Embedded
I am Elecia White alongside Christopher White. We're here to chat about the interests, careers, and lives of engineers, artists, educators and makers. Our diverse guest list includes names you may have heard and engineers working quietly in the trenches. Either way, they are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and inspiring. We'd love to share our enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM).
Episodes
Christopher and Elecia catch up on life, firmware consulting, daydreams, and projects.
Elecia thinks aloud about low-stimulation education toys. Christopher shares his experience using AI tools to build a custom Swift metronome app to train off-beat timing, specifically how he turned the project into a structured language lesson plan. They discuss using Google's NotebookLM on the Embedded.fm transcript...
David Such joins us to discuss his new book, Embedded AI: Intelligence at the Deep Edge. We explore the boundary between classical signal processing, heuristics, and edge machine learning; IMU processing and sensor fusion; and how to determine what sort of ML fits on your processor. David also shares his experiences writing for No Starch Press and why future robotic architectures need a digital cerebellum for low-level ...
Adam Smith from UC Santa Cruz joins us to discuss local Small Language Models (SLMs) and building open, autonomous tools. We explore his BayLeaf AI counterplatform, transagency (the "me-and-the-car" concept of human-agent collaboration), context distillation, and running models locally without relying on data-harvesting corporate clouds.
Adam also shares practical strategies for ...
Aaed Musa joins us to talk about building robot dogs, custom actuators, and his YouTube channel. He shares how he moved from 3D-printing servo robots in his parents' garage to designing capstan drives, and how he uses reinforcement learning to train quadrupedal walking gaits. We also talk about his senior design project (CARA 2.0), his Spider-Man web-shooter build, lessons in storytelling and video editing, and why he's...
Author Susan Lammers joins the show to discuss the 40th anniversary edition of her classic book, Programmers at Work. We discuss what it was like to interview young and pioneering software developers like Toru Iwatani, C. Wayne Ratliff, and Michael Hawley and how the personal computer revolution was built by individuals seeking freedom from corporate mainframes.
Susan also shares her experiences as Edi...
Kevin Santo Cappuccio, founder of Architeuthis Flux, joins the show to discuss creating Jumperless, an open-source breadboard that replaces physical jumper wires with software-controlled analog crossbar switches. We explore the need for 445 RGB LEDs on a breadboard, using MicroPython to create scriptable circuits, some of the lessons that can be implemented with the Jumperless, and how it might be used to create new ins...
Elecia and Christopher celebrate winning the IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education! A huge thank you to Mark Omo and the wonderful listeners who submitted nomination letters. Chris and Elecia talk about learning Hungarian to qualify Chris for an EU passport. They also cover Cory Doctorow's new book The Reverse Centaur's Guid...
Marine biologist Dr. Steven Haddock joins the show to share the alien, glowing, and transparent wonders of the deep ocean. We discuss his beautiful new book, The Radiant Sea, and explore the complex engineering and high-sensitivity optics required to capture living deep-sea creatures. Steve walks us through the evolutionary logic of biological light, how vantablack organisms trap photons in the da...
Chris Svec returns to the show to discuss the messy, non-linear realities of engineering management and onboarding new college graduates. We explore why companies should bother hiring fresh grads in the first place, how to prevent junior developers from going dark when they get stuck, and why admitting ignorance publicly is an absolute workplace superpower. Along the way, we dive into...
Tyler Hoffman returns to the show to discuss diagnostics and observability data in embedded systems. We catch up on his life after startup acquisition, explore the hows and whys of keeping product data separate from operational data, and consider the realities of fleet management at scale.
Tyler is the co-founder of Memfault. Memfault was acquired by Nordic Semiconductor about a year ago. While Nordic ...
Chris and Elecia talk about pushing out of their comfort zone, networking advice, adding STARs and action verbs to resumes, using rust, thermo forming plastics, soldering together audio gear, and winning awards.
If you are looking for an update to your resume or are interviewing for a new job and you haven't heard of the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result), it is a good way to formulate what ...
Dr. Victoria Serrano spoke with us about STEM outreach, fostering curiosity, and inspiring students with engineering education.
Victoria is a professor at the Technological University of Panama (her faculty page: UTP | Dra. Victoria Serrano). Her youtube channel is CIATEC PANAMA which talks about circuits, electronics, and robotics. The channel goes along with her ciatecpanama.com website which shows the types ...
Dr. Tom Williams spoke with us about robots, ethics, teaching, and books. Then we talked about mines, umpires, water, and more books.
Tom is the author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice (free at MIT Press: Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice!).
As part of the discussion, we talked about some other books and media:
Nathan Jones spoke with us about hardware security, motivation, conference talks, and writing.
Nathan wrote an in-depth series of posts about the benefits of superloops vs RTOS: You Don't Need an RTOS (Part 1), Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. He also wrote about
How Hardware Gets Hacked (Part 1) and Part 2 which discusses the MITRE embedded CTF (Capture the Flag) challenge. See his EmbeddedRelated profile ...
Chris and Elecia chat about Leapfrog toys, things they like, large company politics, awards, and open source governance.
The Toy Story 5 Trailer with LilyPad toy which is suspiciously similar to the LeapFrog LeapPad tablet. Which is different from the original LeapPad which had cartridges and capacitive touch (capacitive touch was used on the globe as well… the latest globe also has a screen)....
Sonia Grego speaks with us about a topic no one likes to talk about, but could be used to monitor personal dietary health and widespread disease outbreaks. Toilets! Sonia leads Duke University's Smart Toilet Lab and the spin out Coprata which makes the Microbiome Activity Tracker.
As discussed in the show, when developing a project far from where it will be deployed, there a...
Kenneth Finnegan entertained us with stories about accidentally contributing to the internet's ability to network.
Wondering how the internet works? All those terms about IPv4, IPv6, BGP, OSPF, CDN and other alphabet soup? Check out the YouTube videos by NetworkChuck.
Kenneth writes about his adventures on his blog, The Life of Kenneth. Some of the posts related to this show are:
Chris and Elecia apologize, discuss uses and abuses of chatbots, reach out to an uncertain manager, try to help someone out of their professor's draconian rules, and extol the joys of reading.
Chabot Space & Science Center is in Oakland, CA, US. It is wonderful!
Some suggestions for UncertainManager:
Mark Omo and James Rowley spoke with us about safecracking, security, and the ethics of doing a bad job.
Mark and James gave an excellent talk on the development of their safecracking tools at DEF CON 33: Cash, Drugs, and Guns: Why Your Safes Aren't Safe. It included a section of interaction involving the lock maker's lawyers bullying them and how the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a Coders' Rights...
James Cameron spoke with us about programming for and operating a large telescope. The show is a blend of astronomy, engineering on the fly, and weird lady bug habitats.
The Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) is part of the Australian National University's Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Australia.
The AAT has an all sky camera where you can check in on a v...
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