Embedded - 50: The Podcast Formerly Known As...

Episode Date: May 7, 2014

Christopher White (@stoneymonster) and Elecia celebrate a year in podcasting by talking about the show. Then they decide whether or not to change the name of the show to Embedded (yes). Elecia's list of current and soon activities: Hackaday Prize (SPACE!!!!!) and snooping on current entries Element14 blog based on her EELive Internet of Things talk Shopping list for the are-you-ok widget first discussed on Elizabeth's episode Circuit Cellar interview Going to SOLID conference 5/21 in SF (we didn't mention this, thought I'd sneak it in) Sophi Kravitz blog Other things they mentioned include an amazing anti-tremor spoon, using trampolines to go to space, how drinking the blood of youth will keep you young, oil sensing, and our consulting episode.

Welcome to Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Elysia White. My co-host is producer Christopher White, and this is the State of the Podcast show. It's been a year. Can you believe that? It seems impossible somehow. Also seems impossible we've done what is this is 50th this will be the 50th episode yes and actually a year will be the next one we have 51 in a year because yeah but 50 is a better number all right sure the original plan was only six so you know the plan changed, apparently. It just couldn't stop.

Well, it was so fun to talk to everyone. Yeah, no, and it's, you know, once you get into the habit of doing something, it's easier to keep doing it. That's why six was a good number, because it was enough to decide, well, is this something we want to keep doing or is that enough?

So do you have a favorite episode? Let's see. Of the recent episodes, the one with Micah was pretty good. I liked that one. I liked that one because I learned a lot. I mean, I like talking to people, especially when people are excited about their jobs and stuff, but when Mike is, I actually knew information came in my head. Yeah. Um, you know, there was Jerry Ellsworth one, which was good

from the earlier episodes. There was, that was just me saying, Oh, that's cool. Cause it's, I mean, she kind of did her thing and it was awesome, but all I could do was. That's why it's nice to get good guests because then your job is done for you. Well, yeah, but yeah. And Taniya, last episode was Taniya. Yeah. It was amazing to hear somebody so passionate about what they did. And, you know, that was another one where

you could just sit back and let your guests entertain the listeners she was pretty entertaining how about you um micah definitely was on my list um and i i kind of liked amy button she was way back oh the mars the mars hopeful? Yeah, the chemist who wants to be is part of the Mars One where they ship them off forever. And I did hear that she made it to the next round. So

she's out of the public 100,000 and into the small 1 or 2,000. She gave us a little bit of credit, so that was kind of cool. That's great. One or 2,000 and then down to, how many was it to get to the final round? I think they're only sending about 20.

Yeah, and then they have to actually figure out how to send them. And then there were 40 to choose, and then there were like 100 to start testing on Earth. It was a long process. And a lot of people ask for a consulting show, but we did that at least like episode four or something. You'll have to be more specific, listeners. What do you want to know about consulting? I think they want to know how they can live the wonderful life driving the pretty car and slacking and having time to do podcasts

and talking about all of their strange and fun projects. I have no idea. Well, I mean, you spend a long time mining salt and then you find a nice work group of people and then you ask them for jobs but it's and then every every month you live with the fear that you don't have an income right yeah there's there's some downsides uh yeah we could i'd have to think about what we what we talk about there because i hesitate to give advice about those things because everybody's situation is so specific and you know our network

is specific to us and and we live in silicon valley where this is a much easier proposition because it's easier to have a big network of people right um but and we did give advice or at least we talked about what ours is just sort of that that one's called are we not lawyers because we were afraid of give you the advice. So I don't know what to tell people about consulting. What I would tell them is to ease into it if they can. That's true. I mean, I consulted for a year until I felt like I wasn't getting clients,

and then I went full-time for somebody who didn't want me to do client. Or like one of your electrical engineering friends who um had a I think he had a full-time job but he also did some contract some small work for that oil sensor company right so I mean that's that's one way to dip your foot in without without uh you know taking a huge risk of I'm gonna quit my job and then get some freelance contracts and everything will be wonderful. Yeah, the oil sensor. So I don't think we've talked about that on the show. It measured a couple of different things, but it could tell if your oil was old and what problems it might

have, whether it was just aging or if there were engine problems. And it was a neat sensor, and I think they were hoping it would be a startup and they would go full-time, but instead they kind of killed themselves after work, and now one of them is full-time and the other is still doing the day job thing. Yeah, well, I mean, that's one outcome. But let's not turn this into a consulting podcast.

Right. Okay. Who else do you want to see on the show? That's a harder question for me. I'd like to have some people back. Definitely. Anybody in particular? Well, you know, let's see. The ones where we talked to people who were doing projects and things, it's nice to have people back to say, well, how did that go? So I guess who have we had for those? I guess the Electric Imp people. Actually, they're coming back in a couple of shows.

Yeah, we're going to do a show about my little manatee project. And then a couple of weeks later, the Imp guys are going to come back and tell me all the things I did wrong. So that will be an adventure. Yeah, Matt Haynes is going to bring us an engineer to talk about electric imps. So anybody out there who has questions, maybe now's the time. Of course, I have a lot of questions, so maybe we won't get to yours.

And Jack Gansel's going to come on. I'm excited about that because he's he's kind of a hero I mean it's you know the embedded being famous in the embedded software world really kind of a small mountain but he's

he's definitely at the top of that mountain I think let's see people who could come back James Grunning I hope. Yeah. But he's been so busy doing the whole test-driven development thing.

I'd have Micah back, too. Yeah, yeah. No, there's a lot of people we could have back. And I think, you know, it's good to reconnect with people and hear what, you know, what's happened with whatever they were talking about before and how it's developed and i've invited jerry back a couple of times but i think she's just a little bit a little bit busy yes and i hate announcing um when people who are actually you know going to be on next because my my miss rate is startlingly high, especially lately. One out of ten.

It's true, but they tend to clump. Yeah. So, okay, so what else are we working on? What else are we working on? Yeah, I mean, we talk about the podcast, and I guess I mentioned the manatee, but what else are we working on? Well, you've got a bunch of stuff going on, right? I mean, not necessarily building things, but you've signed up to send people into orbit.

Well, suborbit. That's right. If your project is terrible enough, I'm sending it to space. You personally are going to catapult people into… That's what we should build, A little backyard space launcher program. Trampoline. That's what the Russians told NASA to start using to send astronauts to the ISS was a large trampoline. Really?

You didn't hear that? No. Yeah. This is even better than drinking the blood of youth will keep you young. Oh, man. That was my topic for the fourth third of the show. Anyway, yeah, yeah, no, the Russians were, you know, because we're having a major argument with them over their desire

to take over most of their former territories. But, yeah, I guess NASA said they weren't allowed to talk to them anymore, and now there's some arguments over rockets. And yeah, some higher up in the Kremlin said, well, they can just send astronauts to the ISS on a trampoline. Wow. And then Elon Musk came out and said, well, I have this rocket and it doesn't require a trampoline.

Anyway, we've managed to get off topic already. The Hackaday Prize. What is going on with that? What is the Hackaday Prize? Okay, in case you haven't heard of the Hackaday Prize, hackaday.io is one of those places where you put up instructions on building your project. And they really like open hardware and open source.

And it's kind of neat in that. I hadn't spent a lot of time looking around. But, you know, there's the here's how you hack together something to make a ball out of wood with a circular saw and a drill. I mean, that's usually something that requires a lathe. Yeah. But they give all these instructions. You build this and you build that and then you can make little wooden balls balls i don't know why you would but do with those afterward but you know they're kind of pretty you know they they put them in like pottery barn and stuff so you know

i could see doing it little heads for dolls whatever and so hackaday has stuff like that but also here's how i made my widget or here's a board I made to control motors. It's stuff like that. So it's like Instructables. It's like Instructables with a bend towards electronics. Okay. Except when you're making wooden balls. Well, there is that.

I guess that wasn't the best of examples. But there are a lot of these sites that you put up instructions. And Hackaday is owned by Supply Frame, which I think they make boards or something. You should talk to Chris Gamble. He works for them now. But Hackaday now has this prize where if you have a project and it's really cool, between now and June, you tag it with Hackaday Prize

and you may win a trip to space. What kind of a trip to space? A one-way trip to space? I hope not. Well, I don't know. I trying again you you you win a flight to space or the two hundred thousand dollars they think it will cost oh well that's different well it was maybe 194 000 but it was a significant amount i suspect they're using virgin galactic because that's the only thing that's, I think, that's announced that they're doing rides for people in the next few years. It was something like that.

So you get to ride on a little rocket ship to 62 miles and come back down. Get your astronaut pin. Which you can probably just buy at the gift shop on the way out. Aww. What? So the first stage for that is you get everything in by June, and then there's some community voting, so there's some popularity contest. And then sometime in August, I have to look through some number, 20 or 30,

and give my suggestions to the judging panel. The judging panel, I mean, the reason I agreed to do it suggestions to the judging panel. The judging panel. I mean, the reason I agreed to do it was because the judging panel is fantastic. Yeah. Just let's see. Chris Campbell's on there. No, no.

Cause he works for supply frame. So he's kind of organizing the cats, but, um, Jack Ansel and Lee more freed and, um, bunny Huang who did the EE live presentation, one of the keynotes. Okay.

Dave Jones from EEV Blog and Amp Hour. I knew it was one of them. It was one of them, yeah. But there are about a dozen, ten or a dozen, and so we're all going to get to read stuff. I don't know. It should be pretty cool. I'm excited.

You should at least be allowed to watch them be launched. Oh, I hope so. Exactly. Although it's not a rocket, so it's not quite as exciting for the watchers. You can search for what's already out there. And I said I was a little nervous about judging because I was like, well, maybe I should put my project up. Instead of being a judge, I could participate because space is cool.

Space is cool. Space is cool. But now having seen what people are putting up, it's a little intimidating. Have you seen any of them? No, and probably shouldn't. I shouldn't. You probably shouldn't gush about any of them being a judge at this point. So at least publicly,

you want me to have like judicial integrity or something? I was going to ask Chris if it was okay if I invited them on the show after they get, you know, we'll see. Well, there's a popularity contest piece. I'm happy to help people who are doing that. Yeah.

Anyway, we'll, we'll figure out what the actual rules are. Conflict of interest. You know, that's, um, yeah. Uh, so Hackaday what the actual rules are. Conflict of interest. You know, that's, yeah. So Hackaday Prize, definitely. Cool. And I mentioned Circuit Seller did an interview that got published.

Yeah, with some expert. With some embedded systems expert. So that was kind of neat. You did your eLive duties. I did my duties um i'm sorry mentally about four um yeah so at e-live i uh with jen you did the teardown thing i did a teardown of her watch and um i was mostly the straight person for that. I mean, she had all the technical knowledge and it was my job to ask questions and I do okay asking questions, but at one point she,

she, she got annoyed because she was trying to do something and I was asking dumb questions. So, oh, well, and then I did my internet of things. What Marketing Won't Tell You About the Internet of Things, which is what my talk ended up being about consumers and why they aren't being served by the Internet of Things and what we can do about making configuration easier and what questions people should ask before they really design a device to go on the Internet. That is coming to Element 14, possibly before the show airs.

What's Element 14? Element 14, that's a really good question. I like that I know a lot of, I know, Element 14 sells parts. They're not really Digi-Key, they're more of an aggregator of different things, and they sell kits, or that Riot kit that's sitting there um on my desk there that you just put your paper on it came from them and so they're they're selling things and they're trying to build content uh blogs and stuff okay related to those things.

So it's kind of like DigiKey with blogs. Here's how you use these things that we sell? Sometimes it's here how we use them. Sometimes it's just here's some of the theory around it, which is where mine falls in. I know Sophie Krantz has a blog there about quitting your day job.

And so she's talked to a couple of people about why Sophie Krantz has a blog there about quitting your day job. Okay. And so she's talked to a couple of people about why, how did you quit? What are you doing instead? She talked to Chris Gamble about multiple income streams, and I'll be on that soon too. I'm a little overexposed. I'm not quite sure everything came out at the same time. They all started at different times. Element 14 is silicon. I just got that.

So yeah, if you want to hear my talk, it will be in five a blog series starting probably this week. Cool. And you're still building your manatee project? Yeah, that's back from Elizabeth's show. The one that's called, I think, Facebook Status, Maybe Not Dead, where she had a neighbor that she worries about. And the neighbor worries that she'll wake up one day or not wake up one day and nobody will know.

And so you pet the gadget or whatever. You move the widget and it doesn't email or text your family. So if you're fine, then you do whatever you need to do to give proof of life. Yeah, okay. It is an accelerometer-based system, so you could totally put it on the refrigerator, and then you know that they're alive and eating. I'm amused by the refrigerator. Or they're trapped in the refrigerator.

I guess so. What you should do is you should put a light sensor on the inside. If the little light is on or off. Oh, you know, in the small world thing. I'll let that go. No, no, I'm headed right there, actually. Yeah. In my book, there's the question, the refrigerator question.

Right, the refrigerator question, which I had the very snarky response to. So, this is an interview question. If you're interviewing people who you don't want to have them code, but you want to really understand their creativity. It's a great question for QA people. But pretend you are verifying a refrigerator light works. and how many different ways can you come up with to verify that the light turns off when the door is closed and turns on when the door is open? And, you know, a Wi-Fi camera is kind of tough because it's the whole cage thing. And then you could drill a hole, but then you say, no, no, you shouldn't damage the refrigerator. Okay, video camera inside, and then you get it out.

And people come up with really creative and interesting answers from temperature sensors to cameras. I think my response was the statistical response. You get 1,000 refrigerators, and I don't remember where we went from there. And you open the door on 500. Right. You wait for the light to burn out, refrigerators and i don't remember where he went from there and you open the door on 500 right you wait for the light to burn out and then you open the door on the next 500 and if the light there burnt out in the same meantime between failure then it was off when their doors were closed

and that's perfectly reasonable if you just need a thousand refrigerators to check if your light works it was by far one of my favorite answers to that question. But Jen got that question in an interview years and years ago from Kevin Shaw, who was the sensor platforms guy. Oh, wow, okay. And so, I mean, we talk about the valley particularly being a small world. I didn't realize that Jen knew Kevin. Everybody knows everybody. Well, and apparently Jen knows Kevin, but Kevin didn't recognize Jen last time he saw her.

So I think he talks to a lot of people. So, yeah, but we're going to talk more about the manatee and its new life as a SparkFun tutorial. Excellent. Although that one isn't a SparkFun tutorial yet. That's just probably coming very soon. I hope. I love SparkFun.

And then continuing on the what am I doing, I've been looking for a job. What? When do you have time for that? I know. It doesn't seem like it, does it? No, we have a client who asked me to do something, and I wrote a white paper for them. It's cool, and it's been fun, but I didn't want to code more.

But it was so boring, a topic, that you had to put tiny little kittens all over the PowerPoint presentation, right? Well, you know, the project manager asked if that was about herding cats. But it wasn't. It was about that stupid expert video. It was not stupid. It was not stupid. It was a great expert video. It was full of stupid people except for one person.

How consumers respond well to cats. And so it was a very boring topic. And I did put cats on the slides. And we'll see how that goes. I hope it'll go pretty well because the cats are really funny. I don't think I could have finished the slides because I needed to be kept awake. But I think I got a job this morning, actually. Well, then that topic is at an end.

I know. I was going to totally beg for a job and say, you know, I'm good at a lot of things, not just blathering. Are you still learning stuff? Well, I learn stuff from your guests. You know, and I'm still learning a little bit about the production side, but I'm trying to get that down to kind of a turnkey thing so I don't have to do as much. It's tough when we have the quieter voice like Kevin and the really loud voice like Tania.

If it was always the same people, then that would be a little easier. But even with different guests and you being the same, you change depending on how loud somebody else is. Absolutely. How loud my headsets are and how much I giggle. Yeah. Apparently I giggle very loudly. That's what compressors are for. And you were, you had a microphone when I had Nate on the show,

which was good. Cause I think you and Nate had already talked for a couple hours and you were both kind of talked out. Are you going to have a microphone more often? I'm happy to. You've threatened to and I said yes, but you keep not setting one up. Well, I don't want to barge

into your podcast and you know, bombastically take over. You could try. You're welcome to try. No, i think that i think that would be good because you know there's oftentimes i have questions and stuff for the guest and might as well ask him instead of trying to i am them to you yeah usually you you i am them to me and i try to work them in but then that means i'm spending a little more time looking at my computer screen which is not that great yeah that's how's how I get the, oh, cool.

And you can tell that I've totally zoned out trying to figure out what I'm going to ask next. Sorry about that. I hate it when I listen back. But I have liked the way that it sounds. You played with some of the levels so that it was louder. Yeah. I like the way it sounds now. Yeah, I think we finally hit on the right formula for that.

So, yeah, no, I mean, I think the, you know, I'd like to be on mic some more. That'd be great. I think so. Along those lines, and this is skipping ahead, since we're still talking about podcast stuff, we've been thinking about changing the name. See, it's funny.

You said it's, and I did, he has an outline. He has it printed out. I don't usually let my guests actually have their own outlines. I'm special. But he's special. And he says right above Chris have Mike more often is rename the show. Oh. So you were right in the right area.

I just skipped a couple. It's like eight point font. Let's see. All right. So listeners, we are thinking about renaming the show. You know, right now it's Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. Just a little bit of a mouthful.

It certainly is very long to Twitter. We need to conserve characters. Conserve some characters. So, Embedded. That's it. Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. Yeah.

And of course we have Embedded.fm so that already matches. And while I like to advertise for my book, I figure you've all heard about it. And if you haven't, I'll keep talking about it occasionally. So, yeah. So, you think we just have to change the RSS name and it won't break? Details.

Okay, listeners. If you can't find it, it may have been because we switched the name. And this may not happen immediately. It may be't find it, it may have been because we switched the name. And this may not happen immediately. It may be a little... Or it may. I may just do it tomorrow. You may do it when we release this episode. Maybe we should do it after we release this episode so they're warned.

That's a good point. Okay. All right, so it's now going to be Embedded. All right. Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I can say that. God knows I say it a lot. You didn't ask me what I was doing, as if you know that I'm not doing anything.

You're right. I didn't ask you what you're doing. I'm not doing anything. You are. We went to Halted, and not only did we take those hilarious pictures of things that look like they should be on J.J. Abrams shows, and hold red liquid of some sort, but you got some kits. No, it's just a little radio kit, yeah, just to get back into soldering a little bit. Did you use the microscope? I didn't need to.

This is all mostly through-hole parts. There's nothing else. No SMT. I used the microscope the last time I just had to solder headers on and they sure came out much prettier

once I could see what I was doing. Unless you actually have real vision, so maybe being able to see it in the first place helps. Having 2015 vision

is a little bit better than whatever you're saddled with. Yeah, it's just a little radio. And I had hoped to learn more about the electronics behind the radio, but it's more of a paint-by-numbers sort of thing. So I'm going to try to figure out some other ways to get back into electronics. You've got some of the Mooms books for Christmas. Yeah, yeah. And those are great, but they're kind of, they're not as instructive.

They're more, here's a block. You need a thing that does this. Here's the schematic for it. Yeah. But then the art of electronics. It's too academic. I'm looking around. I put some books on my birthday wish list.

Oh, excellent. But I've been thinking about various projects and I kind of want to learn, which is completely different, kind of interested in FPGAs and programmable logic just from a curiosity standpoint. So, so I'm trying to figure out what to do there and how best to learn that. That's a hard one because the books, the books that I've seen so far are all extremely academic and there's, there's not really a Verilog for casual hobbyists that I've really dug up. Um, so.

HDL for dilettantes. Right. But I did, Philip, no, Patrick Kane, the Cyprus guy who goes to universities and hands out kits. He left us a kit.

And that had a processor which was why I was excited about it and a little PLD I think it had more than one little PLD it was part of their whole system on a chip thing that you get quite a few PLD kits

I'm not sure if that's I'm not sure how much you can actually do with that it might be a good place to start with because it's simple. And I don't even, you know, part of my problem is I need a project before I'll learn something. Yeah, it's hard to say. I always think, I'm going to go learn this and I'll get a book and I'll read it. And I did this when I was a kid, you know, when I was learning programming as a kid. It's like, oh, I know Pascal because I had to do it for a class or something.

I should learn C because C is what everybody's using, right? So I'd get a book on C, and I'd read it, and be amazed at the end of reading this book on C that I couldn't program in C. And you need to actually use these things. So I'm trying to come up with some driving project, and I'm a little bit inspired by some medical projects I've seen. I don't know if you've seen this. This is the Parkinson, this is the,

the Parkinson's or the, uh, well, any, any tremor. Uh, it's a spoon for people who have tremors in their hands. Uh,

it's from a place called lift labs. Have you seen this? Uh, no. So it's, uh, it's really cool. So people who have,

uh, a tremor in their hands, you know, they have difficulty eating because they can't stabilize the spoon enough to get food to their mouth without, you know, going all over the place. And what this is, is it looks kind of like an electric toothbrush. So it's got kind of a big round handle and then the spoon comes out, the normal spoon size comes out the end of it. But it's got sensors and motion compensating motors in it. So it can tell how your hand is, uh, is shaking and it'll cancel it out at the spoon side. So it, I don't really know. They

have some videos on their website. Uh, I was going to take a closer look. Uh, it's actually incredible because right on their website, they have, they have just a loop of a guy eating with a regular spoon and with this. And, you know, it still shakes a little bit, but it's totally a usable proposition. And with the other spoon, he can't even get the food an inch off the plate. But yeah, so it just cancels out all that shaking and allows you to use it. Did we get to do that with a soldering iron? Sorry. No, it's all about me.

No. Okay, sorry. That is really cool. So it's really cool. And it sort of led me to think what other, you know, we've got all this technology. We've got all this kind of cheap technology now that used to be, even just a few years ago, was unthinkably expensive with sensors and accelerometers and, you know, even the processors having enough CPU power to do, you know, do kind of physics computations and things and that kind of thing. So, you know, what other afflictions are there that are physical things that could be overcome with, you know, the equivalent of an iPhone's worth of accelerometers and some electric motors and some algorithms? You know, because we're spending a lot of time making devices for fit people. Not another sports watch.

Well, people are making sports watches. They're making, everybody's got a fitness band. You know, there's all this news about Apple coming out with something or other. And there are a lot of stuff directed toward healthy people tracking themselves getting even healthier. Right? I mean, some of it's directed towards overweight people. Well, okay.

I'm overstating the case a bit. But, you know, some of the things are actually directed towards triathletes, you know. Yeah, I certainly can't deny that. And, you know, so I'm blathering here, but... No, no, this is kind of cool. I'm trying to think of other applications in this space that are similar to this device that could really help people for, you know,

a few hundred dollars worth of technology. So, just kind of running that around the back of my brain. Maybe we should get Hackaday to do that for the next one. Kind of an X prize for disabilities. For making people's lives easier. I think of your manatee gadget along these same lines. You're taking strange technology almost. If you think about it, an accelerometer and a Wi-Fi thing, and you're combining them in a way to give somebody reassurance.

Yeah. And so that's really cool. And I think I just have this feeling that there's a bunch of unaddressed things that people could be looking at, but they're not looking at because they're not sexy or trendy or something. So that's my little. Well, I think some of that is the Internet of Things. When people talk about the Internet of Things, it's that sort of things, even when it doesn't have any actual connectivity. Okay. Yeah.

I think people shouldn't be doing that but i think that's probably true but you know it just as a ludicrous example there's i think i saw in home depot a few weeks back uh speaking of internet of things it was an egg tray you didn't see the Wi-Fi connected egg tray. And supposedly it tells you if your eggs are bad. Look, eggs don't go bad. If you haven't eaten the eggs by the time they go bad, you probably don't own your house anymore. You've left or something. I mean, eggs take weeks to go.

This is not something that needs solving with the internet. Well, you didn't see the piggy bank that was next to it? These are the quirky line of projects. Okay, the piggy bank at least I can kind of see because it'll tell you how much is in it and that might be fun for a kid. No, the best thing about piggy banks was learning how to count money.

Well, here's the thing about the egg thing. It's in a refrigerator, which is a pretty good Faraday cage. So it only works when you open the door, right? Oh, so you can't even like query your egg status from the grocery store. Anyway, my point is... Your point is that electronics are being used for stupid stuff.

Maybe we should use a culmination, some portion of the culmination of thousands of years of hard work and development of science in a direction that might improve some lives. That spoon sounds really cool. So, okay, I agree. Let me know when you come up with a brilliant idea. We'll have a startup.

It'll be great. Here's their tagline. Liftware cancels tremor to bring the joy back to mealtime. I wish there was a way for joy to come back to mealtime for me, but I just don't like food, so. Yeah, Christopher's stomach hates him. That's his affliction. Maybe I could swallow one of these spoons and it would stabilize my stomach. Okay. No, no. Okay. No. So that's what I'm thinking about. I think that's cool. It's a good path, but it's...

Well, I don't want to go down, you know, there's all sorts of things you can think about that, you know, solving vision problems and all kinds of stuff where you get really excited about it, but those are hard problems. I don't necessarily want to solve a really hard problem. I mean, it's always hard to develop something, but you don't want to be breaking new ground

in physics and stuff. I kind of want to take what's out there and say, okay, how can this be applied to this problem by piecing these things together in a clever way? Yeah. You have an accelerometer, maybe three. You have some gyroscopes. You have a couple of motors. You have an LED. You can three. You have some gyroscopes. You have a couple of motors.

You have an LED. You can go off and build something. Yeah. There's an amazing amount that can be done with that. And I don't think we've reached the end. I don't think we've reached the beginning. True. And then there was the, did you see the SparkFun?

You can push a random on spark fun and get a random product what yeah there's a there's and it's hard to find i'm not sure how i managed it the first time but you you find the little button that says show me a random product project or product so it is hard to find because uh if you google for it you get the following things random number generating geiger counter oh nice then that's that's that's the that's a spark fun product random pickup line generator wow lovely i'm not quite sure what so the first one i got was a little ZigBee transmitter. And I'm like, okay, so if I start with this at the base of my project, what else should I do with it?

It was fun as an idea generator. That's a cool idea. Just here's what you have. What can you make from it? Yeah. All right. Well, that's what I'm doing. And then I've got my usual contract switcher which we don't really talk about indefinite indefinite long-term

fun well lucrative sometimes fun yeah i'm i with my job hunt taking longer than i expected. It took you a whole, what, week? Was there ever a week where you weren't actually pulling an income? No. During all the stress about quote, not having a job, I think you pulled in close to or about the same amount of money that I did

when I actually have two long-term contracts. I'm not quite sure what you were worried about. I'm worried about the things I'm always worried about. So how about listener requests? They don't get to have requests. Okay, well, some of them talked back to us. It's different.

It's been like six months since we said hello to everyone. One of the strangest things at EE Live was meeting people who listen to the show. Live was meeting people who listen to the show not only meeting people who listen to the show but having people recognize you from a radio show yes, hi Clark I'm still a little embarrassed that I kind of

was really unnerved by that but you were the first and it was pretty cool and it was nice to have people say hello and it's nice when have people say hello. And it's nice when they send emails. Andre from the Great White North and Stuart are my regular email buddies. I know that if I have a crappy show,

at least one of them will tell me that I didn't do a good job. But usually they're nice. It's always good to get good private constructive criticism. Exactly. Private constructive criticism. Exactly. Private constructive criticism. But no, usually they're very positive. Yeah. And let's see. I do have a list of people who have taken the time to say good job.

Oh, is this like Ropper Room? It is like Ropper Room. Sorry. There was John and Steve Dalton. There was one from Batman, but I suspect that was spam or from you. There was Uniclocker and Chris Speck, who also wrote a nice review for me for my book. Chris B., Luke, Jeff, John Burt, and Clark, which was the same guy who said hello at EE Live, but I didn't connect them then. Not until later.

I'm totally dating myself with that romper room thing. I knew what you meant. I guess we're dating each other, which is good because we're married. Some people wrote with more in-depth stuff. I've already mentioned Casey, who worked on my motor board and got that all done, and now I've soldered

it all together. What's going on with that? See, it's a project that we didn't even list in your projects. Because it's kind of on hold. That was for the shirt. It was a posture shirt. Which goes along the lines of what I was just talking about. The idea was you put accelerometers and little motors, vibration motors,

coin cell sized vibration motors that come from cell phones. All over your back. In a T format. Yeah. So there were only five spots. And if your shoulders hunched or you hunched, it noticed that you were out of good position and it would vibrate that part.

Unfortunately, I started working on the manatee and I have co-conspirators on that one. And so I have to- You need to merge the two projects. You need to put a manatee on your back. Well, it may not be a manatee. Elizabeth got bored with manatees. I'm hoping with narwhal is next.

Narwhal. And then part of that, actually, Philip Frieden asked me to come over and look at his lab before we got the microscope. Because he got the microscope I was looking at. But I didn't actually make it over to his lab until after we had one, and I didn't mean to make him teach me how to solder SMT parts, but I'd just gotten the boards in.

And so he did, and that was so nice. Let's see. Frank is a lawyer type, and we've been talking about legal stuff, which isn't exactly relevant to the show, but I've been talking about legal stuff, which isn't exactly relevant to the show, but I've been slacking about responding, so I figured I should say hello on air. And Berko corrected me about DO-178 levels,

not being about the size of a plane. On Allison's show... Yeah, I remember that. We talked about, I said DO-178B, and how that's for for not big planes but not tiny planes yeah and it that the faa standards are more about the importance of the project okay like so the the chairs don't have to be a geo a178B, even in big jets. But the Artificial Horizon, which is the only thing I've worked on,

really does have to be qualified pretty heavily. And finally, recently, I mentioned Werner Winge on the air, and Luke said that Peace War was one of his really good books. I had read a couple of his, but not Peace War. So I got it and read it and liked it. And I don't tend to be completist on Vinge because he does have some that are really, really out there. I haven't read any of his stuff. It's neat. It's kind of like you said with the accelerometer and the spoon you it made you think of other things you wanted to do yeah a lot of the vinge uh with the peace war and the into the deep fire upon the deep fire upon the deep yeah they have such mind-boggling

concepts that you're like if that if any part of this is true, then this other part may be true and you can fill in your own story or fill in your own ideas and then that leads to product ideas to me. So I tend to read just one at a time and he's in the weird spot of authors that modern authors, their books go on sale because they're pushing, you know, put the first book in a series on sale and then people will buy the other ones.

And then there's the really old authors, the copyright free material. Oh, sure. And that's free or cheap. Yeah. Oh, sure. And that's free or cheap. Cheap, yeah. But Vinge's, his books are all expensive because he falls in that range of, his publishers still hold his copyright, but he doesn't push to get it put into the new electronic formats, and it tends to be pretty expensive. Dick Francis is in that, too.

I wish his would be cheaper. Well, he does have 4,000 books too. Yeah. And at 10 bucks a pop, that's a, Hmm. Well, I'll have to look at,

look at his stuff. Cause I like, I like a lot of that speculative super future hard sci-fi. And it's kind of a hole in my reading. When I was looking around at the Vinge on Amazon, they recommended Hyperion and I know you liked that one. Yeah. I suspect they're quite different. Yes, but there may be some thematic similarities.

And the far future stuff is... Anyway, yes, books. I love books. Our credit card bill attests to that. I go to the library sometimes. Not as often as I should. Yeah. Right. Some people buy electronics. Some people buy gadgets. Some people buy fire alarms, smoke sensors from companies that are just silly. I buy books. I don't think that's entirely fair No, because I buy gadgets too Let's see

We have some future show requests Unfortunately none of these Well some of them might None of what? Well we could talk about working on medical device Devices in the horror stories And maybe give advice to people considering going into medical.

Good show. Yeah. Done enough of that. Um, Garrett suggested that, but he might've been suggesting we have him on the show. And if you're emailing me and you want to be on the show, you have to be really obvious about it.

I'm, I'm actually, you recently came up and said that you finally finally understand me i am completely oblivious to everything that is outside my current like focus um so yeah we should we should do a medical show medical show would be good both of us have worked on some and we can probably scare up some other people. And then we should do another on consulting, just because that one we did was one of our early shows, and we should maybe have an annual one.

Revisit it. Maybe we changed our answers. We should listen to it first to make sure we don't contradict ourselves, or that if we do, we have a good story for why we're doing it. That's true. There was a quest for one on vision, embedded systems and vision. We'd need to find somebody who knows something about that.

I went to two different sessions at EE Live trying to find someone. Yeah. And I didn't. It's a hard problem and some of it's solved with off-the-shelf stuff for some problems. Yeah, I want to know more than just, okay, so you buy a camera that has some facial recognition software.

Or you grab OpenCV and threshold and segment and you're done or whatever. Yeah. No, actually I've got some people who might be willing to talk to us, so remind me about that. The fact that it's printed on a page in front of you doesn't help you? Help me what? Remind you? I'm not going to have this page in front of me all the time. All right, I'll put a star.

And you want me to tape this to my forehead and live my life that way? That would be kind of limiting. Hilarious. Okay, well, I'm actually mentioning these in case somebody out there wants. Yeah, I know. And if people are interested in any of these topics or know about them... Mostly if you know somebody who works in this field who might be willing to talk to me. Yeah, hit us up.

Electric vehicles. I did contact the few people I know at Tesla, all of whom laughed at me and said, yeah, go through our PR department. Yeah, I think they're probably like Apple in terms of how much they're willing to talk. So we'll have to find somebody who got fired from there. Oh, that's a good idea. Or quit. Since we did the show with Allison,

some people were interested in automotive modifications. I could see how that'd be interesting, but I'm scared to do it myself. Maybe we'll find somebody who does it. These days, yeah, it's, well, you know. I mean, I guess the Prius is out of warranty already. What are you going to do to a Prius? I don't know. Hot does it. These days, yeah, it's, well, you know. I mean, I guess the Prius is out of warranty already. What are you going to do to a Prius? I don't know.

Hot rod it. Put some nitrous in there. It's going to be really hybrid. One cylinder, one liter engine boosted up to 80 horsepower and goes zero to 60 in 13 seconds. Instead of the 14 it's got now. Right. Replace its exhaust.

So it's got some real, you know. I'm going to take off the muffler. So, you know, it sounds really. Automotive modding. Yeah.

If you people want to hear about that, you're going to have to find somebody to talk to us. Or wait till Allison comes back from Europe. Yeah. And then SBIR grants. Those are the, those are the grants you can get from the government. Yeah, we can roll that into the consulting show, maybe.

No, actually, I do have a friend who knows. Allison actually used to read the SBIR grant applications. Oh, okay. But since she's on a different continent, that's not going to help me. But we may have a show about that soon. I should put a star in mine me to ask the person I know about that. But I also want to do more science and tech. You know, since some of the shows we've liked the best have been really digging into stuff.

Yeah, no, I agree. They're a little harder to plan. But, yeah, we could branch outside. Now that we're changing the name to Embedded, we should feel free to not have Embedded topics. Absolutely. Embedded in what? That's right. That actually is more general.

We can have a show entirely about insects and amber. Yes. We can have a show about fonts, because when you embed fonts and things well that's it for today guys oh i have more listener stuff um let's see i would you get several in-depth questions regarding calvin filters from tony and kevin's shows um you guys really do like those calvin filters. I like that. Maybe it's just one person. No, there are a couple.

Two Kalman filter fanatics. I think it's because it's one of those algorithms you hear about. Yeah. Nobody ever explains them. Bayesian statistics and stuff. It's all really useful. Bayesian statistics is really useful. It's really neat too. I'm not, it's really neat too.

I'm not disagreeing with you. All right. I'm I'll get off. My little machine learning classification is awesome. So that was right in front of the machine learning show. Oh yeah. I'll note. Um, I met Andrew and the professor at Stanford who has that fantastic machine learning class.

Oh, right. He came over to ShotSpotter and had a demo. I wonder if he'd be on the show. That'd be great. We'll put a little star next to that one, too. Yeah, I'm getting a lot of stars on the sheet. You're planning out the next year of shows. Exactly.

We got some notes from Nate, and I hope he got back to them. And he didn't respond to my email. So I may have to call. Yeah. If you haven't heard from Nate, it's not just you, but overall the podcast has been very positive. I think so. I think so.

Yeah. I mean, we've had some learning experiences. To make that list. I went through six months worth of submissions to the show since the last time we did one of these podcast update shows and it was really nice

it was sort of the thing you should do when you're not feeling so good about yourself I mean it was I didn't know that it would combat imposter syndrome because I'm pretty sure I've got you all snowed but it was...

It's meta imposter syndrome. It's when you have positive feedback coming in and you know they're all morons. I just said I was faking it well. Wouldn't want to be part of any club that would have me. Exactly. But it was, I don't know. I mean, usually I handle the non-technical issue ones but you should do that sometime it was really quite nice

okay so now questions questions from twitter oh my god actually questions from jim gf who was the poor guy who asked about how to tell if you're a good embedded systems engineer and we totally went off on imposter syndrome, didn't answer his question at all. But he asked another question. The short answer is, are you in jail or have you been sued? And if those are no, then you're probably an okay engineer. No? I don't think so.

Because I knew a guy who was in jail who was actually really good. Oh, okay. Well, there goes that. Let's see. Jim GF asks, do you see object-oriented concepts being used more and more in embedded designs along with C++? Definitely. I do, definitely. Yeah. But not necessarily along with C++. I'm still doing most of my embedded work in C, which he says he is.

And I do have design patterns in my book. Do you think that's mostly because of resources? Would you use C++ if we could use C++? No, no, I think it's... I've used C for the last 10 years. I don't see why I need to use your stupid little plus plus language. Okay, that's a very... That's not true.

I mean, that was just a, maybe there was a hint of that. I use C++. I like C++. I don't see a lot of benefit in it for object orientedoriented except for UI design. Oh, I disagree. I disagree. I think there's a lot of language benefits that come with C++ that...

Yeah, like virtual functions. Well... Slow monsters. Come on. It's 2014. I mean, if you're going to have an abstraction layer anyway, which you're supposed to when you're developing stuff, you're already doing that.

There is often an abstraction layer that all it does is call another function. Now, the thing I like about C++ is it allows you to do, it both forces you to do certain structural things to your code, and it allows you to do um some some other organizational things that c is either rather difficult and you have to kind of roll your own or you mean like impossible well variables and functions into classes yeah that and then you know inheritance is really powerful especially if you're making a stack of some kind with lots of different pieces of hardware. That's why I said UIs, because often widgets are children from other widgets. Yeah, UI is a perfect example, but I don't think it's the only place where it's applicable.

I mean, I've done big systems in C++, which anybody except possibly you would consider an embedded system and you know with um data acquisition hardware and uh motion control and all kinds of things and it's much it's much easier to develop drivers when you can build sort of generic types that you sort of piece piece more specific things on top of so if you've got let's say you've got hardware that might take two or three different kinds of data acquisition boards. Well, if you do it the straight C way, you're tempted to write a driver for each one, and they're going to be a little different, and maybe they have different interfaces because you're lazy. If you do it right in C++, you can have this whole class that looks the same, no matter how you instantiate it,

but underneath, only the specific things that talk to that specific different hardware need to be different. And you can reuse that code over and over and over again. And it's helpful for testing, too, because you can take that underlying piece that you're making specific for specific hardware and turn it into a simulator, and all your code still works, but now you're just talking to a simulator. I don't know. Yes, you can do all those things in C. I find it easier to think about them in C++. Because it does group things and then the inheritance part actually becomes...

Well, it's part of the language. With C, everything is, you know, okay, I have to stand on my head with function pointers and how do I modularize this in such a way? You know, there's no concept of public and private unless you're kind of doing it yourself with header files. That's what static's for. Right, but it's easier to make a gigantic mess that way than it is with C++. I think since I recently dealt with a system

that was very large in C++ and very badly written. I'm going to preempt you by saying it's perfectly easy to write crappy C++. I think it's perfectly easy to write any sort of crappy code. Yeah. And one of the reasons I tend to stay with C if people don't care is because I know that my C code is idiomatically good and correct. And it's relatively clean from a modularity perspective. And I do care about public versus private and getters and setters. And if I have global variables, they are very well protected and all that.

But then C++ does have some advantages with that. And if you... It depends on your project, too. I mean, if you have something where, you know, you're building a platform, you might be building multiple products based on this code base. You know, I have one client where they have multiple products,

and I think they've been struggling to try to consolidate code bases, and it's all a bunch of C stuff, and I don't think they can really do it, because there's no... This is an architectural problem more than a language problem, but at least you've got the language kind of encouraging you along and saying, you can do this, and here's all you have to do instead of, oh, I have to figure out how I'm going to componentize these things

and see and separate things. Do I use function pointers here and there explicitly or tables of function? It's just a lot of work. Sometimes you just want to make the thing you're making instead of dig the ditch you know that that's required to pour the foundation and stuff and and you know somebody else can do that for you and i think i think there's been a lot of work done in languages even more recently than c++ that you know i want to build the thing I'm building. I don't care about details of the language and being a super genius. I said idiomatic regarding language a few minutes ago because I've been playing with Python a lot.

Yeah, yeah, well, that's a perfect example. And I am amazed that in Python, whatever you want to do, whatever you want to do, you just type it into Google and it tells you how to do it. You go over to Stack Overflow, somebody's already solved this problem. But reading through some of the Stack Overflow responses, there was one where it was all, you know, they took the hard way to do it and then they asked Stack Overflow if there was an easier way. And somebody did it in like a line

that was completely impenetrable to me. Yeah, well that's the problem with... You should learn some Python idioms and I was just like, dude, you just lost a lot of friends there. That's the problem with expressive languages is you can probably do your entire project in one word if you can just

figure out what that word is. It's like Perl. I mean, Perl is hard to read, but you can do powerful things in a very short amount of code. And I've liked using Python, and it shares a lot with Perl. It does make me miss C++ more, because it is somewhat object-oriented, but it's worse than C to me, but it's probably because I'm using it badly. Well, I'm

a newbie at Python. I'm using it because the interfaces in libraries were more extensive than trying to do it in Visual Studio. Yeah. I'm learning. It's fine. It's good. So, as far as object-oriented goes,

I am a big fan of doing that, whether you're in C++ or C. And to me, it's about making modules and limiting the contact between them. Yeah. And thinking about objects, as physical objects as much as you can

if you want to make a accelerometer thing you want to talk to your accelerometer think about it as an object and what interfaces it needs and don't just let your Kalman filter reach in

and get the global variable that's not how you would treat an accelerometer. No, it's just good architecture. Yeah. Having abstraction layers and modules. And as for design patterns, I think that's just trying to learn from other people's mistakes.

Yeah. Or learn by, you know, it's another word for best practices, which I have mixed feelings about. The concept of best practices because yeah well it's just you know

it comes up in a lot of development stuff or a lot of fields where it's like oh this is what you do to do this this is you know these are the kinds of things that people do over and over and over again and I think that's limiting

but design patterns are more specific than that usually. I'm lost. I've lost you. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking about design patterns. Yes, but best practices. Give me an example.

Of best practices? Now I'm on the spot. Yeah, yeah, come on. Come on. Come on. What were you going to say about it? I know. It was so mean. I'm just mean.

That's just the way I am. I'm sorry. No, it comes up in all kinds of fields. Like in marketing, best practice, you know, do, you know, engage your customers in this way. And if you have a campaign that's directed toward these people, and you do these five things, and it all magically works. And that I've seen that in coding too. Oh, best practices when using, when setting up a SQL

database, you know, blah, blah, blah, X, Y, and Z. And it's just all these formulaic things that by saying they're best practices. You're saying, do it my way. You're kind of saying, do it my way. And, you know, that's fine. It's just, I'd rather have it be, here's a way. What's a recipe? Here's a common way. And I think that design patterns have...

This is why I'm... Okay. Where I was headed was I think design patterns have often become best practices. And this is, okay, this pattern is what you use for this. Don't think about it too much. Just put this thing in your code and

turn the crank. Okay. So, to me these are like, you are against specific recipes without having a recipe book that gives you three or four different examples of how you might cook this. I'm not against them.

Yeah, I'm against things becoming entrenched. That's the only way to make beef bourguignon. Yeah, and I think this happens on the web side of things more than the embedded side. And I'll probably get a lot of flack for that. I don't know. It's hard to say, you know, this is the only way to make a driver. Because, I mean, even if you want to say this is the only way to make an I2C driver, you're still dependent on the processor and the timing and the actual needs and how you're doing. There's just, sure, I can say that your driver should have an open

or start or config function that is run at initialization, but you're still going to have to work out send and get. They're starting places, right? Design patterns are common things that happen, and here's common ways to start solving them. But there's always specifics. The C++, the original design patterns, is a little separate from what we're talking about. But even that is like, okay, here's a factory, here's this, here's these concepts that people have been doing for a long time under different names.

And now here's, here's a complicated name for it. And we're going to embed it in some languages. And I don't know. I have mixed feelings about those sorts of things because I do think they produce a false sense of confidence sometimes and code that works but maybe could be better if it was more finely tuned to its application.

And sometimes you end up with this toolbox from the design patterns and you have a hammer and a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. But what you really, really needed in order to solve this problem was to build a tool yourself. And it isn't a hammer or pliers or screwdriver. It's the thing that they didn't tell you about and that now you can't recognize because all you can do is hold your hammer and wonder how to solve this problem with that. Because that's all you have.

And that, you know, I'm going to contradict myself on the language issue because, you know, I like languages providing services for you. Like, it's great to have container classes, right, that have lists and dictionaries and things because you don't have to think about it. But if you don't understand how those things work, if you've never built one from scratch on your own, if something goes wrong with those container classes or with your use of them, let's say, because they're probably, you know, internally consistent, you're not going to understand necessarily how to unwind that because you don't know how it works. I think that goes back to you have to keep looking around and saying what's new and learning and thinking about things. And not accepting people's prepackaged things. Read about them, learn about them but don't just take it say well this must work yeah and stick it in there and then be confused

when your code doesn't work not everything's in now uh so moving along to questions i have an easy one from stewart when is a cheap logic analyzer worth getting as part of your toolkit? Are you doing any spy or I2C stuff? Making any project that has bus communication to a small device?

Then I would just get one. Since they cost $150 now, it's... I have been... If you spent more than one or two hours debugging something without one, it's time to get one because you would have solved whatever problem

you spent one or two hours on in a few minutes. I mean, when they were $10,000 machines, then that wasn't true. But now that they're... I mean, CVA is just awesome. And their oscilloscope is, I so need one. No, you don't. The whole need one. No, you don't.

I need one right now. What are you going to oscilloscope eyes? Oh, well, I brought home that new hardware from the client, so. You'll get the client to buy one. Oh. What? Oh, well, I invited them back to the show, too. But really, I was hoping it was because they would bring me an oscilloscope to, quote, try.

Yeah, I would just, if you're doing anything with logic buses, serial. And they're not big anymore. I mean, my problem with my logic analyzer is I can't find it half the time. Yeah, I think, when is a cheap logic analyzer worth getting? I think the answer was 2012. Yeah. Now. Now. Now.

And last one is unsolved household problems and creative solutions. Oh, that's from Al. Sounds like what I was just thinking about sort of, except that's a whole show. Yeah. I mean, most of my unsolved household problems revolve around making things better, making things easier to use,

making things more intuitive, less stupid 802.11 configuration that everybody messes up, including me. It's not unmessable. It's inherent in the security model. It is, it is. But yeah, I'm not sure I have much more on that. We'll rattle that one around that we'll rattle that one around

I think I'm about talked out do you have anything else? no I don't think so I think that's pretty good yeah we can wrap it up there is there anything else that we want listeners to give us immediate feedback on? We got the name change. We need an icon.

Oh, we do need an icon. Hmm. If I had a dev kit to give away, we could try to barter that. It's not like these dev kits are doing anything here. Ah, maybe that's... They're forming a very disorganized museum. None of these are old either. Give it time.

Yeah. So, okay, so I wasn't going to ask listeners to make an icon. No. But if you have people you know, especially people you actually know... I'm sorry. The light came on. But if you have people you know, especially people you actually know. Sorry.

The light came on. The manatee has, my proof of life has been established for the day by whacking on my desk. So, yeah, if you know somebody who might be a good person on the show. Let us know. Let us know. I have a little like pre thing that I can send you to send to them that says, here's the show, you should be on it. And if they hate the idea of me being on the mic more, they're just going to have to deal with that.

You say that, and I do want you on the mic more. But you didn't set up the last two times. That seemed like you had it well in hand. Yeah. What would I have said last time? I think you could have said geoanthropatrous with me until I got it right. I had to write it down before I could figure out how to say it. Sound it out.

Exactly. All right, then. My co-host has been Christopher White, my producer, business partner, favorite embedded software engineer, and husband. They're not usually in that order. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me.

You should be on more, not just when guests bail. That's not what happened this time. No, this time I bailed on them. Oops. It's the end listeners. Thank you for listening as always. And I do enjoy getting the notes. It's wonderful.

If you have comments, questions, suggestions, and or compliments, go to embedded.fm and hit the contact link. If I don't respond, know that I do read them and I do appreciate them. And if it really needed a response, well, wait a week and try again. Sometimes when I'm not fully loaded with contracts is when I seem to get the busiest. And the final thought this week is only

happy birthday podcast. And podcast, I hope you follow the German tradition and bring cupcakes yourself next week. It's my birthday too. Almost. Are you going to bring your own cupcakes? No. You want me to bake a cake?

What? What?