Carles Cufí spoke with us about Zephyr, Nordic, learning, open source development, and corporate goals.

Carles had some great suggestions for learning Zephyr:

• Memfault Interrupt Practical Zephyr blog series

• Nordic’s Developer Academy

• Zephyr’s Discord server

• Zephyr’s YouTube channel (@ZephyrProject), sorted by views

• • Macrobatics term is from Zephyr Devicetree Mysteries, Solved - Marti Bolivar, Nordic Semiconductor

There is also the Zephyr website for a full picture. And various Nordic tutorials (see nRF5340 Audio applications).

Carles was an author on Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy: Tools and Techniques for Low-Power Networking. The cover animal is a mousebird.

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Jan Rychter joined us to talk about building a company, electronic components, and software design.

Jan is the founder and engineer at PartsBox.com. If you are interested in the meta-analysis of the data, check out his article on the Top Ten Hobby Parts and the Electronic Component Database,

You can find out more about Jan through his website (jan.rychter.com), LinkedIn, or Mastodon.

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Kwabena Agyeman joined Chris and Elecia to talk about optimization, cameras, machine learning, and vision systems.

Kwabena is the head of OpenMV (openmv.io), an open source and open hardware system that runs machine learning algorithms on vision data. It uses MicroPython as a development environment so getting started is easy.

Their github repositories are under github.com/openmv. You can find some of the SIMD details we talked about on the show:

• 150% faster: openmv/src/omv/imlib/binary.c

• 1000% faster: openmv/src/omv/imlib/filter.c

• Double Pumping: openmv/src/omv/modules/py_tv.c

Kwabena has been creating a spreadsheet of different algorithms in camera frames per second (FPS) for Arm processors: Performance Benchmarks - Google Sheets. As time moves on, it will grow. Note: this is a link on the OpenMV website under About. When M55 stuff hits the market expect 4-8x speed gains.

The OpenMV YouTube channel is also a good place to get more information about the system (and vision algorithms).

Kwabena spoke with us about (the beginnings of) OpenMV on Embedded 212: You Are in Seaworld.

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Elecia is giving a free talk for O'Reilly to advertise her Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition book. The talk will be an introduction to embedded systems, geared towards software engineers who are suddenly holding a device and want to program it. The talk is May 23, 2024 at 9:00 AM PDT. Sign up here. A video will be available afterward for folks who sign up.

Lee Wilkins joined Chris and Elecia to talk about The Open Source Hardware Association, the Open Hardware Summit, and zine culture.

The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) provides certification and support for creating open source hardware. The Open Hardware Summit is happening May 3-4, 2024. It is in Montreal, Canada. It also has many online components including a Discord and online Unconferece. All videos are available for later watching on YouTube.

Lee’s personal page is leecyb.org. Their zines are available in their shop.

Elecia mentioned enjoying There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.

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Chris and Elecia talk about the Embedded Online Conference, their experience learning Zephyr, and some listener questions.

Elecia will be presenting on Creating Chaos and Hard Faults at the Embedded Online Conference, Apr 29 - May 3, 2024. Some other talks that look interesting:

• The Power of a Look-up Table by Nathan Jones

• Zephyr Tools To Debug Hardware by Chris Gammell

• Breaking Good: Why Virtual Hardware Prefers Rough Handling by Uri Shaked

• Beyond Coding: Toward Software Development Expertise by Marian Petre

Use the EMBEDDEDFM coupon for a discount (or if your whole team is going, check out the group discounts).

Elecia’s book (Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition) is shipping (Amazon or Bookshop.org).

Zephyr is pretty amazing.

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Logic gates and origami? Professor Inna Zakharevich joined us to talk about Turing complete origami crease patterns.

We started talking about Turing completeness which led to a Conway’s Game of Life-like 2D cellular automaton called Rule 110 (Wikipedia) which can be implemented with logic gates (AND, OR, NOT). These logic gates can be implemented as creases in paper (with the direction of the crease indicating 0 or 1).

The paper describing the proof is called Flat Origami is Turing Complete (arxiv and PDF). Quanta Magazine has a summary article: How to Build an Origami Computer.

Inna’s page at Cornell University also has the crease patterns for the logic gates (pdf).

Inna is an aficionado of the origami work by Satoshi Kamiya who creates complex and lifelike patterns.

Some other origami mentioned:

• Origami Stegosaurus by John Montroll YouTube Folding video (Part 1 of 3)

• Ilan Garibi’s Pineapple Tessellation (PDF instructions)

• Eric Gjerde Spread Hex Origami Tessellation (This also has the equilateral triangle grid needed to fold Inna’s gate logic)

• Peter Engel

• Amanda Ghassaei’s Origami Simulator (Mooser’s is under Examples->Origami)

Some other math mentioned:

• Veritasium’s Math's Fundamental Flaw talks about Goerthe’s Incompleteness Theorem

• Physical Logic Game: Turing Tumble - Build Marble-Powered Computers

• Mathematics of Paper Folding (Wikipedia)

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Philip Koopman joined us to talk about how modulo 255 vs 256 makes a huge difference in checksum error detection, how to get the most out of your checksum or CRC, and why understanding how they work is worth the effort.

Philip has recently published Understanding Checksums and Cyclic Redundancy Checks. He’s better known for Better Embedded System Software as well as his two books about safety and autonomous vehicles:

• The UL 4600 Guidebook: What to Include in an Autonomous Vehicle Safety Case

• How Safe Is Safe Enough?: Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety

Phil’s YouTube page has a number of videos with great visuals to go along with his books. He also has three(!) blogs:

• Safe Autonomy

• Better Embedded System SW

• Checksum and CRC Central (including a post on checksum speed comparison)

Currently, Phil is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (his page there). You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Elecia read (and give 2.5 stars to) Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature by Marcus du Sautoy: “Interesting but uneven, I kept reading to find out what horrible things math profs do to their children in the name of fun. Worth it when I finally got to a small section with Claude Shannon (and Richard Hamming). It didn’t help with this podcast but it was neat.”

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Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.

Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition came out today! Chris and Elecia talk about the changes, the writing, but not the eldritch horror. Then we talk about pianos and origami.

The electronic version is available now on Amazon, ebooks.com, Google Play and where you get your ebooks. The paper copy will be out in about two weeks, you can preorder now. It is also available on the O’Reilly Learning System, here is a 30-day Trial.

See the Embedded.fm Origami and Flex PCBs newsletter, sign up for future newsletters here.

Memfault is hosting its first launch week of the year! On Tuesday, March 12th, Memfault CEO François Baldassari will showcase how to evaluate the health and performance of your embedded devices clearly within Memfault's observability platform. Join the webinar to discover how simple it is to monitor three necessary device measures: stability, battery, and connectivity. Register today!