of my own friends. It is so cool to see that. Yes. All right. Yes. I totally agree with that. This is why I'm so against test-driven development, by the way, because according to the test-driven development people, you never have to debug if you write the code the right way with test-driven development. And debugging is kind of the fun part.

So why would you want to do that? Well, you can always debug somebody else's code. They should be using test-driven development, too. Oh, no, no, no. Well, since you're at the interface of hardware and software, there's all sorts of things that you... They're blowing up your code because the hardware is wrong. And you get to find that stuff. They should be using Agile and test-driven development too.

Oh, so we have to stand up to fix it. Where's Chris Gamble? Where is our token hardware engineer? Oh no, but he's been talking about doing kind of a, not Agile, but for hardware, the quick iterative thing. Uh-huh. I was just going to troll. So that reminds me of one of my favorite stories that I'd completely forgotten about. was also hired by Eli Lilly to come up with a system based on the continuous process control

systems that Eli Lilly used when they were developing the first human insulin, because that is also a batch process. So I was involved in the team that did the port from the tiny little x86 processors to the VAX VMS processors so that the Eli Lilly people could write their control strategies on top of our system. And, you know, that was cool. It was nice to have it be more broadly used. And then maybe five years later, my daughter was diagnosed with diabetes and started using Eli Lilly insulin. And that was the first time that I had that experience of somebody I cared about benefiting from something I had done. That was super cool.

Yes. And that, yes, exactly. I was going to go back to Andrea's point of we end up working in teams, which as a software engineer, I worked in a team, but we were all kind of, I don't remember the specialties, but we were interchangeable and we didn't work together. And now, I mean, the electrical engineer that I work with is so important. And the apps that I work with is so important and the apps person I work with is so important and I don't always get to work with very many other firmware engineers but I like being that part of a team I didn't expect that after you know after

in years of school where I hated all team projects now now i kind of dig them yeah i think there's a nice in-between point yeah it's a little bit different i mean there's nothing that you can do to change the way your pc works so if you're doing a web app with an SQL backend, you know, the platform is pretty much defined. With us, I mean, we've taken a look at certain aspects of projects and said, you know, this should be done in analog. And it's not, you know, we're going to make it five times faster. It's working in analog. As soon as the signal changes, the output changes. You're not, the computer just stands there and looks at the thing.

You can't do that on a PC. Yes, shifting a reality. Alvaro, were you going to say something? I was just agreeing. All right right we can all agree that's just wrong i came across one of my tools and I lent it out with great reluctance and I demanded it back promptly because it was my tool. Sometimes I do get attached to tools. I, even with the digital discovery and the oscilloscope we have, or the analog discovery and the scope we have,

I still have some affection for my little digital cellulite. And there's this idea that we do get integrated with our tools. And I don't think anybody's going to choose IAR as their favorite tool, but I wonder what tools do you like best? And what did you have to go through to acquire it? Did you just buy it? Did your company buy it? Did you obsess over it for six months and finally plunk down your own cash?

Alvaro, I know you have some pretty spectacular tools, so I'm going to ask you to go first. I do? Oh, since I've borrowed them, I'm going to say that. Oh, that one, right. So yeah, I mean, I have a mix of tools. My very first, well, I mean, I got a multimeter early on, right? That was great. But when I first started doing embedded, one of the first things I got was my Sali logic in 2008 or 2009, I guess. And it was super helpful for a lot of stuff I was doing. And I've upgraded to the later one.

And I still recommend it highly. Analog Discovery 2 has also been kind of a more recent addition to my toolbox but I've used it a lot. Just lots of different things. More specific tools like you mentioned you, I have a Beagle USB 480, which is a USB protocol analyzer. And I first used one of those at work, and it's a lifesaver for when you're doing firmware development. So they had some sort of like 25% off, and it was still ridiculously expensive, but I decided to get it. Because whenever I do need it, it's worth it easily. What else do I have? Power supplies, oscilloscopes. No, no, this is important tools.

Tools that actually are important to you. Not just cool tools, but ones that you care about more than is probably sensible? Well, I made my, some I've made, tools I made out of necessity, and I value those much more because I had to make them, right? So in my first internship, actually, in college, I did a lot of serial kind of communication and stuff. And I would crimp my own cables and do kind of vampire taps so I could sniff serial ports with another computer. And I had, I was known for having all combinations of sizes, lengths, two tap, three tap cables. And it was just super, super helpful. Apparently, after I

left, they made a drawer with my name on it. And people years after recognized me and said, you're Alvaro from the drawer. You're the person who made all those cables. So that was fun. But right now I have my my Silta. I think I talked a little bit about it, but it's just kind of a generic USB to all sorts of protocols like I2C, SPI, and I just have a little Python interface. And I've used that so much in the past couple of years, or a year and a half, I guess,

for embedded systems for prototyping. And that's probably one of my most valuable ones, even though it's just a development board with my firmware. Alvaro's got all these neat tools, and I feel like he's had it too easy. Because one of the reasons I love my Sali A is having set up an old-style logic analyzer, 1990-something. Elizabeth, I suspect you care about some tools more than others because you know exactly what it's like to live with scary, scary tools.

Well, so I'm very much on the software side of firmware. I don't really have hardware tools. I mean, I have a set of connectors and cables and switches from old jobs that I keep carefully boxed away. And I'm very possessive of those. My favorite tools, though, would be software tools and things that I decided I liked enough to pay for myself. And EditPlus and Beyond Compare are the two that come to mind, where the license isn't expensive, but it was more than five bucks. So I had to think about whether I liked it enough to own it,

even if it wasn't what my company was providing and decided I absolutely did. Okay, who on this show has a Beyond Compare license? Me and yeah, I've got, that's one of my tools, which is yeah, absolute favorite. I have a story about that as well. So I echo that definitely. I do too. So definitely almost half. I don't, Chris, do you do you have i just use the free version whenever i need it yeah that's what i've used uh spec why don't you go next sure so i will start with beyond compares that beyond compare is uh one of the first

software tools i ever bought like with my own money um the company probably would have paid for it but i thought i'm gonna use this like i instantly liked it um i was at a company that software tools I ever bought, like with my own money, the company probably would have paid for it. But I thought, I'm going to use this. Like I instantly liked it. I was at a company that used primarily Windows for development environment, and it was native Windows back then. Then I moved to a company that was mostly Mac developed, and it was embedded firmware,

but the OSs we all used for our developer machines were max um and so beyond compared did not have anything for the mac at that point um but there's this thing called crossover where it's it's a wine it's like a for money for pay um wine um windows emulation system um i think the company is called code weavers i think the company is called CodeWeavers. I think the product is called Crossover anyway. So you can run a lot of Windows programs on a Mac or on Linux using this thing. And I actually wanted to use Beyond Compare so much that I signed up to be like an advocate, meaning I did a ton of debugging and basically pestered this Beyond, made sure that the company that did crossover that did this um

this windows emulation had everything they need to make beyond compare work on my mac so i spent a lot of free time and uh mental energy to make sure i could use this tool on mac um and finally a few years ago beyond compare works natively on mac and linux and windows now so i can use it everywhere at once but uh yeah i paid for that tool once a long time ago. They should definitely consider an annual something. Maybe I should buy a second copy just because I like it that much. But yeah, that tool is just a phenomenal diff tool that sort of does everything I assume it should do out of the box really well. Hardware-wise, Salier. I like my Salier. I have used old-school logic analyzers, giant HP things that require all kinds of bizarre hardware

and software to set up. They're like the size of, I don't know, a 30-inch monitor. I've used a few of those. Just nuts, especially considering the Salier is like whatever. You can fit it in your pocket easily. So those are good. Jlink, Seger Jlink, specifically the Jlink Pro that has Ethernet and USB connections. So this is a tool that talks either JTAG

or SWD, single wire debug to chips. So I absolutely love my Jlink. I know people love OpenOCD. I know people love STLinks. I know people love whatever. Yeah, can I have love ST-Links. I know people love whatever. People love OpenOCD? Yeah, can I have a list? Because I need to talk to them. Walk away. Walk away. Walk away. I know people that

actively choose OpenOCD over SEGGER. How about that? I use it. Now that there's a Blackmagic, I don't know why people would not use it. I haven't got mine yet. It's on Linux only. Blackmagic? Yeah. No.

No? No. It works on everything. Man, if only they'd ship their Kickstarter. Everything? I already got my Kickstarter. Does it work on BIOS? Next step? Walk away. Walk away. Okay, okay.

Some of us are looking forward to black magics but that doesn't count uh jlink pro see you're actually you're all proving my point because this whole time while you were debating this thing that you may or may not have that may or may work on your operating system the seger jlink pro has been working for for years and years and years and it just keeps working and they keep fixing bugs and they keep adding chips. And it's got an Ethernet port. So if he opens a port to the Internet, I could log into his thing and bug it.

That's absolutely right. I mean, debug it. Yeah, but that one's not cheap. I mean, that's a pretty expensive thing. No, no, that is not cheap. That's over $1,000. Yeah, I think it's like $1,200 or something like that. However, it's definitely well worth the money if I were an independent contractor.

Yeah. I mean, your time is worth more than that over, over years. Easily. We should have somebody from Segur on. Maybe they'd give us coupons. Yes. Giveaways. All right.

All right. Who's next? Were you Densvek? I am. Yes. Okay. Okay. Andre?

I have not used your diff program. I found out about it last week on the Embedded.fm podcast. But my tool, let's see, my HP16C calculator. It works as a regular calculator, but it also does binary, octal, hex, decimal, plus all the stuff you need for embedded systems, signed and unsigned calculations, various word sizes, shifts, masking, ORs, exclusive ORs, and all sorts of stuff like that. And this is a calculator from the early 80s. Somebody at Dow Chemical had one when I worked there and it was just the greatest thing for programming and it was hugely expensive but um one time Dorothy and I were going down to Mexico and we had a bit of a layover in Los Angeles. So we, uh, had enough time that we could hop into a sketchy cab and drive past all the strip clubs and gun ranges

and liquor stores to this place that actually had one. And I've been using it ever since. Um, so how does, how does this help everybody else? Um't made anymore but you can get an emulator for emulator program for pcs and macs that actually use the original firmware that hp released and there's also a company in switzerland called swiss micros that has re-implemented the 16 plus a bunch of other HP calculators, and you can actually buy them. That is fun. We will have links in the show notes. Looks like for about $150, you can get one on eBay, HP 16C.

Yeah, that's it. It's well worth it. Computer Scientist Calculator. Is that what it was called, computer scientist calculator uh i don't know probably other than that on a daily basis you didn't mention rpn oh yes it's a reverse polish notation calculator this thing it's awesome that was implied with awesome okay yes just making sure it has no for for the uninated, this thing does not have an equals button. So if you own one of these, somebody will try and borrow it, and then they'll return it in about 14 seconds saying, I don't get it. I had the opposite experience.

I forgot my HP calculator at an exam at grad school, and they had some Casios lying around, so I had to use one of those. Oh, no. I couldn't do anything. Not even TI. It was infix, and I can't think that way anymore. No. So it'll break you if you use one of these long enough.

Oh, yeah. Then you'll be a fourth programmer. Right. Yeah. Next to my 16, I've got a 41CV. And my son is actually using my HP 67 while he's at university. And it's me tunes daily to get rid of the daily chit-chat in the office. On the expensive side, I use a Tektronix mixed signal oscilloscope. I would not suggest that people buy these for a hobby because they're bloody expensive, but as a professional tool, oh my God, these things are awesome. Yes. But for a hobby, the Embedded.fm podcast is having a giveaway where you can win a Digilent pocket oscilloscope.

So send in your favorite number. It's just a digital one, no? Oh, yeah. I think it does analog. We're keeping the analog one. They send us three, and so we're giving away the two digital ones. But they are 100 megahertz logic analyzers, and they still do the power out and being able to pattern generate. So it's really cool.

Still super useful. We have those. Well, we've also got a Tektronix 8000 series scope that has the arbitrary waveform generator but it doesn't even have a power supply built in so that Digilent is even more awesome. And remember, we're also giving one

away to students. This is true. The number between 1 and 997. Yours! Get on it! And you should do that very soon because the contest ends May 18th. Also,

t-shirts end May 18th. Maybe one of those is May 19th. When is the show going out? This show? August. Before May, I think. Before May? Can't go before May. 2018. Too hard.

It should go out next Wednesday whatever that is so they'll have a day you won't have much time to order your shirts but you may have two days to enter the contest and there's also a hat contest but that's all

on the blog has to do with March Madness and I'd also like to pass along that we get absolutely nothing from this shill for Cellier and all the Tektronix and HPs. No, but, I mean, people want to know what tools you use. Yeah, that is true. I want to see how much would IAR sponsor, how much would they pay to sponsor this? That's what I want to see how much would IAR sponsor? How much would they pay to sponsor this?

That's what I want to know. Five licenses, two licenses, half a license. I don't want their blood money. My most awesome tool. I just about forgot. Apple MacBook Pro. Damn it, Andre. Sorry.

You can cut that out and put it in later. No, it's fine. Why? Because that was on my list. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. you can cut that out and put it in later no it's fine why? because that was on my list oh I'm sorry okay I should call on you sooner or you should just pipe up no it's fine you have an order I don't really

keep things running keep it going the order is Chris last right? yeah I'm last who's next? you oh is everybody gone? yes well sorry it's a Yeah, I'm last. Who's next? You. Oh, is everybody gone? Yes. Well.

Sorry, it's a, and with my explanation is Chris White. I have no tools I care about. Take away his computer. No, I used to. I used to like my HP 48 calculator. That was something I always carried around, but it was. What about that thing your computer's on? That?

That's a stand. It's a pretty awesome stand. It's a pretty awesome stand. I have a computer stand that's somebody handmade that allows it to be placed in any orientation and I can use it to stand up

or sit down or put it over things. So like if I'm playing drums, I can put it over by my drum set and have it put the computer so that I can access it. But yeah.

And it weighs about 10, 15 pounds. I've carried it and used it outside a few times. It's got three or four joints that can be rotated and adjusted. It's pretty cool. I don't remember what it's called, but we can put it in the show notes. Mover. Yeah.

I don't know if they still make them. They might. Speaking of tools, do you guys have a good usb hub that works i use the amazon basics brand amazon basics uh and i have i think it's a 10 port powered usb hub i am so in favor of powered usb hubs now you don't have any glitches? I haven't had a lot of problems and when I borrowed your USB tool

the hub was never the problem. Maybe it's just a boon too. Oh yeah, probably. That's one thing with embedded systems is you're constantly overpowering the USB for some odd reason because we tend to short things, which makes the USB hubs go offline as well as the USB ports in my MacBook Pro. But it can only be fixed by rebooting unless somebody has a trick to get these things back online.

What are you doing? Wait, no, I don't think we should debug his computer. But I want to go back to the fact that I was asking about tools. You demanded to be called upon, and then you said, no, I don't have anything. Is that really what happened? Everybody took all of mine, and Audrey took the Mac. We can have similar choices. You can chop that out and put yours in. You can give a plus one.

What do you like about the MacBook Pro? It works, and it never broke. I'm going to do this because we're just kind of dogpiling on other Chris right now. Other Chris. Other Chris. Other Chris who edits this program and has complete control over everything that comes out. That's fine.

So I use a Plugable is the name of the company. They have a nice 10 port USB 2.0 USB 2.0 hub. And I've used it at two different companies now. And the Plugable 10 port hub has been pretty darn reliable for me. I even sent 15 volts through it once.

Which way? It torched the robot that I was working on, but the USB hub after a reset has been fine. Wow. I like the USB 3.0 hubs because they have more power. They do. You can source more power. Wow. I like the USB 3 hubs because they have more power. They do. You can source more power. Okay. So Chris,

what do you like about your MacBook Pro? I like that it's indestructible and has lasted for years and has never had a problem. I agree. Wait a minute. You've been talking about giving it back to the Apple store. Oh, it's got a cosmetic issue, but it doesn't really matter. It still works fine. Too much blush or eyeshadow or something or what's that

it's the wrong color of rose gold now let's cut that out this show's only gonna be about 10 seconds long and it's all gonna be me i've got i've got a show title i've got a show title for you then unhappy other Chris yeah all right I used I used to get um uh Dell laptops all the time and they would last about 18 months and then the chassis would crack and then the keyboards would, and then it would blow the motherboard. And I don't remember what got me onto Macs, but eventually I got a MacBook Pro because it had an aluminum chassis. And it finally blew a capacitor after eight years. And I replaced the capacitor, and it's a happy fellow right now and it just keeps

on working that has been a cheap computer yeah it's really sad apple doesn't make these anymore it really is i would have gotten one it's too bad they don't make computers yeah okay so moving along right right yes moving along right agreed we we run a podcast. I don't know if any of you have heard that. And this is episode 200. You've all been on the show at some other point. And many of you listened to the show. I wondered if you would like to say something about Embedded, the podcast, what your show is, what show you were on in the past,

or what show you particularly liked, or somebody you introduced me to that was on the show and you were happy. Since all of those things have happened, I think for all of you, tell me how much you like me. No. No? No. We're fishing for compliments?

No, I'm fishing. Well, this is actually a lead into, we're going to have the embedded survey. Ah. And one of the questions on the embedded survey is, do you have a favorite episode? And I figured maybe if I asked for their favorite episodes, that would help people remember. Yeah, we're just live answering the survey. That was tempting. That was on my list to do next but i think we're gonna run out of time okay chris can chop it out favorite favorite episode or memorable episode or something you like i love interviews like with people that you're finding out more about products like Black Magic or different development techniques. I found a lot of cool stuff that I later started using just from hearing people on the show, which is always fun.

I mean, the primary reason for me to listen is to learn and still going. Okay, so that's good, but we want specifics. I want names. Not necessarily show names, but maybe guest names. Jack Cancel. Yeah. We should ask him. We spent 199 episodes.

Do you have a list? Yes. I hopefully will have a list by the time this show goes live so that it's in the survey but you you i expect to i i don't know you you can you can say your own show and you know patrick was on and you've had lots of friends on the show you have suggested many guests i don't think attacking the interviewee is the right all right all right let's move on well uh i was gonna say uh natalie uh who was on has been on the news a lot recently which is really cool natalie did the tamagotchi hack natalie so yeah but she also found a bug in the windows defender code that you just That was Natalie?

That was Natalie. Well done. She's super cool. Elizabeth, do you have a show you want to suggest? Can you draw? How many of the Siddenblads have you had on? Two. Two of three, I think.

Kathy and her husband, which is Paul. Paul. But not Anne yet. No. So what I like about the Paul episode, which I think I only listened to part of because I'm completely ADHD and I can't sit still that long, is the report that Paul went home and wasn't able to actually speak again until the next day because he had used up all his speak. Yes. We talked to Paul about his career at NVIDIA and the fact that even though he's 70, he's still having a good time being an engineer. Why would you retire?

It was pretty cool. Andrew, do you have an episode? I have a few. Of course, they're at home that I just keep in iTunes all the time. But the one that does stick in my mind is the Jack Ansel one. Because he just passes on such great information all the time. So everybody should go listen to that one. Going back and listening to mine.

Yeah, thanks for replaying that. Those are very shocking. What I like about the Embedded podcast, I don't know why you let me hang around with you guys, but I really do appreciate it. Coming down to California was a hoot. I stayed with Chris and Alicia, and they are terrific people. Got chauffeured around in a car that is very quiet.

They live by a dreamy beach. I'm kind of isolated up here. Like, there isn't a great huge community that we can just, you know, go to an arbitrary cafe in Los Gatos and meet people that are in the same industry. So, just the camaraderie, the group, being able to bounce ideas off of you. I'm just learning so much. Cool. And I hope I'm giving back something. You do.

You do. And your blog is awesome. I mean, it's a lot of work. And it shows how much work you put into it. Okay. I'll take it. Svek spec do you have any shows you like i do uh jack ganzel is is a consummate professional a nice guy um if you never take his class his any of his classes he's he's just phenomenal like his

yeah it's hard to say what a professional he is but like you know in all the good ways the man's a professional um and and he's just a good ways, the man's a professional. And he's a really nice guy to boot. So I actually re-listened to his podcast, I don't know, every five, six months, just to kind of get my head back in that sort of what it is to be a long-term professional in this field, just to kind of hear that. Dennis Jackson was on, and his whole thing, which stuck with me, is don't be clever. And I already kind of believed that, but he had that little short snippet, don't be clever, is just such a good mantra. So I liked his episode, too. It was practical.

And he's someone else who's been doing this a while, doing it in a bunch of different companies. And so his show was great. The most recent show that I think has been fantastic is, I actually had to bring it up because I couldn't remember the name of the episode or the guy, but it's Self-Driving Arm. That's episode 187. Patrick. Polarski. Polarski. Yeah, Andrea actually set us up with that.

Yeah, first of all, he was so enthusiastic. You could tell the guy was having fun on the show. You were having fun interviewing him, Chris and Alicia. And it was a great show. And the content was so broad and deep, right? Because, I mean, it was smart prosthetic limbs, right? So it was AI. It was robotics.

It was prosthetics. It was helping people with cool, interesting tech topics. And he was a very good person to talk about it. He's just really, really well-spoken with it. So those three episodes, I think, have been just really good episodes that I re-listened to from time to time. Patrick is one of my favorites, just because it was such a mind-blowing topic. And the information per second was very high.

Alan Yates is one of my favorite too because he just went through an amazing amount of technical information and it all made sense as he was talking. And afterwards I was like, you can't get from A to B and have it make sense in this amount of time and no whiteboard. But both Alan and Patrick did a great job just making me feel like I understood what they were saying. Chris, do you have any favorite episodes?

It's really hard to answer that question for me. Many of the ones I have enjoyed recording the most have already been mentioned. So Patrick Polarski's and Jack Gansel's, of course. I don't know. I mean, that's a really hard question because a lot of them that I thought were really great, maybe other people don't. And ones that I was kind of, I'm not sure if this is any good, people tend to like. So people don't and ones that i was kind of i'm not sure if this is any good people tend to like so i i don't try to judge too much you're not gonna

probably not gonna say you like your own but i found really helpful the all the consulting tips ones and stuff or like the tax taxes i think as strange as that sound it was super helpful and i actually got my housemates now with your tax lady as well i'm glad to hear that sometimes we do go off book i mean this show is called embedded and what are we doing giving advice about hey you want a guest every week we're gonna have some we're gonna have some off-topic stuff okay okay. Well, that's what I'm saying. Even though it's not embedded, I still found it very entertaining and helpful. Just, yeah. I mean, I want to do that at some point full-time,

so it's good to learn all these things. You want to do taxes full-time? Yeah. That's sick. Don't you? That's sick. I'm going to be a QuickBooks engineer. The flip answer, answer of course is the

ones that are easy to edit the ones yeah which means this will be my least favorite episode you know i've i've been thinking about what a nightmare this is gonna be to edit this is a lot like the time when i said hey chris i want to interview the cat and he was like go get some recordings and i did and And then he spent forever making that sound good. And this time I was like, oh, let's have a couple extra people on the show. And I think maybe Chris was too busy to say, no, that's a terrible idea. And so now we have a whole party here. I do want to say that I actually like in no like no sarcasm i actually

enjoyed the cat episode because it was it was so ridiculous it like it you know it um it overflowed the uh i'm assuming probably you know unsigned unsigned character number for you know ridiculousness and so it overflowed stupidity up into just pure ridiculousness and it was great i enjoyed it i mean it was great. I enjoyed it. I mean, it was 20 minutes long. If it had been five minutes long, it would have been eh. But there's something that happened after about minute 12 that made it awesome. No, it's the Dave Letterman theory of comedy.

This is my theory. So Dave Letterman, his whole thing is like things get funnier the more you say them, especially if they weren't that funny in the first place. So if just keep repeating it and just keep repeating and you're just you're not giving up on the joke that's what makes it funny yes on the other hand the uh episode with the ballista cats was actually very good that's one of the uh musical episodes episodes when Chris was in a band and we would occasionally put up music if we wanted an off week. We haven't done that in a long time because you haven't had new band recordings. That's because the stuff we're working on is too complicated for either of us to play. I've designed embedded systems like that.

It's much too complicated to implement. We've been working on one song for about four months now. I have two songs. Two songs for four months. We're going to have to hear it then. Someday. Oh, no, no, no. Right.

We were warned there might be cowbell. I feel that that should signify something, like we've won or something. It's the last 30 seconds. For the winner of the contest. There's so many contests right now. Why did I make them last so long? Such foolishness.

All right. I had one more question about what do you want to learn next or what field or skills do you think will be useful in your career in the next five years? Do you want to do that really quickly and just tell me one of those two?

I understand it's not always the same. What do you want to learn and what do you think will be useful in your career in the next five years? But either one. Elizabeth, do you have answers for that? Yeah, for me, those are two totally different questions. What I want to learn is probably something about doing things in the garden that I've never been brave enough to try. So like grafting fruit trees. I would love to learn how to graft fruit trees. What will be useful in my career?

I've never had any vision on that. One of the things that our friend Kathy Sidenblad says is, what do you mean five-year plan? I just did the next thing that was in front of me. Yeah. And that's still where I'm at. I've been doing this for over 40 years, and I've never known what was going to

happen next year. And anytime anybody has asked me, you know, what's your five-year plan? It's like, I might have a six-month plan. I have no idea what'll be useful over the next five years. I think I'll probably still be working for the next five years, but what I should be learning in order to do better, I have no idea. All right. Does somebody have an answer? Sure. Go ahead. I want to learn. I'm doing more kind of lower level stuff, so more board layout, more circuit design kind of thing to understand.

I basically want to be more self-sufficient at work. I'm more dependent on the hardware engineers for some of the design. And I do have the EE background, but I haven't been exercising it. So I'm making lots of little boards at home to practice soldering, to practice debugging hardware and stuff. And I'm using this as an excuse to make, you know, for the cheese cave or that kind of stuff. But yeah,

more hardware is just, I guess it's more useful. And there's fewer people with hardware firmware, like good firmware and hardware background than firmware and higher level software. I feel that's more, there's more people that can do that. Cool. Andre? Recently, I've been working with the ESP8266, putting together a web server

on my embedded little processor and learning way, way more web server than I really wanted to. But I can see it being really useful. On the other hand, I think what I'm going to be learning, whether I like it or not, is BLE. I'm sorry. Exactly. Every customer that we have walking through the door wants BLE. And it's, okay, all right.

That's what I'm going to be on. Chris? I think I should probably finally learn how pointers work. Wait. You switched to Rust. I said the quiet part out loud, didn't I? I don't know. I'm always kind of exploring little things here and there,

but I don't know if anything will ever be useful to my career. So, I mean, we spent some time playing around with 3D graphics, you know, on our own time. And I've done some electronics that I've been slowly learning. I think it all depends on what the next bit of work is. And for a long time, it's always been kind of see unembedded systems. And yes, maybe learning,

you know, about BLE, but that doesn't seem like something that new to me. It seems like another, another, you know, isomorphism of networking. So they're all things that I've done before, so learning a variant isn't that different. So I don't know.

I think keeping your eye out for things that are potentially becoming popular, like maybe scripting languages on embedded systems is going to become a thing, and maybe MicroPython will take off, or people will start using Node.js on, perish the thought, but Node.js on embedded systems or something like that. It's good to be aware of that stuff, but I don't think I'd go out of my way and say, you know what? Node.js is where it's at for embedded systems in five years, so I'm going to go learn that, so I'll go out of my way and say, you know what? Node.js is where it's at for embedded systems in five years, so I'm going to go learn that so I'll be ahead of the game

because you're likely to be wrong. So if you want to learn something, learn it because you want to learn it. That's fair. Although, I mean, the ESP-6282-66. ESP-128-735-39. And the ESP-32, which is the new one, are both pretty attractive, especially for their price yeah but yeah spec um couple things one is uh you know i've been sort of at the low level of embedded software

so like 8-bit 16-bit 32-bit micros bare metal um you know maybe an r-toss maybe a homegrown r-toss maybe a free rOS, whatever. That's kind of been where I make my living, make my career. Embedded Linux has been a thing for a while, but now processors are continuing to get cheaper, and RAM and Flash are continuing to get more plentiful for similar prices. So I'm starting to actually finally bought a Raspberry Pi. I'm probably the last working embedded engineer, I actually finally bought a Raspberry Pi. I'm probably the last working embedded engineer in the world to buy a Raspberry Pi,

but I finally bought one and started to actually mess around with embedded Linux a little bit. We're starting to use it more and more at work. And so just, you know, we're going to go, I think our field is going to head that direction. Again, with just cost, you know, continuing to obey, if not Moore's law,

then at least, you know, head that direction to get cheaper. So that's been a skill. The other far more general skill is just writing in general and how to explain things better. So I took a while off from doing the embedded software engineering 101 thing, and I'm getting back into it now and remembering that oh yes it is a very difficult skill to explain um what i understand i think i understand very well it's very difficult to explain those things to someone who has never seen it before and so just working on that skill again through the blog and um through some other other stuff

at work and outside of work i tend to agree with you that things are becoming cheaper and i worry i mean i love the microprocessors and i don't think that the cortex m0s and m3s are going anywhere quickly but i'm not seeing many 8 bits anymore not not when these other ones are so cheap. They'll come back. And I worry that Linux, that we will be doing more embedded Linux because you get these $5

Linux computers and the software becomes trivial and now you end up with other problems. Power is always going to be a problem. Power is always, yes. And yet sometimes I see them and they're not as bad as I would expect. So I think that for me, I'm learning about bigger systems because it's an area that I find sort of frustrating and sort of interesting when I think about machine learning too.

So machine learning and bigger systems are sort of on my radar. Although, I totally understand where Elizabeth is coming from. I work on whatever's next. And that's what I do that makes the most sense. That's how I got here. It's been good so far. Well, it pays the bills as well. I mean, if the guy that comes through the door says, I need to do Canbus, then you're going to learn about Canbus. Probably not, but that's okay. just did a quick poll on the the typing part of the show which involves um not much uh other than trying to get andre to say something funny and everybody passed for final thoughts i didn't except for christopher i have a final thought um who wants to close out show number 200 with a

final thought so Very quickly. We started out this podcast and we said we were going to do six episodes. Yep. We just wanted to know what it was like. Just a little thing to see what it was like. And it's been 194 more after that because somehow we forgot. Just forgot to stop. Every week we do this

and sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's easy but we never don't sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's easy but uh we never don't do it for some reason i mean we skip a week here or there but it's become part of our routine in existence and i think we both really enjoy doing it and uh thank you for listening and i just wanted to point out that today we're recording the 200th episode. We just crossed 1 million lifetime downloads. Wow. Like five minutes ago. That's awesome.

Very cool. That is great. That is very cool. All right. Well, it has been great to have all of you on the show and to be able to sort of celebrate our birthday. We didn't get cake, did we? No.

We didn't get it last time either. I think last time we did. That's for 256. I'm not going to sing this time because you got creeped out last time. No, you and Svek both have great singing voices. What's happening now? What? I don't understand.

I don't understand. They are the only two who have ever sung on the program. I sang. Did I sing? Oh, you did sing. That's right. Okay, well, the three of you are here. I'm sure we'll laugh now. Go ahead.

What are we singing? Serenade Us. What are we singing? I don't know. That's more than 5,000 downloads per episode, so that's awesome on average. Yeah, you're going to lose listeners if we start singing. Only if I start singing let me if i start singing and with that thank you all for listening if you want more information about our fabulous guests including elizabeth brenner alvo prieto andrejchichak christopher svek or christopher white or myself there will be more information in the show notes

and links to their previous shows put links to all my previous shows embedded.fm and if this is the first time you've heard this show welcome to embedded.fm it's not always like this sometimes it's worse And if this is the first time you've heard this episode or this show, welcome to EmbeddedFN. It's not always like this. Sometimes it's worse.

That is true. No, that is false. Cats. Yeah, this, this. All right. And now I am going to choose a quote from Nikola Tesla to close the show with because, you know, Chris is right. We do this, we kind of do it out of habit. We do it because we learn stuff. We do it because it's kind of neat.

And we do it because you listen. So thank you. What we want now is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife, peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment. This is Chris Gamble, and I'm from Contextual Electronics and the Amp Hour podcast. And I'm just, I'm really honored that you guys included me here today,

and I'm just, I'm really glad to be part of the group. And yeah, I can't wait to record. Hello? Guys?