Embedded - 498: To Consume Stickers

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

At the end of this week’s show, Elecia reads a Winnie the Pooh poem as Cookie Monster death metal. Before that, Chris and Elecia chat about mental health, journaling, personal projects, and listener questions.  Please sign up for the Nordic Giveaway!  You can also sign up for the Embedded newsletter. Maybe now with job postings? Elecia’s journaling notebook is this one on JetPens (which is where she gets her nice pens and some of her stickers and washi tape).  From discussing some listener messages, we mentioned: Matt Keeter’s talk on debuggability in production where you don’t have access to the system that is faulting (video and slides) Letter boards (in the Adirondacks), see those in action here Wokwi simulator is a great place to get more embedded experience without buying all the kits. Christopher has said that there will not, definitely not, under any circumstances, be a whole death metal album of Winnie the Pooh poems. Elecia is practicing anyway.  Transcript Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy MCUs and wireless SoCs since the early 2010s, and they offer solutions for low-power Wi-Fi and global Cellular IoT as well. If you plan on developing robust and battery-operated applications, check out their hardware, software, tools, and services.   On academy.nordicsemi.com, you’ll find Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular IoT courses, and the Nordic DevZone community covers technical questions:  devzone.nordicsemi.com.   Oh, and don’t forget to enter Nordic Semiconductor’s giveaway contest! Just fill out the entrance form, and you're in the running. Good luck!

Hello and welcome to Embedded. I am Elisia White, here with Christopher White. Today it's just us, just talking to each other, catching up. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? If I told you, I would end up on a list. On a list.

And not a happiest person in the world list. What have you been up to that you can talk about? It makes it sound like I have a secret identity or something. That list is looking more and more like it. Nefarious clandestine work. What have I been up to? I did recently ask you that if you were pursuing a life of evil crime, what would your job be?

Did you say evil crime? That sounds more vehement than you posed to me. I think a life of evil, what would your career path be? I still don't think it was evil. Okay. Because that changes matters. God, I can't remember what the question was. What was my answer? Criminal?

Maybe it was a life of criminal activity. Yeah, and who gets to define what's criminal, right? All right, all right. Yeah, because I think I said something. You said you were going to be a hacker and you had specific hacking targets that we won't discuss. Get me on a list. I'm not doing that for the record, any of it. For the record, my answer was I would bake

phenomenally good cookies. Yeah, and I didn't understand how that factored into being evil or criminal. Well, I would. Unless the good cookies contain something. No. I wouldn't use any recipes. Oh, highly legal.

It would be like, you would get the perfect cookie one day and know that you could never have it again. Okay, do you understand what crime is? That was why I thought it was evil. Okay, I think you need to work on this a little more. Because if that's the best you can do for evil, I think you're doing all right. What have I been up to? I have been up to some work. I have been up to music. I have been up to some role playing, gaming, which I haven't done for, let's say, 30 years prior.

You seem to really enjoy that. And secondhand role playing is pretty fun because I get to hear everything he says and it's just out of context and hilarious. I was like, does it have fur on it? That has no context at all. Look, it's very important. It was killing, we dealt with a monster,

but we disposed of it. But I realized later that we needed evidence of the monster to take to someone. I was hoping that the monster chains had still set. You are now experiencing third-hand role-playing games. Yeah, I've been doing that. I've been spending too much time watching the downfall of civilization. It's a terrible game. It's a really bad game.

Yeah. Did I mention work? I said that must have said work. I think so, but how are drums going? Drums are going okay. I'm very tired by everything, so I'm having a little trouble maintaining the quite intense pace that I was at. Which is like an hour to an hour and a half a day.

And as I say that, last weekend I think I did two and a half hours a day to try to make up. So I've taken a couple days off this week and I'm going to pick it back up today. But it's going well. It's interesting. You know, I haven't, to bring this back to a larger topic, I haven't studied anything intensely for a long time. With a teacher. I think that's important too. Yeah, with a teacher or anyway, but with a teacher, definitely. So watching the pace of progress Definitely. So watching the pace of progress

and starting to notice progress is actually something I haven't experienced for a while. And we work for ourselves. It's not like we get performance reviews. Yeah, I mean, for work, yeah, we learn stuff, but it's usually ephemeral stuff. Like, how do I solve this one problem? Because we're standing on education

that took decades that we're already familiar with. So learning things, learning new things at this stage of our career is mostly like, ah, shoot, I have to solve this one special case of a problem that I might not see again. Or there's a new API, but it looks like a lot of old APIs or whatever, there's a new chip, but everything looks kind of similar.

But kind of chipping away at a skill that you could continue to chip away at for the rest of your life and mark progress is not something I've done a lot of recently. So seeing progress plateau, seeing it go backwards, and then, but seeing that the curve as a whole is going up and then looking back six months or a year and saying, holy crap, I could not do that before. I didn't even realize it. It's funny you say that because I can think about all the things that you set out to learn

and then you learn like Morse code. That's a thing, right? It's a measurable thing. Yeah, I did learn that, but it's a small thing. It's something that anyone can do in a month or two. I mean, it depends on the fluency and competence you want to get to. Yeah, right, sure, sure. It's like language learning, which is another thing you've picked up recently.

But music is a larger thing to me. Huge. I mean, even within drums, there's several lifetimes of 50 different genres and techniques and things. And somebody who's an absolute world-class drummer in one musical style might come up against something and not be able to do it for years. Like, oh, you know, a great jazz drummer might struggle with Brazilian or Afro-Cuban stuff or something like that. So there's always stuff to do. But yeah, I guess, I guess the thing that's interesting to me is getting very frustrated as I go along with this, but then having moments of, wait, I actually can do this now.

It's amazing how if you spend an hour a day for six months. Well, at this point, it's been a year. Well, your intense class has only been half a year. Intensity hasn't changed that much. I've gotten more feedback, that's all. You get more, oh, okay. But yeah, yeah. I think sometimes we all want to do things.

I want to get better at origami. I want to share some of my origami ideas. I want to get better at robotics. I want to not feel like I missed something in trigonometry and calculus that would just make my life so much easier. And the truth is that if you just put in the time. But that's the hard part. Just put in the time. Just. That's such a stupid word.

Put in the time when you don't want to, necessarily, sometimes. And put in the time when it feels like it's not working. And that's tricky because sometimes it isn't working. And you do need to change something around or let that sit. And that's where teachers in classrooms and other students can help you. But sometimes it is working and it's just like, yeah, this is hard and it's going to take you a month or two of feeling like you're not making any progress until suddenly, oh, you know, you do.

Those moments of inspiration where it clicks, those don't happen because you didn't put in the work. Those happen because you were ready. Yeah. And I think there's another aspect to like, the stuff I'm working on, they are exercises. They're a bit more musical than a lot of music exercises tend to be, but they're still exercises. They're drilling repetitive things over and over and over again. That at first glance, you might think, well, this doesn't apply to me playing music for my band. I don't see how this connects. But after spending six months of mostly doing those kinds of exercises, when I go and play a song, it's like night and day.

LW a lot of the exercises you've been doing have been improvisational. That's true. That's true. And yet when you record music with your brother, you take, I believe the count was 532 takes. Well, that's one thing I'm trying to get away from. By being able to improv better, I won't be just spamming things until I find, you know, something that seems to work and then working on that. But anyway, it's that the side effect of being at the drums

every day for an hour or two and carefully playing, regardless of what I'm doing, makes me a better player. Just engaging with the instrument, my muscle memory, my strength, my hands, my stamina, all that stuff get better, regardless of what I'm playing. As long as I'm not playing something actively harmful. And by harmful, I mean like out of time or I'm not paying attention to my technique well

and I'm reinforcing bad habits or that sort of thing. So I think that's true of a lot of things. I think that's what people miss about school and education and college and things like that It's like okay. Yeah, you may not want to learn discrete mathematics because you can't think of me This is the classic thing. What am I ever gonna do with calculus? Maybe nothing But you're gonna learn how to learn calculus and knowing how to learn calculus means you know I learned a bunch of other things maybe some other things that are hard that you do care about or need

means you haven't learned a bunch of other things, maybe some other things that are hard that you do care about or need. But yeah, so muscle memory is important. Repetition is important. And that's a sad fact of how our brains work. So yeah, drums. What else? I guess that segues into journaling. Good news, everyone. I discovered journaling. Even better news, I'm not that evangelical about anything. Did you discover journaling or did you discover an excuse for stickering? Can I plead the fifth on this one? So I decided I wanted to try journaling. And for me it is, okay, let me be a little bit more tactical. I put in whether or not I made my exercise goals, what I ate, a little bit about what I did, like went to the beach or hung out with Christopher, watched a movie, whatever. And then I look up a journal prompt on the internet of which there are millions of journal

prompts and I write whatever it wants me to write. I actually didn't do the evil career one. It just made me laugh. But like how do you see your life in 10 years? Or what are your values? Those are pretty broad. Those are pretty broad. And sometimes they're very specific ones. Like what are you grateful for today?

Or yesterday it was what annual holidays, celebrations or events do you most enjoy? And it turned out, I was like, I like Halloween, but we didn't even really celebrate last year. But then I started thinking about when the cherry blossoms first hit, and I just get so excited knowing that the narcissists are coming,

or that first day over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, where we go to the beach and get warm by lying on the sand. So it turned out that mine weren't holidays, and I went back and thought about holidays. Anyway, this introspection part has been better for my mental health than any talk therapy has ever had, ever been,, I want to present myself as a kind, caring, competent human being. And the truth is inside, some of that's not always true. And yet, I will put that shiny exterior on and I can't take it off for a stranger.

To be fair, I don't think you've ever had a good therapist. That may be true, but I've had more than three. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, a good therapist will find ways to break through that, but... But I don't really have the patience to let them. Yeah, but I mean, there's nothing wrong with journaling. And the journaling has been really good for, I actually discovered something about myself I didn't know. I hate to ask for help.

Not even a little bit, but when I talked to Chris about this after I journaled about it, I realized just how much I hate to ask for help and will do anything to avoid it. And if help is offered, I can take it sometimes, but overall, I didn't really get this as an extreme part of myself. What kind of help? Like I fall on and could you help me up? Or can you explain this?

Can you sit here and work with me on this problem I'm stuck on or can you? Can you open this jar for me? Okay, that's pretty, pretty specifically. That's not even help. Can you put this in simpler terms so I have an easier time to understand? I would rather beat my head against the wall trying to figure things out than to ask for help. And, I mean, there are times this isn't true.

Like for clients, I know that there's a cost balance and I need to be responsible with their money and ask the questions before it gets too expensive. But asking Chris to carry the groceries when I'm perfectly capable won't happen. Okay. It's only been recently that I like, we walk out of the grocery store, I'm like, he paid, so I'm carrying all the groceries, I should hand one to him. Also, to be fair to me, I ask you all the time, do you want me to take one of us? I know, I know.

I just don't want listeners to think that I'm... No, but I grew up to be so independent. And that was a large part of my childhood, was needing to be that independent. And now I realize that I am stuck there, which is fine. I mean, it's... I mean, you don't have to be stuck there. A realization like that is this... I have been stuck there.

Yeah, okay. And it's not like I'm changing anything radically. It's just, oh, I didn't... It was just a simple journal prompt on the internet, how do you feel about asking for help? And I was like, oh, I feel really bad about asking for help. So I don't know if journaling will work for you, but I do all that and then I have a stamps where I have little puppy dog tracks and for each walk we take the dog on, whether

it's a long walk or a short walk, she gets a puppy dog, I get a puppy dog stamp. If we go to the beach, I get a fishy stamp. Oh, a sticker, sticker, those are washi tapes. If I write about memories, I get a bubble. If I row on the exercise machine, I get a little sushi sticker. I have origami stickers and dragon stickers and space stickers and sad teddy bear stickers. I have hedgehogs for when I'm cranky, sloths for when I'm lazy. I have mugs for when I get cappuccinos, which actually doesn't happen that often. And flowers for when I garden, it is entirely a way to consume stickers and I love it.

It's been really helpful for me to acknowledge the good things in my life as well as explore my own mental corners. All right. Do you journal a little bit? Not really. It's more of a... Because I gave you a sticker for when we went to go buy it. It's more of a...

What do you call it? So I don't have ADHD, but I have probably ADHD-adjacent issues. Maybe I have ADHD. I don't know. I get mushrooms for when I think about autism. But I make a list every day of things. Try not to make a list of things to do. It's not a to-do list.

It's a things I could do list. Sometimes it's a to-do list, like to make sure I keep doing some stuff that I'm supposed to do every day. But it's mostly just a check off to say, oh, you know what? I didn't sit on my butt the entire day. I did these five things.

It's more of a, did some stuff today. Accomplishments list. Work for this client, work for this client, meditate, practice French, exercise, practice drums, and maybe that's stuff I do every day no matter what, but it's nice to check it off. And then I put extra stuff if there's something I do want to do or whatever. And then, yes.

We got you stamps and stickers, but you haven't even opened your scratch and sniff stickers. No, I'll start using them. I got away from the last request from Craig. Did the Meteor stamper not help? There have been days that I've thought about getting that, just stamping the whole page. There wasn't really a context to use it in my to-do list. That's true.

Going out and stamping it on everyone's forehead as I walk around the street wouldn't be looked upon as probably something I should do. We should talk about something... Involving computers. ...mildly technical. You had a GPS logger? Yeah, from one of my clients. involving computers. Marvellously technical. You had a GPS logger? Yeah, from one of my clients.

I think I mentioned, did I mention last time I ditched micropython and went to Arduino? No. Yeah, so I ditched, so anyway, back up, context, GPS logger, it goes in a radio controlled airplane. I wanted a high frequency GPS logging. So there are modules now that'll do 20 hertz. This one actually has 25. What's the problem? It's not high frequency. It's higher than one.

I know, I know. Sorry, I'm working at much higher frequencies right now. Go ahead. And for position, unless you're a hypersonic missile, I mean, this is a little way to control the airplane, it's fine. Anyway, it's 20 hertz. I need it because I need to sync some data with some other stuff and the onboard GPS of the plane is only one hertz.

Anyway, don't ride me. This is how I'm doing it. So I needed to make a little embedded device that was a GPS microcontroller SD card that would just log to CSV position, altitude, time. Power's not an issue but space is. Power's not a big issue but space is, yes. So I started out with MicroPython, I started out on a Pi board. That didn't end up working because the Pi board's a little old and some of the modules

I wanted weren't compatible, so I ditched that and went to an ESP32 with MicroPython. Turns out MicroPython is great. Okay, don't get me wrong. But as we've said before, if you are doing something in Python, a computation or a processing that doesn't have a module that's written in C that Python is calling into. It may not be fast enough. So parsing the NMEA messages off of serial, which is the format that GPS has given you for their data, parsing those at anything greater than 1 Hz was not possible in Python directly.

And before you say what, I tried to do the same thing on ORN in regular Python, and it could not keep up with 20 hertz in regular Python, and I had to write my GPS logger that I run on ORN in C. So that makes no sense. Go try it I tried various modules for NMEA parsing all the standard ones. They cannot keep up and I especially can't keep up on an ESP 32 So I on the ESP 32 I Dithered for a bit thought about just doing it in and see using the ESP IDF or whatever

I don't know what it's called. And then I said, well, let's try Arduino. This is not a product. I'm going to one-off. Read it everything in Arduino. Arduino is way better than I remembered being. There's tons of modules for all kinds of stuff. I'm using TinyGPS, which is a really nice little GPS NMEA parser. Very fast fast, keeps up fine at 20-25 Hz. And, you know, it took me a while to develop the whole thing because actually I want people to be able to use it in the field. So it has a display, it has a state machine, it has error checking, it has some power management stuff, not very good power management stuff, but at least it'll tell

you the battery is dead. Yeah, and it has all the electronics and the mechanical part. It's got an enclosure, the electronics, the antenna, battery, all stuff enclosed. That was the hardest part. The software, I can do software. Getting these are just modules. I'm soldering them together with point-to-point wiring like a crazy, you know. Like a soldering man man. Somebody from the 70s, which is probably what I am.

Mostly for space reasons because putting another interposer board or header was going to take up too much space. Getting all that stuff in there was super hard. Getting the soldering right was hard. Not right, but like getting it so the wires could route in all this small space, getting the grounding right, it was a real pain. You're getting some at messages about key CAD and how easy it is to build new boards. I do not have time to do that and I would advise people to look at how much it costs right now or in the next week to get a board from PCBWay or

wherever because it's gonna be prohibitive. Anyway... Are we gonna talk about that? No. Anyway. But the ramifications of the whole... Let somebody else's podcast do that. I don't know how to do that.

It's gonna be bad. Everything's gonna be really expensive. The entire maker community and embedded space is gonna change radically. There you go. And you thought the chip shortage was bad. This will be a chip shortage too. Exactly. You get both.

For free. For free? Not for free. So yeah, it was a real challenge. And then I got it all done and it stopped working like it wouldn't get any satellites. And I spent a whole day adding more debugging and stuff. And then it just started working and it's worked perfectly since. It was so mad. And I have no idea what was wrong.

I think I just didn't have the antenna cinched down enough or something in the SMA connector. I don't know. I hope there wasn't something that's gonna come back to haunt me. But I'm gonna build a second one and with some lessons learned. Cause I used too heavy gauge wiring.

That was one of the problems. Like I have some hookup wire that I think's... I don't remember what it was, but it's 20 something. 22 maybe? But anyway, it was a little thick and hard to... The boards are very close together, so I had to bend. Yeah, and I did a bunch of CAD work. Now I can make enclosures.

I'm really good at making enclosures now. Got that under my belt as a skill. And I hope it fits in the stupid airplane that I haven't even seen. But if it doesn't, all of it's coming out and getting wrapped in shrink wrap and Kapton tape. I'll just have to scroll around in there. Yeah, but it's cool. It's got a little OLED display it's got a lipo battery the ESP board I have I got all the so the parts I used I have a spark fun thing WROOM I don't know how you pronounce that USB C that's the ESP 32

that's a pretty nice little board it's got the ESP 32 it's got an SD card slot it's got Wi-Fi which I'm not currently using but may it's got an SD card slot, it's got Wi-Fi, which I'm not currently using, but may. It's got a lipo charger, so you can just plug the battery right into it and then the USB on the other end to charge the battery. A bunch of peripherals, nice header with maybe a little bit less peripheral accessibility than I would like. I had to do some games to route things where I needed them to do because there were on board parts that were sharing some of the pins. So anyway, the one thing I don't like about it is it has a fuel gauge, but for some reason they chose a really weird part for the fuel gauge, which does not do any learning.

So it has an onboard curve. A fuel gauge is, if you don't know, it's a chip that kind of sits alongside the battery in the charger that monitors the battery voltage. LiPo batteries are very strange. Well, they're not strange now, but they're strange compared to older batteries in that as they discharge, the curve is very flat for quite a while. So you'll discharge a little bit, as time goes on, the voltage will come down, but then it'll stay quite flat and then it'll go down further.

It's kind of a weird shape. But it's very hard to deduce from that how much charge is there because that's the only visibility you have into the battery's charge is either I know it had this much storage and I've been counting, you know, cool-hams coming off of it or I watch the voltage and there's a lookup table. This battery, the fuel gauge they put on the spark fund thing for this one, does not do any cool-on measurement as far as I can tell. And it just uses a curve, but the curve is fixed.

And batteries are all different from all manufacturers. Those curves are not the same so what the date data sheet for this particular fuel gauge actually says is oh if you got a battery you want to use talk to us and we'll customize the curve for you which obviously you can't do from a spark fun thing so this has a random curve that's not really applicable to battery I've got so it's kind of lying about the charge and it doesn doesn't detect, I had to do a bodge wire to the charge light because there was no way, because this this thing was so screwed up and didn't know what battery it has, there was no way to kind of detect charge by saying oh it's got

a positive charge rate. Sometimes it does when I plug the charger in, sometimes it doesn't. I don't know why, probably because it's math-ing wrong. Otherwise the board is great. And then I have a SparkFun, really nice SparkFun GPS module that has a newer U-blocks chip that goes at 25 Hertz. A LiPo battery and a display. I said a display. Yeah, some LEDs. Oh, the fun thing about LEDs is I wanted the board LEDs that are kind of deep inside the box to be visible outside the box. Light pipe.

And I had this brilliant idea, which apparently everyone else has had in the world, to make a light pipe out of hot glue. So I put a hole in over, you know, directly over the LEDs in the caselid, which is a centimeter or more away from the LEDs. And you probably could see through that if you just left it a hole. But if you put a piece of tape over the top and then jam hot glue from the other side, so the tape keeps the top flat, and then kind of make a, you know...

So on the inside you're hot gluing? Bubble of hot glue, you know. So on the inside you're hot gluing. Bubble of hot glue, yeah. So it's a little, you know, you do want it to be not just a random shape, but in that, the hot glue acts as a light pipe and a lens and gathers all that light up. And on the top, it looks like you intentionally made,

you know, a nice little. It does look really nice. Diffuser. It's probably not super sturdy. It's glue, not, you know, it's just held in there with friction. But for this course. Did you put the board in while the glue was drying?

The board, it's not in contact. Okay. Yeah, no, it's pretty far away actually. Yeah. So that was kind of a neat discovery. Every, I subsequently looked it up and many people do that, but that's fine. I asked my devil recently about our lack of fuel gauge and how we would be dealing with

the discharge curve of our lipo batteries. He assured me, he assured me that it would be no problem that we would be able to tell where we were on the discharge curve. You can do it yourself. Yeah. And I just laughed and laughed, but very quietly because we were typing and decided we could handle that later. You can do it yourself, but just...

Oh, totally. ...putting that into ADC and... But it requires you to know that you're charging and basically you take a chip and you put it inside your software. And you've got to... It's all very possible, but... Build the curve yourself and do a lot of stuff. I was thinking that... It's pretty much easier to buy one.

It's easier to buy one as long as you can get one with a reasonable curve. Well, there are way more sophisticated ones that will learn the curve or monitor other stuff. Learn the curve, yes. Yes. I like to learn the curve ones, although they require you to power it up and discharge it several times so they can learn the curve. And during this time, you're doing board bring up and you're going, why isn't the fuel gauge

working? Like every single time I forget that I have to charge and discharge several times before the fuel gauge works. Yeah. So I'm going to take that out today and do some ground testing with the rest of the system. I hope it works for the flights, but we'll find that out in a few weeks. Oh, this was the plan where I have to hold the plane. Yes, and walk away.

While segueing away, because I had a segue for a very brief amount of time. Emphasis on the had. Do you want to discuss why it's a past tense segue? Or the bruises on my wrist? Yeah, so... And this is not a full board, like this is not the early Aughts Segway, the big one. No, this is the 9-bot. This is the newer 9-bot ones, yeah, which are a little smaller.

But it is the one with the handle, not the one with the knee driver. Right. We really should back up for people who have never met me in person or who have only seen me when I'm fully on. I'm a klutz. I fall down a lot. It's a ridiculous thing. Barring the segue, you haven't fallen down in quite a while.

That is not true. You do not know that I have fallen down because I haven't skinned my knees lately. I think I would notice, but okay, where are you falling? Are you going to other places to fall? Well, I fell at the beach not too long ago. I just tripped. I don't remember that. I think there was a seashell in the way or something.

All right. Stipulated you have fallen some more. At one point, despite Christopher's abhorrence of me getting a motorcycle, he said I could have one if I went for a whole year without falling. I still do not have a motorcycle. To be fair, that was mean, but I figured it was the only way to guarantee that you would never get a motorcycle. Right. Anyway, cluts.

So I got the segue in part because I was working on an inverted pendulum sort of thing and needed to understand intuitively some of the problems that were going to come up with the development. And let's just say there are some problems with inverted pendulums and control. Do you know why that is? Innately unstable. Yeah.

Woof. Especially if you cut some corners. Which I think the latest segways cut a few too many corners for people who are klutzs. But yeah, so I had an incident and... Hmm. Is that true? Or did you have two incidents? I had two incidents. In the first one, realizing that I was in an unhappy way, I stepped off the Segway and I was on an incline and the Segway continued down the hill, narrowly missing a car that

was an oncoming car. And then for some reason, it veered off to the right where it hit a small curb and flew a bit into some bushes where I walked the quarter mile to where it was from where I had gotten off of it and then rescued it from the bushes and the dog who was very angry. Not our dog. Not our dog. The dog who lived at the house that had the bushes. Who is now under attack by a small two-wheeled monster.

Yes, exactly. But, I mean, after that, once they cleaned out the dirt and the grass and the assorted flowers. It was fine. It was fine. The inciting incident was not that it was in an unhappy way. If you've seen the Netflix show, I think you should leave. The steering wheel will come off. I want a car where the steering wheel doesn't come off. But effectively, you

told me that the steering wheel came off. The handle. The handle, the thing you hold that allows you to steer. And so it turned into a hover... hover... With no steering. Well, I mean, I suspect there are people who could ride it that way. No, you can't steer it. Remember? Because it takes input from the handle. Yeah, but having worked with it enough anyway.

Okay. Steering wheel come off, and then you decided that that was just fine and you would continue on? Well, I mean, the steering wheel only came off in certain angles. It seemed like it was on purpose. It was just that I was on a steep enough incline trying to go slow enough. A breakaway steering wheel, as one was. So I go down to a more deserted street and it's got some hills on it, but it's also got some flats

so I can practice. Because I've only had it, I mean, I had tooled about on it enough that I could go around the block and all that. But so I was practicing. And then I decided I was done practicing, I was going to go to the grocery store, which was the mission, and tried to go up. We can see our grocery store from our house. I just want you to make clear how long this travel, this distance is. It might sound like she's been on a long journey where all this happened. I mean, I was gone for at least 20 minutes. 500 feet of the house.

That's quite true, but I'll lie. We can't actually see the grocery store. We have to walk at We can't actually see the grocery store. We have to walk at least 100 feet to see the grocery store. If I got rid of some of the houses, might be able to. And then, so I tried to go up a driveway and it's funny because that was on my list of control problems. And yeah, I experienced that traction control problem and yaw instability quite personally. And I don't know, part of me is like, I shouldn't have held on to it.

If I hadn't held on to it, it would have, it would have sorted itself out and then it would have stopped. But of course, I had just seen it drive away from me at reasonably high speeds down the hill. So I wasn't confident with letting it go. So I held on to it. And that just pissed it off. Because once I was off it, now it was just insane.

It was like, you get those little dogs and they get really mad for no reason. And they just jump up and down around their leashes. It was like that. So how these things are supposed to work is you get up there, so it's only two wheels, right? So you have an interesting dynamics problem where your system has to both balance and keep you upright on two wheels, not bicycle wheels but side by side wheels, but also take input from you in the form of leaning forward or leaning back to take that as kind of the throttle.

So if you lean forward, it starts moving forward in proportion to how much it thinks you're leaning forward while also keeping you balanced. It seems like a tricky problem. It's solvable in physics, you know, differential equations and you do it. Your control system. It's a junior senior project sort of in your college problem usually. But there are hard aspects to that because if you're relying only on detecting kind of that counter torque.

You really don't know whether or not anybody's actually at home. Well, most, the old segue solved to this by knowing whether or not somebody was on them. This is my point, yes. They had a system that would detect writer and it was pretty clear that the new system does not detect writer or possibly I destroyed that part. In the first accident.

In the first accident. I don't know. It's just interesting to me because I did notice when I was trying it, before this happened, that there were times where if you went over a bump or got a wheel off, it would go insane. Like it would just spin up the wheel to maximum because I think it was thinking, oh, this person just leaned forward all the way and we gotta go fast to balance. Otherwise they're gonna fall over.

And so I think there's a lot of misinterpreting in that control system of what's going on, especially once the rider is gone and it's still rolling. If it doesn't, they're not there. And I was on the ground, but holding. It's trying to balance. once the rider is gone and it's still rolling, if it doesn't know you're not there. And I was on the ground but holding the handlebar so it was way pitched over. So yeah, very interesting problem from a safety point of view. How do you make this fail safe, which evidently for some reason, maybe due to damage, maybe

due to design, it did not. But I'm fine. I got some bruises. And I actually, as far as the controls problem, I learned a ton, before I fell mostly. So it's totally worth it. But yeah, Chris doesn't agree that it was worth it. I do not, no. It got him a helmet and we've been on bike rides, so for me that's double worth it. Yeah, I still think bikes having a couple hundred years of development are possibly superior. Because all hoverboards have been recalled at least once, if not permanently.

To be fair, some of those are just for fires. That's true. wants, if not permanently. To be fair, some of those are just for fires. That's true. Which is an unrelated problem space. And I'd like to thank our show sponsor this week, Nordic Semiconductor. Nordic has a vast ecosystem of development tools. It helps us reduce our development cycles

and accelerate the time to market. For example, the NRF Connect for VS Code extension provides the most advanced and user-friendly IoT embedded development experience in the industry. Nordic's Developer Academy online learning platform equips developers with the know-how to build IoT products with the Nordic solutions. Nordic's DevZone brings together tech support and a community of customers to provide troubleshooting and assistance on technical topics. Visit these key websites to learn more. NordicSemi.com, academy.nordicsemi.com, and devzone.nordicsemi.com. And to thank you for

listening, Nordic Semiconductor has a contest to give away some parts. Fill out the entrance form and you're in the running. That link is in the newsletter and in the show notes. Oh, Nordic. We should, did we just play the Nordic head? Yes we did. Wow. And I actually have a little bit of extra to talk about for Nordic, because they are fantastic sponsors and we love them.

And one of the things they do as part of the sponsorship is to have giveaways. And we have three winners from the past three months of giveaways. We have Thomas Stranger, Fanonin Reynolds, and Nathan Ulf. And if you would like a giveaway, which I think is their Power Profiler kit too, it's pretty cool. I mean, it's not like it's a super expensive thing, but it sure would be fun to get one in the mail for no reason. No reason other than you gave them your name. And so please do sign up for their giveaway. It helps us because then they know that you're listening.

There'll be a link in the show notes, of course. And happy profiling. On that note, we have a newsletter which comes out sporadically, at least bi-weekly, but sometimes more often if we have something to say. Bi-weekly as in every other week, not twice a week. Very confusing. It's a dumb word. Well, it's not semi-weekly, but sometimes more often if we have something to say. Bi-weekly as in every other week, not twice a week. Very confusing. It's a dumb word. Well, it's not semi-weekly.

That would be. You know what I mean. Every 14 or so days. A fortnight. It's a fortnightly. Fortnightly. There we go. No.

Well, no, that's wrong too. It's mostly fortnightly, sometimes weekly. Anyway, we have a newsletter. It's like we do this for money. And there's stuff about the show in there. It's usually pretty short, but sometimes we'll write a little bit about it. It's like we do this, sometimes weekly. Anyway, we have a newsletter. It's like we do this for money. And there's stuff about the show in there.

It's usually pretty short, but sometimes we'll write a little post about something, a project somebody's done, something that's on our mind, something that comes up due to a show, stuff like that. Maybe an old blog post that we'd like to get more visibility on. Usually excerpts of the transcript and things to get you into the show. It's always a set of links that we and our social media people find throughout the web in the intervening period. And they're always very interesting things that are fun to look at and distracting. And often quite relevant. Yeah. We are considering adding job postings.

If you're on the newsletter now, you might see one from me. If you'd be interested in posting jobs to a list of a couple thousand embedded adjacent people, let me know. I'd like to gauge some interest before we go down that road. Initially, it'll probably be free until we see how it goes, but there might be a nominal kind of fee for it, for a month's worth of ads in the future. Anyway, just exploring that. And it's not that the job ad you posted isn't to work for us. Right. It's for a client who has another project that he's trying to fill.

So trying to help out with that. Yeah. And if there's something else you'd like to see in the newsletter, let me know. I generally am the one to put it together and I'm open to ideas for interesting new things to write in it. And we should note that the last one, which was actually kind of a personal essay and really good, was written by Chris and not me. Yes.

Sometimes the longer essays are written by me or taken from things I'm writing for other stuff. Yeah. So that was it on the newsletter. Oh, the other thing on the newsletter is we've shifted away from MailChimp because we crossed some threshold where it was going to be very expensive to continue. Where it went from free to $60 a month? I think it was actually more once I looked at it closer.

It went from free to more than we were willing to pay. Yeah, a significant amount of money a month. So we have shifted providers to our web hosting provider, Squarespace, where we do have to pay them as well. But not as much. Not as much. So if you were on the newsletter and you're not, you didn't get one this week, please resubscribe.

I had to import everything and export our subscriber list from MailChimp and import it into Squarespace and it's entirely possible I made a mistake. On the flip side, if you did get it and you don't want it, just please unsubscribe. We'll try not to do this to you again. I may have imported people who had previously unsubscribed and were marked incorrectly or something like that. So yeah. I should add a link in the show notes to the newsletter so people know where it is below

the Nordic link so that people can sign up for the Nordic thing. Uh, okay. Let's see. How about some listener questions? I would love to answer listener questions. Um, maybe the electronics destroyer wrote in. Please continue. Please continue. They have a group that builds and displays light up boards with different messages, neat individual letter boards that volunteers hold, spelling different messages around town. The website is northcountryearthaction.org slash light brigade dot html.

I'm going to put that in the show notes, but mostly it was that I got to say maybe the electronics destroyer. Also notes that they've been a listener and ran an electronics recycling company, tore apart all sorts of things. And while that company closed in 2015 tearing apart can be more fun than putting together. I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes. Sometimes. I do have plans to tear apart the Segway. I don't want to I do not want to disassemble the GPS logger any more times. Maybe the electronics destroyer also suggests we all come to the Adirondacks and visit

Lake George and Lake Placid. Someday. Okay, let's see. Is it Adirondacks or Adirondacks? Yeah. emailed about talking about fault logging, and recently gave an open source firmware conference presentation about designing for the debugability in production,

where you don't have access to a system that's faulting, and sent the video and slides, which I think were really good. So check that out. I believe Matt also works at Oxide, so I suspect some of it will be rust positive. Rust positive. That's great.

Edward emailed and asked if we have any advice for someone trying to break into embedded software professionally. Recently got an ESP32 and my plan was to essentially go through all the pre-made examples of documentation and try to learn the ins and outs of the chip. Is this a good approach? Yeah, I mean, messing around with our doing-no's before that. Break into professional. Study computer engineering. Study computer engineering. Definitely your plan with the SB32 is good. That's a decent microcontroller. Although it's a little idiosyncratic. It's probably not one that's

It's very popular, but I'm not sure how popular it is in industry. It's more hobbyish. It's a slightly hobby-ish. Although industry uses it, so it's not... Yeah, that's why I'm hedging. It's after Arduino, but maybe before STM32 anything. Yeah. So I would slightly encourage you to maybe get a discovery board

and work with that instead, just for most kind of... And that's not to say that learning ESP32 will do you any harm. It's a microcontroller. Similar principles apply. We recently got Adafruit, BlueFruits. BlueFruits, Nordic, yes. Those were really good. Those were really good. That's actually, you know what? I changed my answer to that.

Especially if you want to do any Bluetooth stuff instead of just Blinky Light or I squared C spy stuff. If you want to do anything with Bluetooth, that would be a good thing to start with. But check out Adafruit, check out Sparkfun, Hackaday, Instructables. Instructables is more random. And see what projects interest you. It's not just about what processor you're using, it's what application you're going for that will keep you engaged when you get frustrated at the processor.

And a cheap and easy way to do that part to try to explore things is go to walkway.com. Right. Where you can explore a whole bunch of different boards. I believe some different languages. Yes, yes, yes. MicroPython, C, I think he has Rust. I would have to check. I think he has Rust.

As well as a little bit of electronics because you can build boards on that. It's all simulated. It's very cool. We have shows about it you can go back and listen to. And you don't have to spend any money to do it. It's totally free. And you can do Arduino interface, but you can also do the straight C interface. You aren't stuck in any one place. That would be a good place to just kind of explore first before you make any decisions,

along with some books. I mean, there is a book in this field that I've heard of. It's called Making Embedded Systems. I did. Why? When did you do that? It seems like four lifetimes ago and yet yesterday. But definitely, yeah, I mean, the approach of doing projects, going through the pre-made examples and that stuff, I have one more suggestion if you really want to go whole hog and be attractive to companies doing a bet now, is as soon as you get through the initial hump of stuff, immediately start learning stuffer. I would have gone immediately start learning edge impulse. No, no, no.

You don't think so? If they want to, if they're into that. If you're already liking machine learning and AI, there's space for you there. That's still a niche thing. You didn't mention what you do do professionally. I guess I kind of assumed software, but I don't have any reason for that. Topics to focus on and study resources, I mean, it depends on what you're having trouble with. If you're having trouble maintaining motivation, then communities. Go on the Adafruit Discord and hang out with people who want to get do things.

Find a project you're interested in making. And maybe something that can either, that either makes you laugh or makes your life easier or helps someone else. And it's easier to maintain your motivation that way. Or a project whereby you maybe learn two things at once. Like, okay, I want to make something. I want to learn how to do signal processing or some audio thing or I want to learn how you know to make a

display out of RGB LEDs and control that That's something you can learn alongside the embedded system that needs to drive it Anyway, but there's different ways to motivate sometimes art music sometimes anchoring one thing you're interested in with something else you're interested in as a force multiplier. Um, let's see. Gabe has some nice things to say, but says, most of the time I don't do personal projects outside of work. I worry about this having an impact on my abilities as an engineer and wonder what your

opinion is on personal projects, if those are important to making a good engineer. This is going to sound weird. This is going to sound very weird. But contrary to the answer it is gave, no. I don't think so. I do no personal projects. I have never done any personal projects that are, okay, it's a little bit of a lie, but not much. Like, you know, I've done a small number of hours of personal electronic projects that aren't just like kits and stuff. Those don't count? Why wouldn't those count?

Because I'm not really learning anything, soldering up a kit. I don't think if you're already, if you've already gone through the education stuff and you're in the pipeline and you have a job, then no, I don't think you need to do personal projects. Unless you want to. But if you're trying to level up and get into something and an experience and you don't have a job to bootstrap that experience, then yes. How's that? So if you are enjoying your job and you are learning things

on your job, then focus on your job. You don't need to worry about personal projects. Yeah. If you are not learning things on your job. You don't need to worry about personal projects. Yeah. If you are not learning things on your job, then think about a personal project that would help you learn things. Yeah, yeah. If you hate your job, but you are learning things

or getting paid enough money to stick it out, then personal projects in a different area. So like when I have a lot of coding to do, that's when I tend to do writing as a personal project. When I have writing to do for work, documentation or whatever. And if I have to do that for a while because it's an FDA or FAA project,

then I tend to have coding projects, little coding projects, silly coding projects. And being a consultant, sometimes I have coding projects because I don't have paying work and my coding project is a way for me to learn things. But if you have paying work, the fear that you're going to fall behind because you don't have to do free work, no, no, don't, don't beat yourself up about that. If you like doing the coding projects at home, great, do them. But your brain only has so many oomphs to give and you don't need to spend them on trying to impress an industry when you have a job in the industry.

There's like, we don't do this to other jobs. Like you don't see people saying, you know, going up to plumbers and saying, do you like to install toilets after you come home at your house or for free? Open source toilets. Do you, do you, you know know people who work on you know? Do you design the inside of toilets for your own amusement? I mean there are jobs where there people are You know passionate about stuff and maybe chefs come home and they like to make stuff, but they're probably not running I mean running a line in their home kitchen, right?

You know, I eat noodles and eggs for most meals So we don't we don't demand that if it's fine to do it, but we don't demand that of other other lying in their home kitchen, right? I eat noodles and eggs for most meals. So we don't demand that. It's fine to do it, but we don't demand that of other professions. And I feel like there's a movement to demand that in our profession and I don't like it. If you'd rather read science fiction books or-

Play the drums for two hours. Play the drums for hours a day. It's better to be well-rounded than to be burnt out for sure. Let's see. Yen asks how we're doing mentally. Ha ha ha ha, see previous newsletter. Any changes to your strategies for preventing burnout?

Let me go on with Yen's message. Yes, I'm sorry. Sorry. For Yen, having a clear boundary has made them feel that things are more under their control, which is helpful. For instance, allocating a time block to focus on aspects I enjoy, coding, designing instead of project management, as well as consistently stopping work on time. Not saying they can pull it off every time, but it's beneficial to them. These are good strategies. Excellent strategies.

Journaling has been one of the things that has helped me. And it's weird because there are times where I'm like, we have to go to the beach, I need a sticker, which is bonkers, but effective. It actually makes to go to the beach, I need a sticker, which is bonkers, but effective. It actually makes Chris go to the beach because I need a sticker, which is silly. I need a sticker, which I already own. Anyway, but it also, like Chris's journal, has helped me to realize that I am doing things. Even though at the end of the day I never get everything done I want to, in work, in

life, in everything, I am making progress. I am doing things. Let me stop you there, because I also think you don't necessarily always need to make progress and do things. I've been thinking about that lately too. At some point, you don't have to make progress. I know the growth hacking and the growth mindset stuff seeps into everybody's life these days because it's very popular, but we don't actually need to always be doing stuff and improving things.

Sometimes it's okay to just not do anything. I don't... But then they say that you have to keep learning things or you'll get Alzheimer's or whatever. Who says that? And you'll never stop learning things. I'm just saying, there doesn't have to be an everyday, what did I do today to improve myself? Sometimes I did nothing to improve myself and that's improving myself more than, you know, going out and trying to... The best thing I did today to save the world

was to not try. Yeah. Because that means that tomorrow, I actually will have the energy and oomph to do it. To their question, the strategies are good. One of the things I find about burnout is very difficult is sometimes strategies are difficult to implement. But timeboxing is one of the easier ones. Timeboxing is easier. A little harder because we've got this loosey-goosey consulting schedule,

which I've never been very good at managing, especially when I have burnout. Yeah, timeboxing is harder to do when you don't want to start. Don't want to start or don't know when somebody is going to ask you a question or want to do something. Because the clients are kind of asynchronous. We're not in an office with them. I clocked out when I shouldn't have recently. Right, you clock out at four, I'm done. And then at five o'clock, oh, could you look at this for me?

And it's like, I can say no, but it's hard. Or yeah, so there's that stuff. I'm trying to be better about settings and boundaries. They asked what we're doing going forward. I'm cutting back on some clients. I am looking to take a bunch of time off, both in the short term, just a day or two here and there, and longer term, maybe take a longer break. But that's kind of my

plan is to put some more distance between me and the computers. It's funny because your drums are surrounded by computers. But the drum computers. Those are different. That computer cannot talk to the internet. That computer cannot run any social media. It's also the most expensive computer we have. What is it? A drum module. That?

Yeah, but it runs your electronic drums? Yeah. Okay. Yan followed up with a practical, possibly complex question. Okay. They want to make an event-driven serial communication stack that is compatible with both bare-metal and R-TOS. Strategies and suggestions for that.

The best way that they've thought of is to have an event queue function slash size be specified in the application layer so that bare metal apps push events to the com stack in a main loop and the push pop doesn't need to be ISR safe. And bare metal apps can implement the safeguards. Or RTOS apps. Oh, okay, we're still on bare metal. Bare metal has to implement safeguards where RTOSs can use the functions as wrappers

and call APIs that have the interrupt disabling and volatile variables. That sounds fine. That sounds good. I think you're slightly in danger of implementing an RTOS with some of that stuff. And at that point, the distinction is not as clear. But yeah, I mean, having it run in a loop in bare metal

or having it run in a task in the arch-house is basically equivalent to the communication mechanism and the protections for the things you're after. You're skeptical. No, Yen went on to say the problem for the approach that he described. See, I never know when you're finished. No, no, no, you were right there.

Is that it seems to make the event queue a requirement for the comp stack. And they were hoping the queue could be optional or maybe move the event-driven to have queues. No, as Chris was saying, at some point you are making an art house and your bare metal apps have to call into that hardware abstraction layer. But it is a hardware abstraction layer and message queues, event queues, they're common. Message cues, event cues, they're common.

So at some point you have to say, yes, I want a bare metal thing, but I also don't want to invent the wheel. So I am going to accept that there is an event cue and deal with it that way. Or you can hide the event queue further. It's always more abstraction you can layer onto things. Yeah. I'm mostly joking, but that's actually true.

If you don't want people to see the inner workings, then put it behind somewhere else. Oh, yeah, and also says happy holidays and happy 2025. So this one, we might be a little late on replying to this one. Well, hopefully they've solved the problem. It was an interesting question. It was an interesting problem, yeah. But there is no obvious solution.

It's always a hardware abstraction layer. And you're trying to make one that is compatible for bare metal and for RTOS, and if you want to use event functions, then you have to implement them in the bare metal. Or you have to have the hardware abstraction layer be dumber, and then the bare metal has to implement stuff on top, so does the R-Toss. Yeah. So there is no single obvious solution.

Let's see. Are we out of time? I have one more thing we could talk about but we don't have to. I'm running a little long but we can do it if you want. I think I'll keep one of them for later. I am not going to the embedded, I'm not keynoting, I'm not speaking at the embedded online conference, not because I think they're bad or anything, just I ran out of time and my presentation is not coming together.

And for my own mental health, it seems like that's not a good thing for me. We will be having one of the speakers on in a couple weeks, so getting a preview. And I'm excited about that. And I will probably be talking to a few other folks giving talks because, you know, it's nice that people are interested and with it and excited to talk to other folks. And those are the folks I want to talk to on the show. Phew.

Okay, so we did get one more. Let's see, I guess I should say that thank you and everything before we do the final bit. Okay. Thank you to JoJo the dog for being very quiet. Thank you to Nordic for sponsoring the show. And for the giveaways, don't forget to sign up. Thank you to Christopher for co-hosting and producing.

And of course, thank you for listening. You can contact us at show at embedded.fm if you'd to say hello, or you guys said a lot of weird things, why did you do that? Or would you like to have a full-time job podcasting about random things? Just let us know. So the last listener question we got, request question, So the last listener question we got, request question, was the Cookie Monster vocal metal version of Pooh's poem.

This is Lines Written by a Bear of Very Little Brain. I don't know if this is going to come out. Lines written by a bear of very little brain. On Monday when the sun is hot, I wonder to myself a lot. Now is it true or is it not? That which is which and that which is what? On Tuesday when it hails and snows, the feeling on me grows and grows that hardly anyone knows if those are those and these are those. On Monday when

the sky is blue and I have nothing else to do I sometimes wonder if it's true that who is what and what is who. On Thursday when it starts to freeze and whore-fast, twinkles on the trees and how very readily one sees but these are who's and who's are these on Friday. On Friday. On Friday that's the end. very readily one sees but these are who's and whose are these on Friday on Friday