497 episodes

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).

Embedded Logical Elegance

    • Technology
    • 4.8 • 176 Ratings

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).

    Swimming Through Nutritious Slurry

    Swimming Through Nutritious Slurry

    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.
    Transcript
    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
     

    • 1 hr 6 min
    Soldering the Ukulele

    Soldering the Ukulele

    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.
    Transcript

    • 1 hr 1 min
    Little Squiggles All Around

    Little Squiggles All Around

    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.
    Transcript

    • 1 hr 1 min
    All Sorts of Weird Problems

    All Sorts of Weird Problems

    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.
    Transcript

    • 1 hr 5 min
    446: World's Best PB&J

    446: World's Best PB&J

    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)
    Sign up for the Embedded newsletter! Support us on Patreon.
    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

    Transcript

    • 54 min
    I Do Not Like Blinking

    I Do Not Like Blinking

    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
    Transcript

    • 1 hr 11 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
176 Ratings

176 Ratings

Arlie K ,

A newfound favorite!

I love this show! Embedded consistently offers compelling conversations with interesting folks in STEM, giving you fantastic insights in an easy-to-consume package. It's like having coffee with your smartest friends... highly recommend!

jan-michael-vincent ,

Great Geek Podcast

This podcast is great, if you’re a geek like me.

Always time for empanadas ,

For all embedded enthusiasts out there

I really enjoy the discussions about embedded systems. Elecia and Chris are super engaging and entertaining.

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