Embedded - 73: That's a Waste of Bits

Episode Date: October 22, 2014

Christopher and Elecia look through listener email, check in on what past guests are up to, and consider the best and worst of science in recent fiction.  Hackaday Prize Finalists (and the 50 Semiinalists) Saleae Logic Pro 16 (related: Drive the Boat with a Wii Mote) Darma Kickstarter (related: Resonant Frequency of My Butt) Peep sign up to be notified of their Kickstarter (related: Vision for Simple Minds) EMSL Halloween round up and open house on Nov 13 (related: Mwahahaha Session) Silicon Chef Hackathon results (related: Dancing with Hundreds of Women) Pan-CJK fonts (related: The Tofu Problem) The Martian (Amazon) (There is a tiny spoiler, one Elecia doesn't think merits the warning but Christopher says to skip 55:00 to 01:02:55 if you want to read the book cold.) Don's I Snooze Remote

I'm Elysia White and you are listening to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. It's just me and Christopher White today, chatting with each other, as you do when you're in front of microphones. Often. Sometimes. I don't know. How often am I in front of a microphone? Every week.

Oh. This is episode 73. 73. It's been more than a year. That's a lot of things. So, my outline here. Yes. It says, shortest podcast ever.

I doubt that'll be true. You thought we had things to cover. I think we have things to cover. What are they? Well, you just wrapped up doing some judging for some sort of thing involving embedded development of hacked devices for use in space. Not exactly. I'm paraphrasing my own thoughts. Yeah, I did. I wrapped up judging for the Hackaday Prize, which was the winning entry gets a trip to space or the $200,000-ish that they think it will cost. Can you specify which space?

Inner space. No, outer space. But not far outer space. Low Earth orbit, I bet. And I generally agreed with the five that were up there, that won. So which five were they? Let's see, there was Ramen Pie, whose video, that was the hilarious one. That's a spectrometer, right? That I showed you, yeah.

And he must have recorded the video at normal speed and then sped it up at 2x so that he would fit in five minutes. It was awesome. It was really great. It was a lot like listening to an auctioneer talk about optical physics. That was a Raspberry Pi spectrometer. And I love spectrometers because I always want to know what things are made out of So that was pretty cool

There was the chip whisperer Which I found terrifying It was a way to Hack your chips To look at To decode the AES key Based on Power consumption

Power analysis That was amazing and terrifying yes i think that was the right word terrifying um the portable sdr the software-defined radio uh which i didn't i mean this wasn't my top five or six but i i worried that i didn't understand it well enough because sdr the software-defined radio, has been around forever. I mean, they've been trying to solve that problem. And this was a very hackable, very open-source solution. I'm like, I remember five years ago,

the military desperately wanted those. And, you know, this isn't done. I think you're thinking further back. I guess it was pre-Shotspotter days. So, yeah, that was like 2004 like 2004 yeah which is 10 years ago oh my god no yes and they used sdr all over for the ic probe that was how right so it's it's come along well there was another one that was in the top five the sat nogs um which is the nogs that's global network of ground station so it was satellite ground stations and

they were telling people how to build ground stations so that they could build networks and if you were doing icy it would be so much easier to be able to talk to a satellite or listen from a satellite really uh if you had stations all over the world you could access. Even if they weren't all high quality, it's an averaging, sampling sort of problem, so you might be able to get something you couldn't get otherwise. That was pretty cool. It took me a while to understand that one

because they didn't frame the problem. I didn't know what they were trying to solve. Yeah, okay. a while to understand that one because they didn't frame the problem i didn't know what they were trying to solve yeah okay uh and then because they're probably trying to solve a broad general problem which is both easy and difficult to state in a way that this whiz bang no because they made their um video for like a nasa contest and so they didn't actually say here's here's the problem we're trying to solve, and here's how we're solving it. Instead, they just launched into space, satellites, NOGs, ground stations, blah, and so I was like,

why would you use this? I didn't have that problem with the open source science tricorder, which was an Arduino-based sensor platform with a cute little screen that was used for educational purposes. I liked that. The engineer in me kind of cringed because nothing was calibrated.

But the science teacher in me that wants everybody to be able to have a gadget and look around and say, oh, look, that's different than this and why? And then get into the details. Did it have a Ge and look around and say, oh, look, that's different than this, and why? And then get into the details. Did it have a Geiger counter? I don't think that one had a Geiger counter. It did have the spectrometer sensor that I showed you later.

So they could identify certain materials. Yeah, that was really cool. Again, I wasn't really sure that it would be effective for a scientific thing, but it was open source, and you could calibrate it if you wanted to. So those were the top five. And there were some other ones I liked, and there were some other ones that scored highly for me, but I think those are great five.

You're happy with those? And for me— They all seem really serious. I mean, there was nothing... There's no robot that, you know, delivered you drinks or anything. Those could be exciting projects too, but all of these seemed to have serious purposes

in either industry or a field that's actually pretty damn technical. Like, Raman spectroscopy is really cool, but it's also a seriously difficult thing to do. You know, one of the reasons the Raman spectrometer scored very highly for me was that it wasn't the science. The science was cool, and i love spectrometry but uh what was really really awesome was the very simple detailed build instructions and he took it from i mean he took you through

every stage where like here is how it works but i'm just going to assume you can figure out the physics yourself. Right. Here is the schematic. Here is the 3D drawing. And so, step one, you do this. Step two. And I really felt like I could build it afterwards. That was the ones... So, we had judging criteria. And one of them was open source and another was reproducibility. And, you know, you could be open source without being reproducible, and that felt extremely reproducible.

Chip Whisperer seemed really reproducible, but it also seemed like I'd just buy the kit. They all were supposed to be connected, right? Yeah, and Hackaday didn't define that until later but yeah they're supposed to be connected what does that mean? okay a sensor connected to my processor

that's connected, I2C is connected but they didn't want to say it has to be an internet of things so I think that was a little tough on people that they didn't define it and then when they did define it they didn't quite i mean almost anything can be connected if you have a loose enough definition yeah any sensor can be connected to the internet i mean the spectrometer said it was more useful with the internet where you could look up what the spectrum spectrum was actually

indicating and ship whisper i think was connected because it was connected to the board under test so it was very different christopher just um had ice cubes if you heard that you will know that our ongoing feud about me having ice cubes has now been broken by Christopher having ice cubes. That's only with serious episodes. Right, this isn't going to be a serious episode. We're professional guests. People were trying to make think we do this. This is my first drink in a long time. Yes.

Are we going to take a picture of the whiskey bottle and put it up? That's not what I'm drinking. Oh, right. You have vodka. Anyway. That's so strange. I'm usually the one drinking. But there were so many, I mean, really awesome projects.

And I didn't, you know, I did it because Huckaday asked me to. Well, because Chris Gamble asked me to. And because it seemed neat. But I found out that it was very useful to me how so i learned a lot about sensors i had never learned about i learned about platforms i had never learned about i saw all of these other approaches to problems and you know i tend to be a pretty careful thorough engineer and i i sometimes will say no you can't do that when you probably could if you're willing to bend a few that's what i was

going to ask did you get a sense that some of these things are let me rephrase that did you get a sense that some things were possible in maybe a hacky or easy way that you didn't consider possible. Let's call it a prototype method. Yeah, yeah. Or even just in general, that some things were possible that didn't seem like, wow, you know, somebody actually pulled this off in a MacGyver sort of way. Well, and the ones that are in the top five were beyond MacGyvery. They were headed towards products some of the chip whisperer

i think actually is a product um but they they did kind of open my mind to the lego blocks that a lot of people use if you're not going to design your own board yeah and you are going to buy off the shelf parts what can you do and i knew you could do a lot but i didn't realize you could go this far and that was sort of mind expanding for me and cool and looking at the conversations people had on hackaday i was impressed by the give and take i mean some projects were discussed in detail and people would actually ask for, you know, does anybody have an oscilloscope I can borrow this weekend?

I could read about people meeting up. It was just really cool. Well, I think that's what they were going for. So I think that's a success. I'm so not a joiner forum sort of person. And as a judge, I felt like, well, I'm not going to read all the comments, but I read

a few. No, I had a really good time because I learned so much. And I've already looked, you know, somebody used a Teensy in their project and they made me go look at the Teensys and say, oh, why didn't I know about this? There was another off-the-shelf internet of things widget it just was really educational for me i felt like i had downloaded three episodes or three magazines of ieee spectrum just in my brain in an hour so part of that is being the contest and being forced to look at all the forced being encouraged encouraged to look at all of these. My eyeballs were held open. Projects and entries.

Clockwork Hackaday. But do you feel like you'd go back to Hackaday now and look at projects to keep that going? To keep learning about stuff? I certainly do. I mean, after seeing that raw on spectrometer,

the gears started turning on my head about what was possible in a related but but different optical scanning uh space that i that i've worked on in the past and could we drive the cost out the same way and you know i kind of told you with that and the answer is probably not and it's probably not interesting but uh in a market sense but it still got me going and thinking well okay they did that so that means that it should be possible to do this you know slight modification here or even major modification like on that project that he did 3d printing for a lot of the optical train

in the mounting which saves you a ton of money over the lab calibrated, you know, the, the, the optical tables and breadboards that you have to buy to screw things in to put optics in precision spots. That was kind of a, wow, that's an amazing idea because yeah, you can make this precision mount for all this stuff. It's, you know, already set up for your device. And I don't think he had a 3D printer. I think he just, you know already set up for your device 3d printer i think he just

you know sent it off to shapeways yeah yeah uh so i had a question for you and i've talked way past it it was do you think you'll go back and keep looking at stuff between contests i i was very privileged to go from 50 to 5. And you know, they started out with 800. So I already had a calling of things that were not as professionally done. And I think that benefited me enormously. There were, I'm not going to talk about the ones that weren't good in the 50. There were some people who just hadn't made many modifications.

They hadn't continued on like some of the other people had. And there were some who just had catastrophic failures at some point and couldn't finish in the time given. Their projects were interesting, at least in theory, but they weren't as awesome as the top five or the top 25. So that calling really helped me. I don't know if I personally will serve Hackaday to look at what's going on in other projects.

I would like it curated. On the other hand, with my next personal project, I will post there. Yeah. Because it was nice to see what was going on. And while I don't feel obligated to that sort of audience, talking about your projects does help you get them done. Well, it does, you know, you do feel like there's at least some eyes on you and going, hey, why haven't you updated this in six months?

Or can I help? Yeah. You know, when I was working on Maxwell, the Are You Okay doll, I got a lot of people on my personal blog who chatted with me about trying things. It was very cool. You were just saying, this is cool, and that's enough of a validation to continue something. Oh, and that reminds me, one of the things we were going to talk about was listener comments. Uh-oh. So I think I'm going to kind of spread those out because we haven't done a show like this

in quite a while. Yeah. I'm going to start with the people I am extremely embarrassed because I never replied to them. You know, I used to be so good at replying to like everybody, at least thank you or whatever, but I kind of, man august was tough and then that led to september and here we are in october and i'm still yeah my email's a giant okay so so chris may i'm going to quote him because i thought it was really good i appreciate how you interview people delving deeper than most podcast interviewers and being willing to leave the script and get lost in whatever the interviewee just said or brought in particular i keep thinking about how

elicia that's me got drawn into micah's triangle project and i really enjoyed the recent discussion with mike stitch especially where the interview delved into enjoyment electronics and electronic stores those are always my favorite parts too too. When we, like, totally... Sometimes those are in the script, but it's when we finally stop being the professional people and start being the okay. Well, you can't find anything out.

It's hard to find anything out interesting based on a series of written questions. And, you know, usually some people are programmed to kind of answer the questions as they get them. And if you can dig a little deeper, get a little off topic,

then they open up more and you can find things that you weren't even sure you wanted to talk about or knew that you wanted to talk about. Yeah. And a lot of people come on the show with a message i mean we're we're getting press passes and whatnot so we're kind of press and they come on they want to talk about their project which i totally respect that's why i invited them on but then then you just want to chat yeah Yeah, well, that's what it's for. And everybody in this industry has a different perspective on all aspects of this industry. So it's good to get perspectives outside of,

hey, so what are you working on? Tell me about it. And yet that's what I like. I mean, that's why we started the show is so that I could walk up to people and say, so, hey, what are you working on? Because I do like to hear about the projects. It's funny that now that's something I want to talk about,

but I also want to get to the comfy part. And it's funny that some, I guess this goes back to media training. Some people don't ever get comfortable because they're warned that the media will take them off topic or they'll have bad quotes. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. And other people don't get comfortable because they've never had any media training and they're nervous the whole time. And so there's this set of people who've had enough.

They come on, they give their message and they get comfortable but not so much that they have to stay on message the whole time there are people with too much media training of course there are i mean if we had if we had the president of the united states on i am certain he would never start giggling the giggling is my favorite part. Look, let me be clear. Oh, I see. My answer to this question. Thanks.

Will not answer your question. We got a lot of comments about our live show, the one at Hacker Dojo about... Safety Critical. Safety Critical. You know, we totally failed to cover Misra C. That was not exactly an accident. No, but it was in my list of things we should cover,

that we should at least say. And Andre pointed out that we failed. Misra C. I've said it it's cool no it is a way to simplify some of the medical places on gnarly c things and a lot of automotive people use yeah it's it's big in automotive but we were talking to an automotive audience from a non-automotive perspective so it wasn't right we were going to assume that they already knew all of that and we didn't need to mention it. But for people who don't, it is pretty neat to have something that says, here are the rules of using C safely.

Here's how we take an extremely dangerous language and try to make it a little safer without changing it. Let's see. I had another comment on that show. This one from Doug. Wow. It's kind of long. Well, summarize. Yeah. Sum up.

On unit testing for the cheap and dirty prototypes, we missed an obvious answer. For cheap and fast prototypes, do cheap and fast testing. I'm totally going to steal that. Set up the 10 test frameworks and do one or tests per function or module and call it good because that's what you do with prototypes. You do a little bit and then and call it good. Because that's what you do with prototypes. You do a little bit and then you call it good. And then that lets you make sure your code modules are testable. And that's a benefit of test driven development unit testing.

And you get from 0% coverage to 20% coverage. You're nowhere near 100, but you're so much better than zero. And you're on a path that gets you towards 100. Whereas if you're at zero, you're still on a path not. I like that one. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. It depends on how cheap and dirty the prototype is.

Well, you're working on a prototype soon, and you're going to do some testing soon. I'm going to see if it works. I'm not doing formal unit tests because I have... It's not very much code.

I'd be testing somebody's library mostly. I mean, I have a UI. I have a UI, I have a data acquisition object that talks to a board that has two accessor functions, and I have a DSP function that does an FFT from somebody's library. I mean, I could write tests for all of those things, but I guess I have,

because I wrote a fake version of the data acquisition board that just runs through some sine waves and runs it through the FFT. So, yeah, okay. That's epsilon away from a unit test. It is. All you have to do is make it run often,

or easy to run. But I mainly did that because I don't have the real hardware. Yeah. So I needed to test, I needed to be able to develop the parts of the system I didn't have. I don't know. I can go either way. I think it does depend on the complexity of the test because this is throwaway code. And I guess my feeling is throwaway code is almost exploration

and test on its own. Test of concepts, test of pieces of hardware. It doesn't really make sense to me to go through a lot of effort for something I'm going to toss just to see, okay, can this work? Can this piece of hardware work? Does this piece of hardware work? Yes, okay. Now that we've done that,

now we're going to actually start the project. And that's where I'm at with this. Okay, Doug, I am so in agreement with you but clearly christopher's wrong i'm not what i'm not saying i disagree necessarily but i'm saying do you understand what i'm saying i i do i do i have three pieces of hardware i want to see if the hardware works so i'm actually writing tests for the hardware should i I write tests for my tests? No, no. That's what I'm saying. I agree with you.

Yeah. And I just think that you're going to be building a lot of software on top of this. And right now you are already writing software that takes the hardware out of the loop. Once the proof of concept is done and they say, yes, we can do this application, then it'll go through a more rigorous development process. But at this point, it's a stage of, can this thing even work in the idea that we have? And if it can't, there's no point in...

Well, and that's not a two-year development. No, it's a two-week development. Right. I have two weeks. So it's not like you're going... And somebody's already set the demo date for middle of next week, and I started last week. So I'm not going to do tests for this code.

You've already done tests for this code. Just saying, there are circumstances where you've got to move really, really, really quickly. And I'm in favor of unit tests almost everywhere, except when you've got five hours. I am going to get so much hate for this. There is no one right way. I mean, there is no single here's how everybody should do everything.

Hey, did you see my satiety arrive today? I see a brown box that doesn't have any markings on it. It's opened because I took the T-shirt out and put it in the laundry so I could wear it tomorrow. I see. But I haven't actually powered it on. This is the 16 channel thing? Yeah, it's the pro. And so it's got...

Because we're pros. So they tell us. You know what makes you a professional? Giggling. Somebody pays you for anything. We're not professional podcasters. It's the Logic Pro. It has 16 digital channels

and 16 analog inputs. Well, there's a total of 16, so they can be digital or analog. And it samples at 500 mega samples per second, digital or 15 mega samples per second. Oh, cool. I'll play with that tomorrow if you don't take it. I'm not going to.

And we would have gotten ours sooner, except I ordered it in red, because I wanted it to be different than everybody else's. Does it have, I forget, does this have outputs as well? You know, their old one had outputs, so I think this has outputs, but that's at the software level, not in their pretty user interface. I think you have to write C for it. What's the analog bandwidth? 50 megahertz.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I'll try that out tomorrow. That sounds exciting. I like that you're already planning on how to use my toys. Well, you don't, you know, have a project. I do have a project. I do have a project. I've got piles of hardware over there. I do have a project, although I only have about

two more weeks on it. So if anybody's got anything neat they're working on, now's a good time to... I don't think that project needs your salient. I think we're saying that wrong again. We never looked up again how to say it. I did not look up how to say it. Now I fall. I could play our old podcast to find out.

I don't think the listeners want to hear our old podcast played through our new podcast. Why not? It's great. This is great radio. Maybe next show we can talk about

all the things we messed up on this show. Episode 73, the apology. Okay. So the salier is cool, and we'll talk about that at some point once we actually open it. Well, I was thinking about asking them to come back and talk to us. I don't think they will once they've heard how we pronounce the name.

Stefan from Johannesburg tried to buy a Salier after we had them on the show. Although maybe he knows how to pronounce it because we've clearly forgotten. But since they were going with the O-scopes and they'd already switched over to the new ordering, he couldn't get one. And it would be fun to talk to them about how it's really hard to have a lot of products, a lot of SKUs, when you're such a small company. And why nobody can get the old versions anymore. It's almost impossible, because it's hard to plan, just plan your mix, and how many of each thing you're going to stock.

That would be a good conversation. Yeah, I mean, it's a small business thing. So I'm going to talk about it. Let's see. What else is happening? Are there people who have been on the show recently? Dharma. The cushion people. Right.

So they had their Kickstarter. Yes. And it went nuts. I mean, crazy nuts. They were trying to raise, I forget how much? $40K. $40Kk okay and they they cleared that first 24 hours i mean first like three hours i think and now they're at 200k with 20-ish days to go that seems like enough yeah it does wonder if they under undershot what they really wanted

so they could be over or that's interesting i mean it does suggest it's kind of like pricing your stock right when you go way over it suggests that you set your goal wrong but i don't know how the psychology of kickstarter really works if you set it too high will people not hurt you well it hurts you if you set it so low that you can't actually build it well that does suggest which i think they were kind of on the verge of there but if you only get what you ask for if you ask for 10k you really needed 100 because you're trying to game then you set Then you set yourself up for failure. Maybe. Yeah.

I don't know. It's, it's an interesting psychological question of are people more apt to give to already successful campaigns because they want to get the gadget or the thing that that's, that's the reward or are they more apt to give to something that's just about to make its actual goal in the last couple of days? Oh, definitely. Definitely. If it's already made its goal, I'm way more likely.

It seems like there's some economics papers to be written about Kickstarter. Yes. So they're doing well and they're going to go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. And they did hire the MBA student that was here on the show. Okay. but they so they're doing well and they're gonna go ahead yeah yeah and they they did hire the MBA student that was here on the show

okay so that's kind of cool I've heard rumors that and not necessarily about Dharma except that they did really well

and so they remind me of these rumors that some of the hardware accelerators are gaming the system gaming Kickstarter, like putting money towards the given,

putting your limit too low and then giving you extra money. Does this make any sense? Putting your limit too low and then, and then giving you, well, okay. So let's say for, let's say I had a Kickstarter

and I worked with Accelerator. Okay. And I thought it would take $100,000 to build my widget. And then I'd go on Kickstarter and ask for $60,000 and they would go ahead and put down like $20,000 immediately with a promise for the other $20,000 later so that my Kickstarter did better in order to, you know, that first 24 hours.

So somebody, somebody, a ringer, a ringer is buying. Yeah, a shill. A shill. A shill. A confederate. I don't know if it's true. I hope it's not. It seems like Kickstarter would want to fight that kind of thing.

So. Yeah. I think if they found out about that, they would be very unhappy. I mean, Kickstarter is one of the ones with somewhat strict rules, so I'd be surprised if... It's no Indiegogo. I'm the one drinking. Really? What's that over there?

Oh, I missed that. Speaking of hardware accelerators and Kickstarter, Craig Sullender. The camera guy. Yeah, the machine vision camera guy. He had that project he was working on called Peep. That was the front door internet of things camera. Yeah, and so you could see who was at your door, whether you were there or whether you just were too lazy to get off the couch.

He went to Highway 1, which is here in the Bay Area, another hardware accelerator, very like Hackcelerator. And it sounded like it was intense but educational, which is kind of cool. We should get one of the Hackceler the accelerator people on or the Highway 1 people. What is it like from their perspective? And advice to people who are looking to get into accelerators, I think. Yeah. I mean, Emil Petroni from last week?

Yes, last week. The Tindy CEO said that there's a process to it and only certain people really qualify. The people who don't really know what they're doing with getting consumer working. If you knew what you were doing, you wouldn't go that route. You wouldn't need an accelerator. Yeah.

I promise I have no idea how to do this. Please help me. So if you're interested in that, there's a Kickstarter for his peep coming coming soon it isn't quite up yet but i suspect that accelerator helped um other kickstarters light up light up who's been on the show twice they say they're shipping soon really really shipping soon we're gonna have them on again aren aren't we? So, how's it going? Shipping soon.

They've had a lot of problems with just getting things moved from one place to another without getting interfered with by customs. It's such a cute project with teaching electronics. Is there a specific problem with their stuff or just not knowledge of how to manage it? This is why you go to a hardware accelerator so that you figure out how to manage all these things. I thought they were involved with an accelerator. Yeah, they went through an accelerator.

Yeah. But it's still, I mean, moving atoms from here to there is not as easy as moving software electrons from here to there. I guess. It just seems like that should be a streamlined process at this point. I mean, there's enough companies making stuff in Asia.

Everybody's making something different. It seems like the CM should actually deal with most of that for you, but I have no idea. Never done it. Don't plan to. Yeah, that's always been kind of a barrier for me people say well are you going to make your own company i'm like a i don't want to devote my entire life to that even for two years because i think that's kind of what it takes yeah and b we've already

done that though i mean we've been at startups and devoted 100% of our time. I mean, we've been through that ringer a couple times for other people's companies. So it's hard to... Well, you know, I always thought that if I found an idea I fell in love with, I would do it. Now I'm just not that excited about shipping products. I'm much

more excited about helping other people ship products. Which is to say, I don't want to deal with the logistics of production. Well, you hire people who know how to do that. Yeah. I mean, we talked about hiring a summer intern this year, and we didn't do it. It's a little different.

We don't have anything for them to do. Really? Is there an organization that could happen? Yeah, but they're not going to make anything for us cleaning our office is not really a technical task I know we've got some more feedback

follow up I think the new feedback is going to say wow let's see I feel like I should thank him again he's been really great suggesting guests Rob Faludi and Jack Gassett, the Papilio, which was another episode people liked. The FPGA introduction. Yeah, that was good.

Past guest Ken Milnes emailed me that he liked the FPGA introduction, which I'm just so tickled when past guests comment on current shows. I don't know why that particularly gets to me, but I do like it. No comment from you? It's great. I mean.

Let's see. Again, a nice, really nice note of encouragement from Frank in Belgium maker of the you know I don't think that's right

oh no okay yes we got a nice note of encouragement from Frank in Belgium we also got a nice note of encouragement from Don maker of the

iSnooze remote useful for people who are listening to podcasts as bedtime stories. Oh, that's important. I do sometimes. And he made a Hackaday project to tell when the local tennis court is free.

And I really liked that he's sort of crediting us with the inspiration. And I'm tickled because I do like to share the enthusiasm. The only thing we get is feedback, so. Yeah. Someday we'll monetize this puppy and be billionaires.

I think it's worth dollars. Whole dollars, not just partial dollars. Maybe we should get advertisers on here for. Ten, maybe just partial dollars. I bet we should get advertisers on here for... Ten, maybe. Ten dollars. Ten. Unitless. Unitless. Yeah. So, lots of really nice comments.

Justin wanted to... had nice comments, and he also wanted to know about more coding techniques in embedded software. I felt like we should do a serious show about that, and then we did this instead. Well, we need one more person for that. Well, he specifically wanted to know about the ARM Cortex-M series. Definitely need one more person for that. I really like, and I would like to talk about, CMSIS and the compilers and the options and this and all these things.

But the business cards from the people at ST didn't actually... Go anywhere? Well, maybe they did, but they just didn't reply. Oh no, it's them. Run. Yeah, exactly. I met her at a conference. She just don't even reply. She don't want you to talk on her podcast or something so if anybody knows uh somebody from st i would want to listen to that episode because

i'm using that stuff right now at a high level but i don't you know i don't know anything about it except as a user so that would be yeah no i've used it a lot. I can read the assembly, but I sometimes, yeah, I still have questions. So, yeah, I'll keep trying to poke. And if anybody has a suggestion for a good person who could speak to that, that would be great too. Particularly if you know the person. If you just know of the person, then, you know, I'm kind of in the same boat you are. So, oh, and I'm trying to get a show together about ageism in tech, which is related to a comment sent to us about a year ago. They just kind of want to talk about particularly as...

I think it's a topic that is not talked about much. And I already have one guest for that. But another one would be nice and by the way our cut off age is 65 so if you're less than 65 even if you're pushing 70 but not yet 65 what about what about from google's perspective ageism and tech from google's perspective yeah i mean i think the 65 cutoff is way too high i think the 35 cutoff is way too high. I think the 35 cutoff is way too high. That's what I'm saying. We already qualify by quite a bit. Yeah.

Now, I want to talk to somebody a little older who's been around long enough to maybe push through, maybe give some strategies. No, I think that's an important topic, and it's one that doesn't get talked about very much. You know, the big topic now is sexism in the industry. But there's a lot of... We don't have to talk about that, do we? We're not going to talk about it. Okay. But there's a lot of other issues culturally

with the tech industry. And, you know, I think it comes and goes. I think 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there were, you know, a lot more of the grizzled unix unix guys around gray beards i didn't want to say that okay i didn't think it was i mean it's okay to have gray in your beard i mean not for me but maybe neck beard is the one i was thinking of that that's a little more insulting yeah anyway uh not the neckbeards are bad in any way nor are starburns the vast bolus of young people who came through computer

science in the or in the early 2000s you know or even the 90s making up the industry right now so but i am such a better engineer now than i was then oh god yes but i think that's topics for that show so if you know somebody who might be good on the show uh drop us a line show at embedded dot fm you know whatever whatever shout loudly out your window yeah show it embedded.fm or hit the contact link on Embedded.fm. I'll do the whole spiel at the end. They know. I have final thoughts.

They all come from Winnie the Pooh this week. If you have feedback for this episode. Send it to. Send it to show at. AnnBauer.com. Send it to Chris Gamble. Yeah, we do have Andy as a listener. Actually, I know Andy because I worked in the same building.

I worked for a company he used to work for. And he pointed out the Amp Hour episode with Trey German was about TI processors. Okay. And I haven't listened to that because I've been very late on my podcast listening because I got a couple books on tape. Well, books on MP3. Tape? No, there's no actual tape involved, but you know.

This one's about edible bugs. It's kind of cool. The feedback or the book on tape? The book on MP3. Oh, I thought you were moving to the next feedback and it was about edible bugs. No, no. Do we have more feedback? One more.

Mason suggested we talk to Parallax, and that is coming soon. Yeah, that'd be cool. I do want to talk to them. I want to talk to them about their open core, about their mini cores, about their propeller. Yeah, it's all the stuff. So I'm hoping that will work out soon. It was one of the first sort of home project devices I used was the basic stamp. Propeller, yes. Yeah, it's all the stuff. So I'm hoping that will work out soon. It was one of the first sort of home project devices I used was a basic stamp.

I think that's true for a lot of people. Because it was, I mean... It was available. Yeah. I mean, now we think about all of these Arduino and things. The basic stamp was the way to go before we had all of this. I wonder why I didn't continue to sort of hold that cachet. We'll add that to the list of questions. I'm sure they'll enjoy that question.

Why didn't you take over the hobbyist market? Why do you not have world domination at this point? Let's see, other people that we've had on the show, we have kind of exciting people sometimes. I know. Ken Lund have kind of exciting people sometimes. I know. Ken Lund, talking about exciting people, but not necessarily one of the most exciting shows. It was an important show

about a difficult topic. It was about internationalization and embedded systems. And I ended up having... Which, like ageism, doesn't get talked about enough. It doesn't. I had to listen to it six months later because I had to do more of it, and I had forgotten enough. And I was, I don't know, I was walking to Starbucks

or whatever and listening to it. And even as he was talking, I was like, right. And then, of course, my voice would ask the next question. It was kind of surreal gosh i wonder i wonder why well in that one i i promise at the beginning we're going to get through all of these things like a b and z and then we get through a and b and i'm like ready to listen to c and instead i say and now for c, but we're out of time. Goodbye.

That's very frustrating. It was so annoying. Why would you do that? I don't know. But Ken Munns sent me an email. One of the big questions with internationalization in embedded systems, particularly Asian internationalization, is the font. I mean, making your own font is way too expensive.

And now there is an open source pan CJK font. Okay, cool. And I am excited. It makes so many more things easier. Yes. I think they partnered with somebody, but yes. Hey, we have a link for the show notes. I have a few links, yes.

I know. Other people we've had on the show, EMSL, the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory. Lenore. Yes. Was on the show. They have a bunch of Halloween posts, and I know they put these up every year, but every year I'm like shocked at how cool they are. The Cylon pumpkin is, We have to do that.

They're having an open house coming up soon, too. Oh, they are? Do you know when? That would require me to remember something I saw in a tweet two days ago. Weren't you supposed to do all the prep for this show? And I have done all of the prep that I was going to do for this show. You hooked

the microphones up. November 13th. There, see? Google is your friend. I can't go to Google. I've got this big audio thing in front of me. Clock counting. Let's see. And we had Angie on the show.

The Silicon Chef hackathon. Yes. Hackbright hackathon. Went off very well. I ended up giving a talk on Sunday, which was mostly, you're not done yet? Go ahead, go, go, go.

And you too can be a hardware hacker in your professional life. But I gave it a prize. Well, our company gave it a prize. Sorry, not just me. Did I authorize this? Yes. You'll never know.

I am the CFO. You are the CFO. But the Brainwave team won the most likely to become hardware hackers in their professional life award from Lodge of Elegance. $50 gift certificates from SparkFun. That's a really long thing to put on a trophy. Most of them were very long, yes. And they got copies of my book. And that

made reminders for prescriptions and medications, which I thought was pretty cool. That's cool. It was a good project. Seriously, shortest podcast ever. That was all I had. Oh, and Jerry Ellsworth's company has moved to the Bay Area?

I know. I'm like trying to wait patiently before I email her and say, can we have coffee? Can we have coffee? Can we be besties? Come on. Well, not besties,

because I mean, I have a bestie, but... Oh, God. Where's my alcohol? Should I put an end point there? Maybe. Let's just mark that for later review. Yeah.

But anyway, it sounds like things are going well for her and her company, and they're moving into production. Serious why? I'm looking forward to having that. I just got the new development kit for the Oculus Rift, which I've only tried out for about 10 minutes.

But this is the second one. The first one had worse motion sickness problems. This one has head tracking and a better display and a higher refresh rate and a bunch of things that they've put together

to try to combat some motion sickness. And from what I tried it, it felt a lot better. So I'll give it another chance. It also integrates with the Leap Motion, so you can actually see your hands in front of you in a virtual world. So I have some ideas for playing around with that. But yeah.

So you know my extreme ability to get motion sick. Yes. Do you think it's ready for me to play with? I think it wouldn't bother you for about five minutes. You'd know pretty quick if you were having a problem. By the hurling? I don't think you'd immediately hurl. I think you'd start to feel weird and just

take it off. Okay. It's not like a boat where you kind of have to drive the boat back to land to get off. Come on, I don't need to leave the land to be sick on the boat. It's not like a car where we have to stop every five minutes because the air conditioner isn't pointed just the right way that's not the problem it's the parking it's the parking lot we're ready for bonus topics uh is this where

we get to talk about scorpion the tv show two. Two things that I thought would be good compare and contrast exercises for how to do technology in fiction and how not to do technology in fiction. Science and the media. I just wanted to send all the NPR-y there for a second. So let's start with the bad one because I don't remember it as well and it'll go faster. Okay, so this is Scorpion, the TV show. Scorpion was a new TV show scorpion was we watched the pilot new tv show

this fall that we watched the pilot for and then immediately deleted everything about it from our dvr we're still recording it so really that's a waste of bits um so scorpion if you haven't seen it and by the way spoilers if you care is a terrible TV show written by terrible, horrible people starring some unfortunately good actors, maybe, kind of, who just got roped into this for some reason. It's about a group of hackers. Geniuses. Not all hackers.

Right. In fact, they weren't all computer people. They were mechanical people. Right. There was a psychologist who sat... Anyway, we'll get to that. A group of people, smart people, and you know where that heads with Hollywood.

Smart people. Christopher's been working on this rant for weeks. That the FBI gathers up to do the impossible things that the FBI cannot do on their own. I've known some FBI agents. They aren't dummies. Here's the premise of the first episode. Airplanes.

Airplanes cannot land if a computer breaks at an airport. At all. They can't land at another airport. Well, no, because the... It was just one airport. No, it had spread its virus to others. It was just the one.

It was LAX. Okay. There was maybe some other implausible problem. But anyway, the FBI can't fix this. They have to do a firmware upgrade to the computers in LAX. And I forget why,

but they couldn't do it to the computers at LAX. but for some reason which makes no sense the binary the air traffic controller software had a different copy on all of the airplanes that were flying around so their brilliant idea was they needed to get the software from the airplane skipping a lot of steps but yes i'm skipping the the stereotypical characterization of all the high technology and smart people. They broke into that place and that was kind of funny.

But yes, okay, so skip to the part where there's a fast car on a... The only way to get the software was from one of the airplanes. And since they didn't have any radios on the airplanes that worked anymore, even though radios on airplanes are kind of analog things.

And for some reason, cell phones could only point up. Nothing worked. So they decided that they were going to... And here's the other thing I didn't understand. All right. They were going to get the software from the airplane by a wire. No, no, no. They were going to get the software from the airplane by a wire. No, no, they were going to do it wirelessly, and then they determined that it wouldn't transfer fast enough due to wireless interference, wavy hands.

Okay, I'm going to put a pin in one little thought here, and I'm going to come back to it. So my hand up here is this pin. Never going to come back to it. So in order to do this, they decided, for whatever reason, they decided that the only way to get this software was to download it to a laptop

from an airplane via an Ethernet cable while it was flying at low altitude, and I'm talking 10 feet above a runway, at 200 miles an hour. And so they got a Lamborghini convertible. Which was just sitting there. It was kind of cool that it was just sitting there. Stood up in the Lamborghini convertible at 200 miles an hour. And so they got a Lamborghini convertible. Which was just sitting there. It was kind of cool that it was just sitting there.

Stood up in the Lamborghini convertible at 200 miles an hour. Which is hard to do at 60 miles an hour. Without their hair whipping at all. Yeah, her hair was really dangling. And reached to a dangling Ethernet cable from an airplane and plugged it into a laptop to download the software, which shouldn't have been on the airplane anyway because it was air traffic control

software. It always comes down to an RJ45. It always comes down to a wired ethernet they were going 200 miles an hour and that scene was at least five minutes long which means that the runway had to be like six or seven miles once when i was in a car going 180 miles an hour i knew how fast we were going because that was how long it took to get around a two-mile track. I mean, we timed it. It was just based on the time. Okay. And it wouldn't have taken five minutes now.

Yeah. Oh, here was the real pin. That was an auxiliary pin. Why couldn't that plane have landed? It was already five feet off the ground over a runway. It was already five feet off the ground. Over a runway. It was a municipal runway.

It wasn't the big LAX runway. I see. So the runway was not long enough for the airplane, but it was long enough to go 200 miles an hour over for like five minutes. This is what it's like watching television with Christopher, just so you all know. Only if you're inside my head, I'm usually very quiet and respectful. Besides the completely stupid writing. I mean, there were some good parts of the show.

What? There were. I really liked the characterization of the geniuses as people who were forming a team. Were in a fight. And I liked that the waitress had a genius son who she thought was developmentally behind, but was in fact so focused on his internal world. And so these geniuses were going to help the mom communicate with the son.

And I liked that bonding of technology and humanism. I liked that part. I thought it was cute. I thought it was a cute world-building premise. The whole planes will drop out of the sky at any minute because they don't have the right software was bogus. And the whole Ethernet cables from a plane was extremely bogus. But I liked the people part of it but you're just looking at me like i thought they were standard cookie cutter nerds from central casting nerd land you had your your anarchist nerd you had your your

sort of autistic nerd you had your socially challenged flavor you had your anarchist nerd. You had your sort of autistic nerd. You had your socially challenged nerd. But they had a nerd in each flavor. You had your slightly sexy nerd who wouldn't take any guff from a man. And it all seemed predictable. Not a good show. I recommend you don't watch it. I wouldn't recommend it, no. In contrast, however.

In contrast. Christopher gave me reading before this podcast. A homework assignment. He gave me a homework assignment. I and you both have completed a novel this weekend. It didn't take me all weekend. I read very slowly compared to you. I don't think that's in any question.

The title is The Martian. The Martian. By Andy Weir. Yes. The title is The Martian. The Martian. By Andy Weir. Yes. And it's a fantastic book. The science was so good. I did not do the math to see that he got his delta Vs correct in his orbital mechanics. I trusted him by that point.

But that makes this sound really boring. I know, but it wasn't. It totally wasn't. But he took really technical topics, technical things, activities. We should back up and say what the book's about in a second. Yeah, let's just talk about it first. The science in it was not in a dry manner. It was always interleaved with stuff that was interesting.

It wasn't such that if you didn't know anything about science, you'd find it boring. In fact, it might kindle some further investigation. Anyway, the book is about an astronaut who is stranded on Mars, and basically it's his story of how he survives and tries to get back home. And it was really good. I mean, I wrote a NaNoWriMo novel, and it was really bad.

It was not like this. It was bad. But one of the things that I did in my person with a resume remarkably like mine ends up in space and has to communicate. I was like, I don't know Morse code. And I wouldn't necessarily learn Morse code. On the other hand... Spoilers, by the way, possibly.

I know the ASCII table. And I know what HEX 40 is. And I can totally do it from there. Yeah. And I think ASCII is the New Morse is fine with me. Askey is the New Morse. But it was a novel. It's fiction, obviously.

But it had really good characters, really good humor. I thought that was the other really, really cool part. Oh, he had really good humor. Excellent science. And then he had great humor and good comic timing. I mean, I don't really talk about comic timing in a book, but you'd

read one thing, and then the next sentence would be just perfect. And good cultural references. I mean, he ends up on Mars, and he has a limited amount of entertainment, and he wove those in, and if you are over over 25 you'll get at least half the references maybe 30 uh duke's hazards but he did come back to the science because this was

another case where you know you read sort of pop sci-fi stuff contemporary sci-fi it's easier to do super futuristic sci-fi and kind of make up technology and do Star Trek stuff. Physics doesn't matter. It doesn't apply to us because we fixed all that. There was nothing, and I don't say this to toot my own horn, there was nothing in this that kind of jumped out at me as, oh, that's made up or wrong or that's not plausible.

Master's degree in physics. Christopher has one. Master's degree in physics. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah. How often do I use anything from that except to apparently when you're reading novels hold up stuff on the desk with some of my textbooks last time it was me holding stuff up the gravitation book is big i mean the the science i mean there was one point where he printed out i think the boot up log from a mars and it was the x works and wind river and it was allXWorks. And it was VXWorks and Wind River,

and it was all stuff I'd seen before. It was absolutely correct. And they have talked about that particular thing again. And it was VXWorks. I remember they were making a big deal out of it. I know. I remember when they had a problem with the original probes, they were doing a patch,

and they were talking about VXWorks, and it's like, oh, I've used that? And even the way they dealt with computers was, it was a little easier than it might have been in real life, but it was realistic. Very nicely realistic. I think instead of, he made the decision, instead of making stuff up or overly simplifying things,

he skipped over stuff. Which was fair. Some of the things you were talking about with the orbital mechanics, it was clear to me what they were doing, what the astronauts were doing, and that they were probably doing it correctly, but he didn't go into details such that you could say, oh, that's not going to work.

Like gravity. But he did actually give the numbers. I think you could prove that it did. I believe he did the math. In some of the parts, yeah. In some of the parts he gave some In some of the parts, he gave some indication that he'd actually thought about it. But it wasn't like gravity physics, where you just point

at the spaceship you want to go to and you go to it. So I really, really enjoyed it. Would love to actually talk to that guy on the podcast. You could ask him to be on the podcast. And, you know, I think there's room for fiction that has a heart, but it still has technology in it and gets the technology right. And I rarely, I can't think of another example of a book that had so much science in it that was so well researched that was fiction.

There was so much near-term science. I mean, I read Locke and Scalzi's new book, and you haven't yet. And they dealt with computer security in prosthetics. Okay. And they did a really, really good job of saying and they don't say it directly but anything that is valuable needs to be updated faster

than hackers can hack because anything that is valuable will be taken over that's just life so you have to stay ahead of the curve and I liked that somebody was thinking about that, but I didn't think he went far enough.

But that was just me, because I've been all like, what can hackers do right now? The one thing I was thinking reading this book was, and this is going to sound weird, but it was a good thing that I didn't read it at a younger age. Because you would totally have gone into the space program. I would have gone into the space program. You know it's a book about somebody getting trapped on Mars.

I wouldn't have gone that far in the space program. I would have helped somebody else trapped on Mars. Oh, I'm going to be seeing Amy Button, the Mars One person who was on the show. I'm going to be seeing her in a couple of weeks. I will totally ask her if she's read that book. I think she should read that book. Anybody who's thinking about going to Mars, and I know that's a lot of you,

Elon Musk, should read the book. Oh, if Elon Musk listens to the show, we'd like to have you on the show, too. Right, yeah, I think that's going to happen. I would totally giggle and say, please, please, please. Anyway, so to sum up, do not watch Scorpion. Read The Martian.

The Martian is actually going to be a movie. Ridley Scott is directing it. I think Matt Damon is cast as the... You know, when you told me that before I read the book, I was like, ah, no. But now that I've read the book, the comic... He might do okay with it. I was like, ugh, no. But now that I've read the book, the comic, he needs to have some good comic chops. And I think Matt Damon might be able to pull that off. Either him or the guy from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. No.

Kidding. Well, Terry? Oh, God. Yes, Christopher and I do watch some television. Just going to punch Mars. Yeah, so you had a list? I think we've exhausted it. Oh.

Unless you wanted to talk more about stuff. Things. Things and stuff. All right. Well, after several really good shows, it's nice to take a break and talk amongst ourselves. With nobody listening.

Yeah. So if you are still listening, do feel free to drop us a line. It is show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm or tweet at embedded.fm or logical elegance, which is me or stony monster, which is me,

which is a really good story. You should totally ask about that. Not in 140 characters. And yeah, I think that's it. Normally I have my outro notes, ask about that. Not in 140 characters. And yeah, I think that's it. Normally I have my outro notes, but today I... Normally we'd encourage you to review the show, but I think we'll skip that this time.

I think so. So if you do go on iTunes, make sure to avoid our show and do not click on any stars. Yes. Well, my wine glass is empty, so I am going for the final thought. Do you still have... I've had an eighth of an ounce of vodka, and I'm totally out of it.

Yeah, that's great. Okay, so final thought this week, and this is for the people who use this show as bedtime story. Rabbit's clever, said Pooh thoughtfully. Yes, said Piglet. Rabbit's clever, said Pooh thoughtfully. Yes, said Piglet. Rabbit's clever. And he has a brain. Yes, said Piglet. Rabbit has a brain. There was a long silence.

I suppose, said Pooh. That's why he never understands anything. Winnie the Pooh is awesome. Good night, everyone.