Embedded - 472: Field of Boxes

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition came out today! Chris and Elecia talk about the changes, the writing, but not the eldritch horror. Then we talk about pianos and origami.  The electronic version is available now on Amazon, ebooks.com, Google Play and where you get your ebooks. The paper copy will be out in about two weeks, you can preorder now. It is also available on the O’Reilly Learning System, here is a  30-day Trial. See the Embedded.fm Origami and Flex PCBs newsletter, sign up for future newsletters here.  Memfault is hosting its first launch week of the year! On Tuesday, March 12th, Memfault CEO François Baldassari will showcase how to evaluate the health and performance of your embedded devices clearly within Memfault's observability platform. Join the webinar to discover how simple it is to monitor three necessary device measures: stability, battery, and connectivity. Register today!

Happy book birthday to me. Happy book birthday to me. Happy book birthday to Making Embedded Systems 2nd Edition. Happy birthday to me. Where's the cake? Oh, man, I forgot something. I'm so sorry. I didn't even know this was happening.

And now there's the cake. Pick up your cake on your way home from work today. No, pick up my cake and bring it to me. I don't care about their cake. Oh, everybody should get cake today. Okay. All right. Welcome to Making Embedded.

Wait, nope. That's the old title. The old title? The title from 2013? Welcome to Embedded. I am Elisa White. Second edition. Oh, sorry.

Here with Christopher White. And it's just going to be us chatting. And it's going to be us chatting about, well, the biggest thing in my life right now, except for, you know, work, dog, husband, house, everything else. It could be bigger than some of those. Okay. So, any questions? About what?

Well, I could either go chapter by chapter and talk about the book. What book? What's happening? Okay. Not only have you finished your book. Today is when the electronic book came out. Somewhat released. On Thursday, March 7th, 2024, the book is out on electronic platforms and it will be paper copy in like two weeks.

And for people who haven't been listening to the show, which is tuned back in after five or ten years, this is the second edition of your Making Embedded Systems compendium of all things embedded systems firmware. Yes, it's my book, yes. Okay, got it. And you finished it last week and somehow it's released today. I mean, that's not quite true. It's been done since December. But your last chance to do anything was last week. I just think that timeline is impressive.

Well, that's why the paper copies are a couple weeks out yet. Still, that's fast. I was surprised. I mean, the last thing I did was like the second or third quality check. I know, I know. It's just I'm used to things that, you know, big publishers taking a while, like, oh, the book is done, and then you'll have it in six or seven months. No, O'Reilly's more like you'll have it in a month. But I was pretty on top of things. So, our last quality pass-through didn't have a lot of changes.

Okay. So this is the second edition of the book. The book originally came out in a year that I can't remember the number of. I think it was 2011. 2011? Okay. I think it was November of 2011. So it was kind of 2012.

So that's 13 years ago. Sure. 13 and almost a half. So what possessed you to update the book? Nothing has changed in Embedded. I can tell you because I'm still using the same stupid protocols. It's still all 8051. Data sheets are still written by people who hate you specifically. Yeah, so why did you want to update the book?

I mean, things have changed. There have been some changes. The whole industry is far more simplified in terms of it's all arms now. I mean, sure, you get it. Don't email us. There are a few that aren't, but even pics are arms now. Even, all right.

Yes, well, the RISC-V people would have, and the expressive people would probably take issue with some of that. But yes, there's a lot of arm going around. And the tools have changed and the availability of hobby boards for professional development is just amazing and the kinds of things people are like not the kinds of things that are popular to do with with embedded systems now or rely heavily on Bluetooth and IoT? So I had a chapter about

how to build your own bootloader in the original edition. And now that chapter is expanded and it's all about how to manage your IoT system. Because really, you shouldn't be building your own bootloader. You need that information enough to understand what somebody else has built for you. But really, you should't be building your own bootloader. You need that information enough to understand what somebody else has built for you. But really, you should be using Nordics or TIs

or whoever has an OTA or DFU system. And then it talks about what the security things are that you should be looking for in those and how to build your probably multi-image with signature thing. And it isn't like it tells you how to do this for TI or Nordic or ST. It tells you the theory of it, of these are the parts you're looking for. These are the things that you should expect. And if you have to build it yourself, these are the pitfalls. But overall, this is the idea of what you're doing. Okay, so that's one specific thing you've expanded.

Do you want to go chapter by chapter or topic by topic? Or how would you like to talk about your work? Well, I could also just tell you everything that went wrong. Let's start with everything that went wrong. Okay, so chapter two. I go over system diagrams because I think it's really important to have the idea of being able to take a, an idea and turn it into a napkin sketch and're like faced with a wall of code, the way to get around it is through diagrams, is through trying to summarize your information as you learn it into different kinds of diagrams. And I have one that's a block diagram, which I think most people understand, and a layered

diagram, which is trying to figure out where the APIs go. And then like an org chart diagram that is where code flows. Like if you're walking through it, you go from main to this subsystem to that subsystem and the control flows. That one's about control. But I added a new one. I added one to talk about the context of your diagram. And this is really important in IoT stuff because it's not just box. It's box in a field of boxes and then these all go up to a cloud and then you have an interface. And even

in things like toys, a context diagram is a good idea because you can get an idea of what it's supposed to do. You're looking at it from the outside instead of the inside. It's kind of a user. I hate to say user-centric, but it's user, it's how it sits in the actual world instead of looking inside the box and seeing what parts are made of. So I made a diagram and my diagrams, when I do

them, they're like on a yellow pad with, I pencil them in and then I ink them, and they're very messy. I'm not a graphic artist. I will occasionally draw and I'll take a long time to draw something, but I can't, but diagrams themselves tend to be not great. And O'Reilly gives me an artist, Kate D'Ella, D'Ella? D'Ellier? It's in the book. She's credited. But Kate was great. But my notes on this first context diagram had a toy and then it had an IoT system to compare

the complexity of what this diagram might look like, this context diagram. And the toy, I said, make it a little creepy. and then just because i thought that would be funny so she sends me back this diagram it's like a mouse skull on top of a giant two-story tall toy with people running away from it looking terrified stick figures looking terrified which i thought was fantastic i mean like how do you make stick figures look terrified? I thought it was great. It was. Should have kept it.

It was. That was not what you said initially. I think what you said initially is, I'm going to have nightmares. That was great. I thought it was somebody else. And so they. It was very Donnie Darko. I tried to be polite and subtle and say, maybe not. And that apparently didn't come through. Because I also, you know, I was reviewing all of the images and some of them I had very technical, detailed feedback on. And this one was just a, wow, that's terrifying sort of feedback. And eventually the production editor finally said, do you really want this in there like that?

I was like, no. And she did a tamer one. It's still kind of creepy. I mean, it's still pretty creepy because the notes did say make it creepy. But it isn't mouse skull on top of stuffed animal that's giant terrifyingly so so that's good um at the end of the book so so my cover animal is a is a great ear nightjar same animals before just different drawing different drawing now in color um which by the way the ebook is in color but the paper book isn't there isn't a lot of color used.

A couple of diagrams are a little simpler with color. But the Nightjar, in first edition, they have this thing at the end that talks about what the cover animal is. And they had this long section about goat suckers and chupacabra. And I took that and I was like, no, we're not doing that this time. This is a nightjar. A nightjar is a well-understood animal. It is not called a goat sucker by anybody who even is familiar with this creature. Because nightjars are super cool. And so I was excited to be able to mark that off. And then they added a whole bunch of stuff about the sounds it makes, which are kind of creepy, but at least it isn't a goat sucker anymore. They kept wanting me to say that the animal was a great-eared goat sucker, and I couldn't do it.

And it took me like two years to figure out that nobody called it that. And the great-eared Nightjar is fantastic. Like, if you've ever seen How to Train Your Dragon, it looks just like the black dragon in How to Train Your Dragon. Sort of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And weird tufted ears and a big wide mouth. Strange bird.

Fast. They're super fast. What is the name? Toothless. Toothless. Toothless. So let's see. What else went horribly wrong? None of these things sound horribly wrong.

Well, at the time, they were kind of stressful. Like the index. The index was 10% the length of the book. And I sent that back and said, oh, no. I don't think that's right. I think maybe 5% of the book would be good. Because there's a lot of, it wasn't just redundancy, it was just stuff that didn't belong in there. But then even as I had emailed, I think this should be shorter. I also wanted to add jokes. So hopefully, and I haven't seen the final index. I got the final PDF this morning, but I didn't look at the index.

But hopefully in the index there is... Some Easter eggs. Oh, you don't want me to tell that? Yeah, no, you can find stuff. Well, there is one that people know about if they've seen the first edition. But now it's in the index, and there's a Triceratops data sheet that's now in the index. If you want to look up where the Triceratops data sheet is, you can. Okay.

Well, none of these things sound horribly wrong. Okay, okay. They sound like normal editing. Horribly wrong would be, well, I wrote this whole section about ST, and then they went out of business. Oh, no, nothing like that. Horribly wrong would be, I wrote all this binary math stuff and it turns out that binary math isn't right. Well, when they translated my book from the original, I don't know what language it was

written in. You wrote in English. No, no, no. I mean, they encode it. And I think it was encoded in English? No, no, no. I mean, they encode it. And I think it was encoded in XML. Oh, okay. And they said, do you want to use our HTML editor or do you want to use Google Docs?

Okay, so for the first edition, they said, do you want to use our XML editor or do you want to use Word? And like an idiot, I said, I will use your XML editor. I will use Word to write, and then I will put it all in your XML editor. This time I said, I want to use Google Docs. Because Google Docs is super easy. But that translation, all of the squared, everything that had a superscript. Oh, okay. Went into the line. Went into the line? So it was no longer a superscript went into the line.

Went into the line? So it was no longer a superscript. Oh, it was just a normal number? It was just a normal number. Oh, my God. So as I was editing, that was one of the things I was finding. Hopefully, I got all of those. Let's see.

But that was good. There was stuff like that where I was going through and fixing. I fixed all the erot, of course. And then I needed to break up chapter six. What was chapter six? The kitchen sink. I think it was called peripherals. And it was a mashup of listing all of the peripherals and all of the communication methods. So it was like Spy and I Amuse, which, yes, they go together, but it was a super long chapter. I was really sad about that because I liked having 10 chapters. 10 was just a good number. Okay. I don't know.

But then that led to a few more chapters. And then I had 13 for the longest time, but I didn't really want to have 13. I don't know why. I don't know why the numbers matter. They don't matter. Obviously, they don't matter. But then now it has 14. Because we added one about motors.

It also has 100 more pages. Of course, I don't know where the index came in, but I'm pretty sure it's 100 more pages. Not all of that is index. Which means it also has four more interview questions. Well, three more interview questions and one advice on interviewing. Because each chapter, at the end of the chapter, it has an interview question. And if you haven't read the book, it won't make a lot of sense, but the interview questions are from the perspective of the interviewer.

Like, I have to interview somebody today. What should I ask them and what should I expect in response? And I had so much fun writing those. Because it's not, you're not asking like textbook questions of what are the pros and cons of I2C versus SPY. You're talking about how does a system boot up from nothing? And then it goes through and it says you're listening for things like C startup and memory and how you get to main and vector table. And so it was just, it was way more fun to pose questions that way. And I thought it was more interesting to read an answer that was more on your side instead of adversarial. Like, here's what we would look for instead of your answer is wrong. I had fun writing some new ones of those.

What else did I tell people? Oh, like I said, it's an e-book. And you can get it from ebooks.com or Google Play or Amazon Kindle. There will be a coupon. What's on O'Reilly? Does O'Reilly actually sell their books anymore? Oh, I don't know. Oh, there's on O'Reilly? Does O'Reilly actually sell their books anymore? Oh, I don't know. Oh, there's the O'Reilly Safari System.

It's not even what it's called anymore. Oh my God, I'm totally showing my age here. It's the O'Reilly Learning System. And they usually have a seven-day trial thing. I have coupons for 30-day trials, which I will write down here. I will put into the show notes. So if you want to try a 30-day O'Reilly thing,

I just found that the O'Reilly learning system has a whole bunch of webinars. I mean, I knew they had classes, but I wasn't really sure about their classes. But the webinars are like one to eight hours of pretty detailed, focused information. Of course, it's more software than hardware, but still. They were interesting. I think I'm doing a webinar probably in April. I'll let everybody know when it happens. I sent over a couple of abstracts this morning because I don't really know what to talk to the O'Reilly audience about.

It's not really hardware. Like, do they really want an introduction to embedded systems? I can totally do that, but it's kind of boring. I mean, your book's there, so it would seem like something embedded systems would make sense. I don't know what the O'Reilly audience means. I mean, they have a large mailing list of people who have attended these in the past. Okay, so that's, yes. So what else? Oh, I said I broke up chapter six. Now I have a communications chapter and a chapter about peripherals. And the peripherals I handle in a different different way and I talk a lot more about flash memory, not just about using it internally, but about all the things you can do with externally.

Before I had a section about LCDs and fonts and how all of those work. And I still have that. But now I talk more about, well, how do you get the assets into the Flash? And again, it's not how do you get the assets into this Flash? It's how do you go about putting assets in Flash? What are your options? When you go into manufacturing, do you do it through the code? When you update the code, do you think about updating the assets? It's all of these things as you're building systems. There is more code now, but not really in the book. There is a GitHub repository that goes with the book, which is supposed to have a lot of code, but turns out has a lot of links to other people's code. Because why bother to write it myself if somebody's already done a pretty good job?

Let's see, what else did chapter six become? The communications. Communications got split into local communications and non-local communications. Sure. Cloudish communications. And then that got mushed into IoT stuff, so that moved around.

With my class per class, I had this nice section about main loops and how they work. And I guess that's something that people don't think about much. I mean, you have a main loop and you have while one and stuff happens over and over again. And then after that,

you add some interrupts and the interrupts do stuff. And maybe the interrupts actually do the stuff and then you come back to the main and it just spins. But then maybe the interrupts start having event handlers and main starts looking more like a state machine, an event handler, event loop. And then it goes through each step one by one until you end up with active objects. When I did this as a talk with classpert folks, it was a, okay, I have a system that needs to do this. How do we handle that? And building up the means that way. I didn't get to do that so much in the book because you can't have that two-way dialogue, of course. But I did try to build up why you want to do events instead of handling things in interrupts. Why active objects come up

when you're dealing mostly with frameworks like Nordic and other BLE stuff where somebody is running a big system and your code is actually pretty small in this system. Let's see, what else? Was there anything that was outdated that you cut? Little pieces. I switched from an NXP processor, an example, to an ST processor just because that's... I mean, NXP processor and an example to an ST processor just because that's... I mean, NXP is still around, but

I didn't know whether to call it NXP or Philips. So I just gave up on that one. Look, ST! Yay! Let's see. The motor section... Motor section I'm not entirely happy with. I think some of the diagrams are badly sized, but that's my fault.

You're not coming on this show to badmouth your own book. Motorsection is great. Last time we talked about my book. I think the show was titled Worst Book Ever. That was because we were making fun of the one bad review you got on Amazon. I mean, I got more than one, but yes, the worst. Which, I mean, now is the time for me to say, please review the book.

Review the book, especially if you like it enough to give it five stars. The reviews are super important. I really appreciate them. I don't care if you review this one or the older one, but put it under the second edition version because that would be really nice to have more reviews

there. Okay. I'm sorry, was that aside kind of too weird? Alright. Unless you want to read the whole book, I don't know what else to say about the book. It's out. Go get it. It's out. Go get it. Yay! Or pre-order it for April if you want it in paper.

And it should be out April-ish. It should be out sooner than April. Okay. I think Amazon is showing April 7th, but the paper should ship sooner. There's this whole, if you're late to Amazon, they get really mad. So they put in some buffer. Okay. And I didn't quite use that buffer and I'm not quite sure how I didn't use that buffer

because I did put a delay in at some point where I was like, nope, this is broken. We got to fix this before we go on. Well, the buffer they tell you and the buffer they tell themselves are probably quite different. I think that's what happened. There's a much bigger buffer that's real.

Yes. I should thank some of the people who helped. Chris Svek at iRobot helped quite a bit with the writing and technical review. Rene Novar, also technical review and writing. He is fantastic at catching code errors, which I am terrible at catching. Philip Johnston of Embedded Artistry and John Katsoulis were all my technical editors. They did a fantastic job. Any errors that are left are my fault not theirs of course

except for Svek they may all be Svek's fault we don't know I don't think so I asked them what they wanted their titles to be for you know thanking and sending them stuff and Chris Svek and I almost agree that his title could be

not the embedded co-host but no he gets some director of And I almost agree that his title could be not the embedded co-host. But no, he gets some director of robots and software engineering or something that sounds like he's about to take over the world. Did you enjoy writing it? Or was it a chore? You know, at this point... Did it take as long to write the second edition as the first edition? Yeah, it did. It really did. At this point, after the first edition, I was like, never, ever, ever, ever again.

And I had some of that in February as we were, what felt like rushing and stressful to me, but probably wasn't because they built in buffers that I wasn't aware of. But overall, you know, it's kind of cool. Paging through it, it's sure a lot. Like, I didn't think I knew that much. And every time I have to turn to a page to explain to somebody is like, a couple times I've had people ask me questions. I'm like, well, I'm not going to bother to generate new words for this. I will just turn to this page and not read it to them, but show them the diagram and explain whatever. And that's been really cool.

I mean, it's always a good feeling. But it's also like, okay, I do kind of know what I'm talking about here. You're smiling at me like, you're crazy. No. I've seen you give that smile to the dog. Weird to have imposter syndrome after you've written a book. I mean, maybe not weird, but it just seems like you've been living it for so long that you feel like you actually do know what you're talking about. But it was a little different writing it this time

because last time I think you had a full-time job too, right? So you had a little bit more freedom to... I was working for the custom chip Cortex M0 credit card thingy. Oh, right. No, you weren't full-time. So that wasn't entirely full-time. Okay. I didn't have a podcast, though.

Right. So, yeah, I don't think... I think it was about the same amount of time. Just because it was going through and checking all of the old stuff and writing the new and trying to go through some of my other explanation things. Like going through all the class part. I'd have mini lectures that were strewn throughout the course. And those were all new stuff. And so translating those into the book was good.

I didn't get to do all of them. I didn't want to do a whole chapter about internationalization because it's so boring. But if you start internationalization and you don't know where to start, it's so hard to collect all the information and i do have a blog post about it but last time i checked its images were all kind of messed up so i should fix that but i haven't yet i've been busy writing a book all right well that's the book that's the book. Please take a look. If you hate it, please wait about three months before telling me that. Just because I need a little good time before we get to the bads.

If you like it, I don't know. I get kind of weirdly shy if people tell me they like it. Just review it. Yes, just review it. Review it to other people. Yeah. Okay, so I thought that was going to take up the whole show. That's 28 minutes. Okay, wait a minute.

I know we have two sponsors right now. And I need to make announcements for both. You do? Yes. Okay. So for Nordic, who I think isn't sponsoring this show, but sponsored the last one and will sponsor the next one, we still have a giveaway. And technically I should be announcing a winner, but I did not choose a winner. So instead I am going to encourage you all to enter. The current question is, what would you like to change about the Power Profiler Kit 2?

What would be different? What could be better? And so send me an email with that, showitembedded.fm. Those will all go into a hopper, and then I will share the interesting tidbits with Norik, but also choose three winners over these three months, which probably at the rate it's going, it's going to be three winners at the end of the three months. So enter early in case I draw early. Okay. And so for Memfault, they are doing something a little different.

They had been doing the webinar things, and so they're doing a different... The panel discussion. The panel discussion. So now they are going to have... Actually, why don't I just read this? Yeah. Memfault is hosting its first launch week of the year on Tuesday, March 12th, which is very soon. The Memfault CEO, Francois Baldessari, will showcase how to evaluate the

health and performance of embedded devices with Memfault's observability platform. Join this webinar to discover how simple it is to monitor three necessary device measures, stability, battery, and connectivity. There'll be a registration link in the show notes. And I think that's going to be pretty cool. We really do appreciate Memvault for sponsoring this show and several others over the last few months. Using their observability platform, it will help you to figure out how to deal with your systems. It gets larger, how to debug figure out how to deal with your systems.

It gets larger, how to debug it, how to make sure it's healthy. And it can be IoT or distributed systems or just a whole bunch of small systems connected together. That's what Memfault's there for. Cool. How are you doing? I'm all right. You got a piano not too long ago. Okay, I don't know what that has to do with anything, but continue.

And one of our show friends asked about learning piano as a beginner. Okay. What advice do you have for somebody learning piano as a beginner? Get a teacher. Okay. What advice do you have for somebody learning piano as a beginner? Get a teacher. Okay. I mean, that's not necessarily obvious. There's a lot of resources out there, right, on YouTube and books now that weren't when I was learning or starting to learn. You know, back in the 80s, you know, if you wanted to learn an instrument, you had to get a teacher pretty much.

Do you still have to? I mean, you still get a teacher. It's really helpful because there's a lot of stuff, unless you're really rigorous about recording yourself and zeroing in on your hands and things when you're learning technique on any instrument, not just piano. It's real hard to critique yourself if you don't know what's correct. on your hands and things when you're learning technique on any instrument, not just piano. It's real hard to critique yourself if you don't know what's correct. And so the best you can do when you're first starting, and even when you're advanced, sometimes there's stuff where somebody needs to, you know, point out, okay, here's how you should be doing this technique to be more efficient or put less stress on your wrists or hands or whatever. But there's stuff you can watch on YouTube. It's like, here's a proper technique and here's what

your hand is doing. But it's real hard to, if you don't know anything, to figure out how you're supposed to hold your hand. You can get part of the way there, but it's helpful to have a teacher. And it's helpful to have a teacher to motivate you. Because I think, at least for me, I'm at the point where I can self-motivate some, but it took a long time to get there. And when I was a kid learning, I don't know how old this person was, is, but when I was a kid learning, there was no way I was going to practice without some mean lady coming to yell at me every week and even now i think i should have teacher isn't listening it's a metaphorical mean lady even now i i think i should get instructor periodically for all the instruments i play because there's that aspect of it it's's like, okay, I need to practice. I can go practice for an hour and get nothing done because I'm ADHD about it and just flitting around between things

and not being serious. Whereas if I had a teacher say, this week you're going to do these three things for at least 10 minutes a day, and then have somebody to say, did you do that? But you've had drum teachers who... I've had bad teachers, yeah, that's true. Oh, okay.

But they didn't have a plan like that. But I was already somewhat intermediate advanced at that point, which is kind of paradoxical. If I had been a beginner, I would have been fine. But sometimes once you get to a particular level, the teachers don't know how to teach you. Or they treat you more as colleagues with suggestions instead of... Yeah, which they shouldn't have because they're way better than me.

But anyway, so teacher's good. If you don't have a piano, there's a million options out there. I would not... It depends on how serious this person is. Let's say serious just because that's the most interesting. If you're somewhat serious, then you want a piano keyboard, the keyboard mechanism. Ignore the sounds for now.

You want a keyboard mechanism that as closely approximates how the key mechanism of an actual piano feels as you can afford. And that's where I would put the money is on better key action. This is because with a real piano, when you push it down, there's... There's linkages and then levers and then a hammer that goes and strikes the strings. And so you have a force to it. And if you push hard, you get a different sound than if you push softly. Right. But you can get that effect with cheapo synthesizer keys where they just have a pressure sensor. But it's the other effect it's the feedback that's it's the whole it's the the weight of the key the travel distance there's there's actually things where as you press a key as you go through it's called um shoot what's it

called not lift off um i can't remember the term but there's a there's on a real piano there's a there's a moment where the hammer starts to move in a certain way, and there's kind of a little hitch. And then past that, it eases up. That's not super important to simulate necessarily, but a lot whole technique thing with the way actual keyboard, actual piano key actions work that you don't get with like a synthesizer action keyboard, which is just basically a switch or a pressure sensor and a spring. And that matters. It matters if you're going to play piano. It matters if you want to play piano. If you want to learn keyboards to do kind of some synth stuff or organ kind of music, then it doesn't matter so much. So that's a distinction. If you want to learn piano, you should get something that feels like a piano.

And there's a whole range of things. You can get just a controller that has weighted key action or what what sometimes they call, you know, grand, a lot of them are called grand feel actions, and there's a whole bunch of different kinds. Roland has them, Kawai has them, Yamaha has them, Casio has them. And they all have different names and numbers, and they get more expensive the more closely they approximate a key action. Some of them feel pretty good, but they're just plastic mechanisms that are simulating the feel without actually simulating the whole mechanism. And some go all the way up to where

it's just a piano keyboard mechanism, and then the hammer goes and strikes a sensor. And so they go all the way. This is a piano keyboard, and the hammer strikes a sensor. That's like the one I have. So it's arranged there, the for the sound part you can get some that have good sounds in them most of them will have adequate sounds in them uh you can get some have no sounds in them they're just midi keyboards that you plug into either

a tablet or a raspberry pi or a laptop or whatever and then you'd have to buy some software that that is a sampling library for pianos which sounds really good so you can do it that way too and then you can always keep upgrading the sounds as things get better um and the other slight thing that's nice to have is is you you do want to have the pedals at least at least the damper pedal which is what people you hold it down and the notes keep going the sustain pedal um you at least want damper pedal, which is what people, you hold it down and the notes keep going, the sustain pedal. You at least want to have one pedal for that because the damper pedal is super important

for most piano music. And you can buy those externally and just have it on the floor with a cable to them. Or if you get some of the other models have a whole cabinet kind of thing and that's part of the cabinet on the floor. And then you want a good seat. You don't want to be sitting in a chair that's at the wrong height or a weird bench that's uncomfortable.

So you want to make sure you get something that's at the right height and isn't uncomfortable to sit on. Because like tapping on a keyboard, it's pretty easy to be holding your arm, hand, wrist, fingers wrong. Yes. And since you're doing it a whole bunch and you're doing it wrong. Piano is a repetitive stress injury magnet if you do it wrong. Yeah. Especially if you practice a lot. It's funny to hear you say teacher because I know you don't have one.

I know you've been in classes and stuff lately, but you don't have any dedicated teachers for any of the instruments. And yet I totally see where you're coming from. I think about learning yoga. A physical activity kind of needs a physical teacher. You can learn yoga from videos, but until you have somebody actually correct you and say, this is what it's supposed to feel like, it's hard to really learn what you're doing. Yeah. And sometimes somebody needs to reach across and grab your hand and twist it. Yes.

Or hold your elbow up and say, this is what this should be. Or show you their hand while they're doing something. And you can look around. Yeah, on YouTube you can't see behind. Or they can hold it in a particular way and say okay see this there are some really good piano technique videos out there um but again it's it's a different experience and you have to it depends on how you learn um and this true all instruments they're all instruments involve technique at some level and

sometimes it gets really esoteric uh and some of that stuff you may not get from a teacher and you'll have to learn for yourself once you've got fundamentals but you signed up for an online course system for piano yeah do you like it i do i wish i had more time for it uh since it's uh you know it's another thing i have to add to my day. Well, you know, there's lessons I can take there. They're video lessons. And some of them are very good. I'm learning technique things that I did not know and that I wish my teacher had told me. But they're not like, the thing with videos is it's often like, give me the thing that in five minutes that I didn't know before will just transform my playing.

It's never like that. I mean, YouTube has plenty of videos that say they'll do that for you. But a lot of these course things are like, well, here's how to get faster at say scales or some fundamental technique. And they will tell me something that's like, oh, I had no idea that was how you're supposed to do it. That's actually where the wall is in speed.

Like if you don't do this, you can't go any faster. But that requires extra practice like okay now i know the secret the secret doesn't make you faster the secret the secret puts you on secrets puts you on a new ground floor of practice to actually implement the secret um so but teachers can they have things like that. They have secrets. And, and I learned some from the instructor that did the class, the piano class I took, the, the group class that you've mentioned. Um, there was something about scales and fingering. It was like, oh, and with this kind of scale, your fourth finger always goes on B flat. Or, yeah, I think it was B flat or something like that. And I was like, oh, if I'd known that, you know, I would have had to like memorize a whole bunch of things. It would have been much easier. But anyway, there's a lot of stuff like that. Do you want to recommend to the class system? No.

Okay. No, I mean, it's for advanced, at least intermediate to advanced players. So there's not a lot of beginner stuff. It's called tone bass. They have several instruments. It's all classical for now. I think there's a little bit of jazz, but they have piano, cello, flute,

and guitar, classical. And they're a big, big site with lots of videos. And you can take a quiz, an online quiz, and they'll try to guide you through kind of a course thing with various videos

and various techniques and things. It's helpful for me because I'm coming back to piano after not having played it seriously for 30 years. So I'm trying to take it a little more seriously and go back and like, okay, how should I be practicing? What are some techniques that I kind of know how to do, but maybe I'm not doing appropriately and things like that. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of options for pianos out there. Anywhere from probably, it's going to be a few hundred dollars to many thousands. Many, many, many thousands if you want to get really fancy. But you should be able to do, for a beginner,

you should be able to do something that would serve you for years for between $500 and $1,000, I would think. And you want the full ADA keys too. There's a space cost involved with even

the most compact keyboard. If you were somebody who wanted to learn to play music as an adult, would you suggest piano or guitar or drums for their anger? Drums is very specific. You have to want to play certain kinds of music and stuff. And drums, unless you buy e-drums, which tend to be more expensive than a basic set of acoustic drums.

Go either way, but they're very loud. They are. Even e-drums, they're... Oh, they're so much quieter. They're so much quieter, but if you're in an apartment... Yes, we did have that guy when we lived in an apartment who had the e-drums, and it doesn't help when all you're hearing is thwapping, and the thwapping isn't even rhythmic because they're playing different drums, but you can only hear all the swaps.

Yeah, I mean, that's what mine sound like, but you don't care. Yeah, they're annoying. I would say e-drums are annoying, and real drums are catastrophic. catastrophic, especially for the first couple of years where you're not good, which is going to be the case. Hearing somebody play loud drums arrhythmically is really hard to take. So I apologize to all of our neighbors from 2001 or so to 2005 or so. But yeah, real drums are super loud and you have to even manage your own hearing and stuff with them.

I wouldn't recommend starting with drums. Guitar is very frustrating to start with. I heard it was only the F sharp chord that was hard. It's F, but... Like I know. The F bar chord that everybody har. It's F, but... Like I know. The F bar chord that everybody harps on, even though you shouldn't bother playing the whole thing. Guitar hurts.

Your fingers, until you get calluses. There's a whole thing with your fingers. There's lots of strange positions you have to bend your fingers into. About repetitive stress injuries. You have to push them into these metal strings that push back on you um so on the one hand while you're first learning guitar you're limited how much you can practice because after about a half an hour for a while you're just gonna be like i can't do this this hurts too much um so that takes a while i mean you can get

you can get like all things learning there's you's the learning curve where you make a lot of progress early on. But guitar, I feel like you do make that progress, but also it hurts. And there's a bit more to think about because you not only have to think about your fretting hand, which holds the notes down, but you have to think about your strumming or picking hand, which is doing rhythmic stuff and playing those notes. And there's a lot of technique stuff that you have to get down before you sound like anything. So you have to be able to fret cleanly without buzzing, and that's going to be harder for different chords. You have to be able to pick in time. You have to be able to pick the right strings without bumping the other strings. You have to sometimes mute stuff that you don't

want to ring. There's a lot of stuff with guitar that before you sound okay, you have to kind of get a feel for. And you can get to strumming chords and stuff pretty easily, but anything beyond that is harder. Piano,

you can sit down and you can push one key and it's going to make the sound. Okay. And you can push three keys and it's going to make a chord. That's my level of playing. There's a lot of technique stuff with piano, but the technique stuff comes in feel, like bringing out different notes when you're playing multiple notes at once um you know rhythmic sense all kind of feel stuff and then techniques you're not bumping other notes and you've got some fluidity and stuff and rhythmic and speed but the the curve of learning curve of piano

is much more satisfying i think because there's not that, okay, I have to learn this, but also I can't work the instrument until I learn how to do some things. And guitar is hard. Or flute or any of the other stringed instruments with bows and stuff. Those are in a completely different league where you're going to sound like a murderer of cats for months before you can even. So there is a hierarchy of pain. Oh, definitely. But yeah, guitar is harder. But the notation is easier. Guitar?

No. Guitar is much worse. Guitar is much worse. Well, there there's there's just those little boxes well there's three three kinds of notation for guitar there's chord notation chord box notation where it puts little dots on the string locations and you can put your finger and that's how you can learn some chords there's tablature, which kind of puts the strings on there and then puts X's where the notes as they go along. It's like guitar hero. That's okay.

It's a, it's a bit of a crutch because you can't notate a lot of things in there. It's not as easy to see rhythm. It's not as easy to see dynamic markings and stuff. A lot of people use tab. It's not a crutch. I use it all the time, but I used the wrong word,

but it's limited. And you can't communicate with other musicians through tablature. If I'm in a group and I want to show the piano player a part, they're going to look at me like,

what the hell are you giving me this for? I don't even know what that means. So if you want, you know, to be an intermediate or advanced player, you should be able to somewhat read music on guitar. And that's trickier because guitar, the way the strings are laid out, there's multiple places for notes. You have to make some choices when you're reading. Anyway, it's more complicated. Piano is one note, one key.

So what you're saying is I should just stick to the ocarina? Sure. Do you have one? No. Okay. I don't know why I've gone on a rant in this episode of Embedded about pianos. Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who enjoy listening to random things. Okay, let's see. The last thing I have on my list actually went into the newsletter last week. I shouldn't have wasted it. Well, not everybody's on the newsletter.

What? Why not? Well, just because they hate us, I assume. Okay, so we have a newsletter. I think it's under subscribe if you go to the website. It comes out every week. On the weeks where we do a show, it's usually, you know, what we said on the show.

On the weeks where we don't do a show, it's whatever we think of putting up there. Plus, every week, there are a random assortment of links. A random assortment of links. Sometimes they're really, really good. Sometimes they are... Really, really random.

Really, really random. Indeed. Okay. So, last week Ben Henke of Pixelblaze asked me about origami. And

I don't know if he wanted a short answer or if he realized that asking me about origami was kind of like Alicia, please talk for 45 minutes. Like asking me about pianos? Ben asked if I knew of any origami applications for flex PCBs.

And he wasn't sure if he was interested in pure origami, but related folding structures or self-arranging structures or kirigami, which is a form of paper art. He was thinking about different ways a folded structural flex PCB could be interesting. And then linked to this video called The Piece of Paper Could Revolutionize Human Waste, which is not what you think. It is the paper that DigiKey sends, the Diami paper, that has a whole bunch of holes in it. And I responded that I spend an unholy amount of time thinking about this.

Not that I've ever done it, just that I think that there is a lot of interesting things you can do with flex PCBs and how they're folded. Of course, flex PCBs don't fold like paper. If you did, that would break them, probably, or maybe just break the circuit. But whenever you're in the spot of things that can't really be folded folded, you can create hinges instead. And paper artists as a whole talk more about hinges than folds. And in Flex PCB, hinges are, let's say you take a flat PCB and then you cut, you're going to have to describe what my hands are doing.

Okay, okay. And then you cut, you're going to have to describe what my hands are doing. Okay. And let's see, it's a rectangle and you have it long, long ways horizontal. Okay. I'm holding a PCB. And then you cut down the center, but only in the center, you leave two strips along the edges. Okay. So you've got a four-inch PCB and you might cut the middle two inches. You might cut a four-inch PCB.

A line. You might cut, say, a four-by-two-inch PCB. Yeah. And you cut one- a half inches vertically, and then like a quarter inch horizontally. So now you have a rectangle that is horizontally big, and then you cut a hole that is vertically big. Sure.

This would be much easier with a whiteboard. So now I have a little rectangle in the rectangle. Right. Okay, go on. Your PCB will fold around that much easier than it would fold elsewhere. Because you've removed a bunch of pieces, a bunch of paper, and now it can fold back and forth along that. Okay, so this hinge, if you did something like circular pleats, which are really cool, it's when you make a paper, back to paper, you make a circle of paper and then you cut out the center so that you have a donut of paper. And then you make concentric

rings inside the paper. And then the first ring you fold up and the second ring you fold down, first, third, up, down, up, down. Okay. So you do this. And in the end, you don't end up with a donut that's folded like a fan. You end up with this saddle shape that starts doing crazy things the tighter you make the folds. Okay. I call them chaos noodles, and I just love them. And they're well-known in origami. This is not me inventing things. But I think you could do that with a saddle, where you would make arcs instead of

folds. And you could still keep, and that would create this hinging effect, but also the unstable waviness. So I've been thinking about that, and how that might be fun for either

antennas, which probably has no particular use, or actuators like Carl Bojega has been doing, which, would it undulate? Or would it do something else? Maybe it would just go into a fixed pattern and then flap back and forth. Although that might be a cute flower effect. I don't know. Anyway, so there's also a bunch of

origami to do with hinge it or with antennas in 3ds uh and there's i mean so much stuff in space anything where you need something to get smaller and bigger ferrisris wheels, for instance. Yeah, we saw that ferris wheel. It was all collapsed down into a box and then you had a cherry picker? Yeah, something like that. A forklift of some kind. And it lifted it up and it was like... And then it unfolded itself into...

It just unspoiled. Yeah, that was cool. So, yeah, origami. Stents was the other thing. You think about putting things in the body. There's a whole area, a whole giant field of origami surrounded Miura, Miura Ori. Miura is the guy. And then there are a bunch of like sub things of Yoshizawa that's a form of Miura is the guy. And then there are a bunch of sub-things of Yoshizawa that's a form of Miri.

And these are all things that collapse and how they get smaller and bigger. And again, going back to hinges, you can make the hinges so that they are active. And then that spreads out like the solar panels on the many of the space stuff, space satellites, satellites, probes, yeah. And those are the ones that spin out. And again, we're talking about hinges, but in origami, the hinges are folds. In flex, it's probably cutouts. And then stents have similar things where the hinges can be hard or soft. And if they're hard, they are big. And if they're soft, they're small and collapsed. And so you can have them go big or small.

It's not exactly soft robotics, but there's definitely some crossover. Anyway, anyway, we're not going to put all the links into the show notes because in the show notes we go into the newsletter and then we have some sort of weird inception problem, but I will put up some of the notes for the origami because I did add notes about

all of these terms that I've been using. Okay, well I can't think of anything else for Hannah to talk about that has nothing to do with embedded systems. I wrote a book about embedded systems. I don't have to talk about it anymore. I put down all of my knowledge there. That's right.

Well, the show is now a random topic that we like. Anyway, back to embedded systems. I will be giving a talk at the Embedded Online Conference. It's going to be from one of the new chapters in the book. The talk is called Causing Chaos and Hard Faults. The chapter in the book is, I believe,

Getting Into Trouble, in which I talk about hard faults and debugging and memory issues and just all of the things that you get into trouble and how do you start debugging it. For the talk, it will be, let's get into trouble on purpose for fun and then we'll figure out how to get out of it. And I'm looking forward to that. The current plan for that involves puppets.

I'm sure that Christopher will be talking me out of that. When is this happening again? End of April, beginning be talking me out of that. But in the meantime, when is this happening again? End of April, beginning of April. Yeah. All right. All right.

Better start thinking about that. I have, that's how I got to the puppets. You've got to, if there's going to be puppets, you need to write a script. Well, yes,

no, I have, I know, I know which parts of the puppets. You have to obtain the puppets. You have to kind of block out what the puppets are going to be doing. I thought you were doing something where there was going to be an evil you and a good you. I figured a puppet would be a lot easier than trying to play myself in two different roles.

I'm not sure. We'll find out. Well, the only good puppet I have right now is that frog, which I like a lot. But the only good puppet action I know how to do is... Does this mean we can buy puppets and write them off? Well, the frog, the only thing I know how to do it is to make it look like it's barfing up a cat hairball, which is not what I need for this. That's why you need a puppetry teacher.

They can teach you fundamental techniques. I need a puppetry teacher and a bunch of puppets. And that's it for... Good, yes, because I have to edit this, and I also have to do actual work, and I have to put it up. Right, okay. He wants me to stop talking, so thank you for listening. Thank you to the Embedded Patreon Slack for their support through writing the book, and for their random questions that lead me to long diatribes.

This week it was the origami, and then there was an internationalizations one, and who knows what's coming up next. And did I say thank you for listening? Yeah. Oh, then thank you to Memfault for sponsoring the show. And if you would like to contact us, show at embedded.fm.

And let's see, I guess I'm only reading a little bit of Winnie the Pooh today, but it's a good time because it is somebody's birthday there too. Happy birthday to my book. Happy birthday. Oh, okay. So, Al is writing happy birthday. Al doesn't know how to spell and has written hippy, pippy, bithy, bithy, bithy, bithy, bithy, bithy, bithy. Pooh looked on admiringly. I'm just saying happy birthday. A happy birthday, said Owl carelessly.

It's a nice long one, said Pooh, very much impressed. Well, actually, I'm saying a very happy birthday with love from Pooh. Naturally, it takes a great deal of pencil to say a long thing like that. Oh, I see, said Pooh. While all this was happening, Piglet had gone back to his own house to get Eeyore's balloon. He held it very tightly against himself so that it wouldn't blow away, and he ran as fast as he could to get to Eeyore before Pooh did, for he thought that he would like to be the first one to give a present, just as if he had thought of it without being told by anybody. And running along and thinking how pleased Eeyore would be, he didn't look where he was going, and suddenly he put his

foot down on a rabbit hole and fell down flat. Bang! Piglet lay there, wondering what had happened. At first he thought the whole world had blown up. And then he thought perhaps only the forest part of it had. And then he thought perhaps only he had. And he was now alone in the moon or somewhere and would never see Christopher Robin or Pooh or Ewer again. And then he thought, well, if I'm in the moon, I won't have to be face downwards all the time.

So he got up cautiously and looked around. He was still in the forest. Well, that's funny, he thought. I wonder what the pain was. I couldn't have made such a noise just falling down. And where's my balloon? And what's that small piece of damper hack? It was the balloon.

Oh, dear, said Piglet. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Oh, dear, dear, dear. Well, it's too late. I can't go back. And I haven't another balloon balloon and perhaps eeyore doesn't like balloons very much and and so he trotted on rather sadly now and down he came to the side of the stream where eeyore was and called out to him good morning eeyore shouted piglet good morning piglet said eeyore if shouted Piglet. Good morning, Piglet, said Eeyore. If it is a good morning, he said,

which I doubt, he said, not that it matters.