479: Make Your Voice Heard

Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and Empty Crate spoke with us about the joy of puzzles, the changing directions of an interesting career, and the C++ programming language. I mean, of course we talked about C++. But only a little.  Jason recently published Programming Puzzles Big Book: 400 pages of fun for ages 7-99, a book of puzzles for the logically minded. It teaches programming concepts as engaging puzzles: recursion, binary, assembly, Lisp, regular expressions. You may not know what you are learning but you'll likely find you know a lot more about how computers work afterward.  For the puzzles, paper is better than electronic. But you can also get the electronic version on LeanPub (which is better if you like to get lost in Wikipedia links). This is not Jason's first puzzle book, he's made them for C++ Object Lifetime and Copy and Reference (see his Amazon and LeanPub author page for other books as well).  If you want to catch up on C++, check out C++ Weekly With Jason Turner - YouTube. Note the playlists are useful if you are looking for a deep dive on a particular topic.  If you want to get more out of C++ in your organization, Jason's consulting company is Empty Crate. His contact page is there as well (or look for lefticus on most social media platforms). Transcript If you're interested in how 3D printing is changing design engineering, Mouser Electronics has some great resources to check out. Their Empowering Innovation Together platform is taking a deep dive into additive manufacturing—covering smarter production, faster prototyping, and breakthrough materials that move ideas beyond prototypes into real-world products. You'll find podcasts, expert articles, and videos that keep you informed and inspired. Sound like your thing? Head to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and explore.

Katherine "Smalls" Connell spoke with us about making thin and flexible circuits, making stretchable electronics, and running a successful Kickstarter. Katherine's Kickstarter: Sprite Lights LED Body Art (light-up tattoo). Katherine shares her makes, describing her build process for companion robots and other projects. You can find her as The Small Wonder on Hackster.io and Hackaday.io. She often goes by Smalls on other social media.  We talked about a paper on making stretchable circuits: Silicone devices: A scalable DIY approach for fabricating self-contained multi-layered soft circuits using microfluidics. Transcript If you're interested in how 3D printing is changing design engineering, Mouser Electronics has some great resources to check out. Their Empowering Innovation Together platform is taking a deep dive into additive manufacturing—covering smarter production, faster prototyping, and breakthrough materials that move ideas beyond prototypes into real-world products. You'll find podcasts, expert articles, and videos that keep you informed and inspired. Sound like your thing? Head to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and explore.

Chris and Elecia talk about the show overflowing to another bit, fight over vim vs nano, consider awards, discuss writing (and self-motivation), consider linear algebra on AI cores, encourage remote device quality assurance, describe design documentation, review timer multipliers, and consider changing chip vendors. A list of all Embedded Episodes Support the show and get goodies: Patreon/embedded and Ko-fi.com/embedded  Data-Driven Science and Engineering book (currently on chapter 8 and working through the Control Bootcamp playlist) Not mentioned but related to the Cozy Science announcement: Elecia found Sleeping World, a 10-episode podcast that is nicely soothing and science. Transcript If you're interested in how 3D printing is changing design engineering, Mouser Electronics has some great resources to check out. Their Empowering Innovation Together platform is taking a deep dive into additive manufacturing—covering smarter production, faster prototyping, and breakthrough materials that move ideas beyond prototypes into real-world products. You'll find podcasts, expert articles, and videos that keep you informed and inspired. Sound like your thing? Head to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and explore.

Christina Cyr spoke with us about building cell phones, entrepreneurship, social purpose corporations, awards, lithium recycling, and her interesting career path.  We talked about Christina's Cyrcle Phone, the related kit from dTOOR, and her CES Innovation Award. We also mentioned Fairphone in the section about social purpose corporation. There is a great paper from Nature about lithium-ion battery recycling: The evolution of lithium-ion battery recycling | Nature Reviews Clean Technology Christina Cyr Personal Website  Wellfound (formerly AngelList) is a startup focused job site that may lead to non-fulltime positions. Crunchbase may help you figure out is the startup has capital (also Pitchbook thought that generally has a cost). ADH connectors by JST and the SparkFun JST Battery Removal Tool The quote was from Hemlock & Silver by T Kingfisher and it was a lovely fantasy mystery with an incredible first chapter. Note: there are some audio artifacts on Christina's track, we apologize as there was a technical issue that couldn't be resolved. We've tried to clean it up with post-processing. There's nothing wrong with your headphones :) Transcript                                If you're interested in how 3D printing is changing design engineering, Mouser Electronics has some great resources to check out. Their Empowering Innovation Together platform is taking a deep dive into additive manufacturing—covering smarter production, faster prototyping, and breakthrough materials that move ideas beyond prototypes into real-world products. You'll find podcasts, expert articles, and videos that keep you informed and inspired. Sound like your thing? Head to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and explore.

Steve Hinch wrote a book about engineering, innovation, and business. He shares decades of wisdom gleaned from his career at Hewlett-Packard and Agilent as an engineer, manager, marketing director, and general manager.  Steve's book is Winning through Innovation: Lessons from the Front Lines of Business. While mostly retired, Steve is an executive consultant, see his website to get in touch: Stephen W. Hinch.   We also touched on some of Steve's nature and hiking volumes as well.  While Elecia is reading My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir | Project Gutenberg, Steve suggested works by Edward Abbey might be of interest.  Elecia and Steve both received copies of Bill Packard's The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company while at HP. Transcript                         Mouser Electronics has a dedicated Empowering Innovation Together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is reshaping engineering—from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance. You'll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you're ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

William Griffin spoke to us about hardware-in-the-loop testing, simulation, terminology, learning complex topics, and books. We don't usually expand upon the show title but Wikipedia has a rabbit hole called Evil demon so there you go. Books mentioned: Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos CMOS Cookbook How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Adventures of a Curious Character Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time (though we then talked about a different Jeffrey Pfeffer book: 7 Rules of Power. William Griffin and  Bailey Steinfadt (333) have started Spark Embedded, an embedded software and simulation consultancy.  Transcript Mouser Electronics has a dedicated Empowering Innovation Together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is reshaping engineering—from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance. You'll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you're ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

Chris and Elecia chat about books, courses, alternate podcasts, electronics, statistics, kidnapping Roo, and journaling failures.  The Embedded Patreon book club is reading Data-Driven Science and Engineering: Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control by Steven L. Brunton, J. Nathan Kutz. PDF book and links to lectures are at databookuw.com. Some recent links of interest: Datasaurus dozen: a collection of different small data sets that have the same summary statistics. You can see all the graphs here. From Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors.  The I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird YouTube video was really neat, which led to AudioMoth ultrasonic recorders as well as making a $40 bird identifier with an RPi and some software (BirdNET-Pi).  Chris is taking a course from Dogbotic. See their workshop list. We interviewed Kirk Pearson from Dogbotic on Episode 491. Transcript Mouser Electronics has a dedicated Empowering Innovation Together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is reshaping engineering—from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance. You'll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you're ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

Dmitry Grinberg joined us to talk about running Linux on small microprocessors (physically small and/or 4-bit). Dmitry does this by emulating a MIPS processor. Boot times vary between minutes and days, depending on the processor.  Dmitry's projects are on his website (dmitry.gr) including: 8-pin Linux (Cortex-M0+!) Linux on an 8-bit micro? Linux/4004 Dmitry recommended NandGame, an online game about building up a processor. We mentioned Eric Schlaepfer of TubeTime. He was on the show on 419: Fission Chips, with EMSL's Windell Oskay, talking about their book Open Circuits. Transcript Mouser Electronics has a dedicated Empowering Innovation Together hub that covers the latest breakthroughs in tech. Their new series explores how AI is reshaping engineering—from design automation to rapid prototyping and predictive maintenance. You'll find insightful articles, podcasts, and videos that showcase real-world applications across industries. If you're ready to see how AI is powering the next generation of engineering, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

We spoke with Peter Griffin about Jumperless Breadboards, no-install GUI development, Excel, and puppies. Jumperless Breadboard at CrowdSupply Colab GUI for Jumperless Breadboard Website GUI for Jumperless Breadboard Excel GUI for Jumperless Breadboard (though it has some USB DTR issues as noted in the show: Jumperless_V5_GUI (Shared).xlsx. Note Microsoft Datastreamer is a serial interface to Excel  Teardown 2025 will have talks up soon! Cory Doctorow wrote about 'Enshittification' in Wired. We didn't bleep the word for this episode since it's becoming an essential part of tech criticism. The Flag of Maryland. You know what you did. Joel Spolsky's You Suck at Excel Miso Come Here (Instagram, TikTok) shows puppy communication buttons. Transcript Mouser's Empowering Innovation Together hub dives into all sorts of topics like renewable energy, energy-efficient systems, and sustainable design. Whether you're looking for the latest in clean tech trends or just need some inspiration, you'll find articles, videos, and podcasts all geared toward engineers who want to make a difference. Head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and check out their clean tech content.

It's another episode with Elecia and Chris. This week they discuss people that have influenced their lives and careers, thinking about past career choices and regrets therein, identities, the Embedded Slack book club, and electronic projects. Chris is currently taking Dogbotic's DIY Rhythm Widgets course which covers making an analog drum machine from components. We had Dogbotic founder Kirk Pearson on the show on Episode 491. Elecia mentioned the book that the Embedded Slack #book-club channel is working through, Data Driven Science & Engineering Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control, which you can find for free at https://databookuw.com along with code and examples. The group is two sessions in but if you want to join late, join the Slack group via Patreon or Ko-Fi. You can subscribe to the newsletter here. Transcript