Embedded Logical Elegance

Kari Love joined us to talk about soft robotics, robots in religion, and squishiness.
Kari co-authored Soft Robotics: A DIY Introduction to Squishy, Stretchy, and Flexible Robots. Her website is karimakes.com. She was previously on Embedded 189: The Squishiness Factor
One of the pneumatic drives that we mentioned was a Hackaday Prize Winner: FlowIO. Another was the Soft Robotics Toolkit. However, Kari recommended Amitabh Shrivastava’s Programmable Air (Crowd Supply page for Programmable Air).
Some search terms for getting started with soft robotics: “DIY Jamming gripper”,  “Positive pressure gripper”, and “bendy straw robot joints”. (That last one leads you to the delightful video Make a Robotic Hand with Straws.)
Polysense conductive dye for making sensors out of found objects. (On Hackaday.)
Simulation of Soft Bodies in Real World Applications (for squish and stretch) include SOFA, Abaqus, and DiffPD.
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An incomplete list of power systems people have used for generating soft robotic motion:
Pneumatic - air and vacuum
Hydraulic - using liquid
Electrical - using currents
Thermal - using temperatures
Cable control - using motor control
Magnetic - using magnets
Chemical - using reactions
Photonic - using light
Biological - using living cells
Hybrid systems - multiple sources in tandem
 
An incomplete list of things people have used to make soft robots:
Fabric
Silicone or other rubbers
Flexible plastic
Plastic films
Metallic films
Paper
Carbon fiber
Silly Putty
Shape-changing alloys
Electroactive polymers
Liquid metals
Gelatin or Gluten
Cell tissue
 

Chris and Elecia talk about internetting your thing, motivating yourself with cheese, a pile of scrabble letters, an electric ouija board, and a supervillain origin story.
Elecia will be on a Memfault Panel on June 1, 2023: From Concept to Launch: What It Takes to Build and Ship a New Device 
Elecia was on Alpenglow’s Industries Solder Sesh #60 with Carrie Sundra. See the highlights (or the whole thing) on YouTube.
Chris has been working on building a baritone ukulele from a StewMac kit.
The conversation about uninteresting projects reminded Elecia of one of her favorite blog posts: Resilience Is a Skill 
Classpert will be offering a self-paced version of Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course. Sign up on Classpert to be notified about the details.
The O’Reilly Learning System will have the first looks of the second edition of Making Embedded Systems. The full book should be out in the fall.
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Carl Bugeja makes actuators out of PCBs, puts them to work flapping origami bird wings (or moving robot rovers), and takes videos of the whole process. Oh, and get this, self-soldering circuits. 
First, origami: flap actuators video. Your source for the PCB actuators: flexar.io
Carl’s YouTube channel is filled with hardware, software, successes, and misses. Check out his tiny foldable rover and the self-soldering circuit. His projects are open source so you can find the information on github.com/CarlBugeja
Carl has a site (carlbugeja.com) and shows his projects on Instagram instagram.com/carl_bugeja
Elecia worked on a zero-heat-flux, deep tissue temperature measurement system.
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We spoke with Chris Gammell about IoT, podcasting, relaxing, and learning. Chris works at Golioth.io. They have a neat blog that talks about reference designs, Zephyr RTOS, and making products.
We talked about ESP chips which are made by Espressif. The ESP32 line is RISC-V.
Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)
Some YouTube channels we discussed:
Wendover Productions: explaining stuff
CGP Grey, especially the recent one about vexillogy and US state flags
Blacktail Studio: Soothing woodworking
Adam Neely: music theory
Shawn Hymel on Digikey’s channel explaining continuous integration and delivery: Intro to CI/CD
The H note in music
Want to know more about self-paced Making Embedded Systems? Sign up for the waitlist at Classpert.
Want to learn electronics? Check out Chris Gammell’s Contextual Electronics.
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Chris and Elecia talk about ChatGPT, conferences, online compilers, and Ardupilot.
Compiler Explorer: godbolt.org (and function pointer example)
Jupyter Notebooks with colab: colab.research.google.com/ (and one of Elecia’s origami pattern generator collabs)
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Conferences and happenings:
Hackaday Prize
Embedded Online Conference : late April, online
Open Hardware Summit 2023: end of April in NYC, NY
Teardown 2023 | Crowd Supply: late June in Portland, OR
SEMICON West: July in San Francisco, CA 
embedded world North America: October 2024, Austin, TX

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We spoke with Charlyn Gonda about making things glow, dealing with imposter syndrome, and using origami.
Charlyn’s website is charlyn.codes, the projects we talked about are documented there. You can find her on Instagram (@chardane) and Mastodon (https://leds.social/@charlyn).
Adafruit came up a lot in this episode. 
NeoPixel Jewel
DotStar High Density 8x8 Grid
SAMD21 QT Py and RP2040 QT Py
Adafruit IO 
Jason Koon’s Fibonacci displays are mesmerizing. Check them out on Jason’s website www.evilgeniuslabs.org or acquire them on Tindie. It can be controlled with the Pixelblaze.
Sonobe modules in origami
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