PODCAST · technology
Embedded
by Logical Elegance
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
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536: I've Seen a Giraffe
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...
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535: The You in the Machine
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...
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534: I Think We'll Add a Head
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…
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533: The Garage Is Open
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...
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532: It's Still Real Fire
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...
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531: Sequestering the Mess
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…
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530: A Living Highlighter
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...
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529: The Narwhal Looked Amazing
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...
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528: Goldfish Chunks
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…
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527: At The Jellyfish Conference
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...
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526: Take A Taste Of Engineers
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...
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525: Some Sort of Metal
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...
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524: This Isn't a Movie
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...
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523: Bad Experience With Donuts
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...
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522: The Information Is In Poop
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...
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521: Are You The Tiny Domino?
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...
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520: All Sorts of Interesting Facts About Teeth
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...
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519: The Password Is All Zeros
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...
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518: Nothing We Can Do About Frogs
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…
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517: A Direct, Sensible Podcast
Nathan Jones and Chris Svec give Chris and Elecia their 2025 performance review. Donations went to Elevate Tutoring, an organization that provides funding and support to low-income and first-generation college students as well as free STEM tutoring for underserved schools. Embedded has already…
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516: Voices From the Cataclysms of the Universe
Sophi Kravitz joined us to talk about art, science, and engineering. You can see Messages from Space on Sophi's website /sophikravitz.com). A subset of the artwork had a short stay for a demo at Chabot Space & Science Center. The completed work will be shown in 2026. Sophi mentioned collaborating...
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515: Script Boomers
Nick Kartsioukas joined us to talk about security in embedded systems. Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is the primary database to check your software libraries, tools, and OSs: cve.org. Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP, owasp.org) has information on how to improve...
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514: Just Turn Off All the Computers
Philip Koopman joined us to talk about embedded systems becoming embodied and intelligent. We focus on the safety considerations of making an intelligent and embodied device. Phil's new book is Embodied AI Safety: Reimagining safety engineering for artificial intelligence in physical systems. It...
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513: I'm Sorry You Learned Something
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...
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512: What if I Didn't Stop?
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...
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511: Forty Trillion Divides
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...
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510: The Secret Chip
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...
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509: Swarmed by Engineers
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...
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508: Descartes' Demon
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...
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507: Turn Our Data Into Predators
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.…
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506: How Do I Fit a Whale Into an Apartment Building?
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...
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505: Potato in a Number Field
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…
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504: The Robot Was Expecting It
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…
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503: The Tiniest Laptops
Emily Lovell spoke with us about teaching how to contribute to open source, including her own experience creating the LilyTiny as a Master's student and researching the impact as a PhD student. The LilyTiny work was done in conjunction with Leah Buechley (Embedded episode 382). See the paper The...
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502: Chat, J'ai Peté!
Chris and Elecia talk about Murderbot, LLMs (AI), bikes, control algorithms, and fancy math. The website with the ecology jobs is wildlabs.net from 501: inside the Armpit of Giraffe with Meredith Palmer and Akiba.. The algorithm Elecia mentioned was from Patent US7370713B1. The Control Bootcamp...
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501: Inside the Armpit of a Giraffe
We spoke with ecologist Dr. Meredith Palmer and embedded engineer Akiba about lions, terror, and technology. Akiba works for FreakLabs.org on global conservation projects. We talked about their Boombox which Meredith uses to create experiments to map the landscape of fear in predator/prey...
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500: Nerding Out About the Ducks
Komathi Sundaram spoke with us about her enthusiasm for tests and test automation. We talked about the different joys of testing vs. development, setting up CI servers, and different kinds of tests including unit, hardware-in-the-loop, and simulation. It may sound dry but we had a lot of fun....
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499: This Is Your Problem
We spoke with Janet Hansen about the world of professional costumery (with electronics) and becoming an artist. Janet's business is Enlighted where you can find custom illuminated clothing as well as Janet's ready-made art. Janet's personal site is janethansen.com which is more focused on her...
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498: To Consume Stickers
At the end of this week's show, Elecia reads a Winnie the Pooh poem as Cookie Monster death metal. Before that, Chris and Elecia chat about mental health, journaling, personal projects, and listener questions. Please sign up for the Nordic Giveaway! You can also sign up for the Embedded…
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497: Everyone Likes Tiny
OpenMV has a new Kickstarter so CEO Kwabena Agyeman chatted with us about more powerful (and smaller!) programmable cameras. See OpenMV's site for their existing cameras. See their (already funded!) kickstarter page for the super powerful N6 and the ridiculously small AE3. Note that OpenMV still…
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496: Beauty, Elegance, Consistency
Professor Shimon Schocken spoke with us about teaching computer science from NAND logic gates to arithmetic units, micro assembly, virtual machines, compilers, operating systems, and the Tetris games. We also talk about good design, good interfaces, and good tests. Shimon's book is Elements of...
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495: Shortcut the Difficulties of Reality
Professor Cindy Harnett spoke to us about new and different sensors and actuators, primarily designed for soft robotics and fabricated with relatively low cost materials. Cindy is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Louisville where she runs the Harnett Lab.…
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494: All Tech Is Wearable
Debra Ansell joined us to talk about finding friends and exchanging neat gifts, accidentally tricking people into making unmanufacutable boards, and happy, blinking lights. Debra is usually known by the moniker GeekMomProjects (also her website is geekmomprojects.com). She has been writing for…
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493: Put the Peeps in the Chili Pot
Elecia and Chris talk with each other about the state of Chris' mind, what makes an embedded developer stand out, "LEGO block" based design, unit tests, and astronomy. Whew! Elecia was recently on the Changelog podcast, talking about the world of embedded systems. Chris has been working with...
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492: Octopus Army
Nathan Jones chatted with us about his proposal for a computer architecture book based on a 4-bit computer. Nathan found the 4-bit computer in the Hackaday SuperCon 2022 badge and was amazed by some of the ideas that folks implemented (see SuperCon Badge Hacking Awards Ceremony). Nathan spoke at...
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491: Oscillators Oscillating Other Oscillators
Chris and Elecia spoke with Kirk Pearson about running audio-electronic-art workshops, interesting sounds, and their book Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos. Find the book and a whole kit of parts on the Dogbotic Merch page. A few clicks from there…
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490: Wait Until Physics Has Happened
Nikolaus Correll spoke with us about robots, teaching robotics, and writing books about robots. Nikolaus is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, see his lab website (or his Wikipedia page). We discussed Nikolaus' Introduction to Robotics with Webots Specialization…
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489: Constructive Cat
Chris and Elecia discuss her origami art show, ponder PRs for solo developers, attempt to explain GDB debugging, and make a to-do list for getting rid of Kanga. Elecia is having an Origami Octopus Garden art show at the Aptos Public Library for the month of November, 2024. The postcard...
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488: Two Slices of Complimentary Bread
Adrienne Braganza Tacke spoke with us about her book Looks Good To Me: Constructive Code Reviews. It is about how to make code reviews more useful, effective, and congenial. Adrienne's book is available now as an ebook at manning.com or a paper copy later in the year (Amazon link). Check out the...
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487: Focus on Fizzing
Chris and Elecia chat about simulated robots, portents in the sky, the futility of making plans, and grad school. A problem with mics led us to delay the show with Shimon Schoken from Nand2Tetris (co-author of Elements of The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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).
HOSTED BY
Logical Elegance
CATEGORIES
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