Embedded

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 the show, when developing a project far from where it will be deployed, there are many common issues. The Lessons Learned chapter of Sonia's recent book gives an excellent introduction to the unexpected environment far from the comfort of desks. The book is (free online!) Engineering Field Testing of Non-Sewered Sanitation Systems: Compendium of Lessons Learned, See Sonia Grego at Duke Electrical & Computer Engineering, the Smart Toilet Lab as well as Sonia's company Coprata. Some terms that came up in the show: Coprolite: fossilized excrement (Wikipedia entry has great(?) pics!) Scatological: material, humor, or language that relates directly to bodily waste Helminths: parasitic worms including roundworms, tapeworms, and fluke (oh look. more great images on Wiki entry) Poop jokes Transcript

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 adventures on his blog, The Life of Kenneth. Some of the posts related to this show are: Creating an Internet Exchange for Even More Fun and Less Profit Building an Anycast Secondary DNS Service Building the Micro Mirror Free Software CDN We also mention FCIX aka fcix.net or the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange You can also find Kenneth at @kwf@social.afront.org where you will find more about half-dollars, nickels, and trains. If you also secretly long to run a locomotive, take a look at the Run-A-Locomotive program at WPRM. The title is related to the XKCD comic 2347: Dependency. Transcript

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 UncertainManager: Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Resilient Management Manager's Path Soft Skills Engineering podcast Hang in there! You are probably doing better than you think. Audio books are great! In the US, many libraries have digital libraries with extensive audio collections. There are several apps with different catalogs for the same library Libby, Kanopy, Hoopla, and Palace (check out the California shelf at Palace!). And since you are probably going to ask about the games Elecia doesn't play: Turing Complete shows how logic and logic gates work, building up a processor. Zachtronics' TIS-100 is another logic and processor design game. It is a little ugly in spots (too real world) but it is a really deep dive into learning assembly. It is the precursor to Shenzhen IO but harder to finish. Zachtronics' Shenzhen IO is about circuits and how they work . Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation is about optimizing resources, it turns out to be a lot like assembly programming. Should you have gotten here because you wanted facts about teeth, Elecia had been enjoying Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans. Transcript

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 involving the lock maker's lawyers bullying them and how the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a Coders' Rights Project to support security research. As mentioned in the show, the US Cyber Trust Mark baseline has a very straightforward checklist; NISTIR 8259 is the overall standard, NISTIR 8259A is the technical checklist, NISTIR 8259B is the non-technical (process/maintenance) checklist. Roughly the process is NISTIR 8259 -> Plan/Guidance; NISTIR 8259A -> Build; NISTIR 8259B -> Support. We discussed ETSI EN 303 645 V3.1.3 (2024-09) Cyber Security for Consumer Internet of Things: Baseline Requirement and the EU's CRA: Cyber Resilience Act which requires manufacturers to implement security by design, have security by default, provide free security updates, and protect confidentiality. See more here: How to prepare for the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA): A guide for manufacturers. We didn't mention Ghidra in the show specifically, but it is a tool for reverse engineering software: given a binary image, what was the code? Some of the safecracking was helped by the lock maker using the same processor in the PS4 which has many people looking to crack it. See fail0verflow :: PS4 Aux Hax 1: Intro & Aeolia for an introduction. Mark and James have presented multiple times at Hardwear.io, a series of conferences and webinars about security (not wearables). Some related highlights: 2024: Breaking Into Chips By Reading The Datasheet is about the exploit developed for the older lock version on the safes discussed in the show. USA 2025: Extracting Protected Flash With STM32-TraceRip is about STM32 exploits.

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 Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Australia. The AAT has an all sky camera where you can check in on a very dark sky. James was on Embedded Episode 172: Tell Forth You Me Please where we talked about the Forth programming language and his experiences with One Laptop Per Child. Transcript Unrelated to the AAT, Chris took this image of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) from his Zwo Seestar 50 over 9 hours (multiple days), stacking the images and processing the data.

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 sent in the match to the donations for a total of over $5000. Here is a list of all Embedded.fm episodes. We mentioned the Foldscope, a small but mighty microscope. Also, mentioned was the book If I Only Changed the Software, Why is the Phone on Fire? The show this week is sponsored by us. And you. Please consider supporting Embedded.fm on Ko-fi or Patreon. Or tell a friend about the show. Transcript

You can find the embedded.fm survey here: https://forms.gle/xPp8YkX8MXvgUENM7 and please consider donating to Elevate Tutoring here: http://donorbox.org/embedded-fm-supports-elevate-tutoring-866250. The survey will be up until the Dec 25th 2025. 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 with two sonic environment artists Sofy Yuditskaya and Ria Rajan. Geiger–Müller tube is an ionizing radiation detector. Cosmic rays move through space at nearly the speed of light, generally originating far away and long ago. You can also see them in a cloud chamber, like the one at San Francisco's Exploratorium. We also talked about using sculpting in Blender (there are many online video introductions). Sophi does EE consulting and system quality checking at her company Greenlight. The show this week is sponsored by us. And you. Please consider supporting Embedded.fm on Ko-fi or Patreon. Or tell a friend about the show. Transcript

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 security in all kinds of applications, including embedded application security. There are also cheatsheets, Nick particularly recommends Software Supply Chain Security - OWASP Cheat Sheet. Wait, what is supply chain security? Nick suggested a nice article on github.com: it is about your code and tools including firmware update, a common weak point in embedded device security. Want to try out some security work? There are capture the flag (CTF) challenges including the Microcorruption CTF (microcorruption.com) which is embedded security related. We also talked about the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge (also see Prior SANS Holiday Hack Challenges). This episode is brought to you by RunSafe Security. Working with C or C++ in your embedded projects? RunSafe Security helps you build safer, more resilient devices with build-time SBOM generation, vulnerability identification, and patented code hardening. Their Load-time Function Randomization stops the exploit of memory-based attacks, something we all know is much needed. Learn more at RunSafeSecurity.com/embeddedfm. Some other sites that have good information embedded security: This World Of Ours by James Mickens is an easy read about threat modelling Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is at cisa.gov and, among other things, they describe SBOMs in great detail National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) also provides guidance: Internet of Things (IoT) | NIST NIST Cybersecurity for IoT Program NIST SP800-213 IoT Device Cybersecurity Guidance for the Federal Government: Establishing IoT Device Cybersecurity Requirements There is a group of universities and organizations doing research into embedded security: National Science Foundation Center for Hardware and Embedded Systems Security and Trust (CHEST). Descriptive overview and the site is nsfchest.org European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) - Consumer IoT Security Camera Ubiquiti configuration issue (what not to do) Finally, Nick mentioned Stop The Bleed which provides training on how you can control bleeding, a leading cause of death. They even have a podcast (and we know you like those). Elecia followed up with Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT). Call your local fire department and ask about training near you! Transcript

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 uses robotaxis as an example as it discusses safety, security, human/computer interface, AI, and a bit of legal theory for tort negligence. If you'd like a taster, Phil gave a wonderful summary in his video: Keynote Talk: Embodied AI Safety This new book is intended for a wider (less devotedly technical) audience than his book How Safe Is Safe Enough?: Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety. Phil was last on the show in episode 473: Math Is Not the Answer where we spoke about his book Understanding Checksums and Cyclic Redundancy Checks Transcript Thank you! This episode is sponsored by you, our listeners! If you'd like to become members and get ad-free episodes as well as bonus shows, sign up at Patreon or Ko-Fi. Thanks for listening.

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

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 LilyTiny: A Case Study in Expanding Access to Electronic Textiles or watch the video. UCSC Open Source Program Office (note this is different from the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) that we spoke about with Carl Maltzahn (Episode 285). Emily recommended the curriculum from TeachingOpenSource.org. Emily’s other life is at EP Custom Pickups and Aberdeen Guitars. She spoke on a lutherie panel at NAMM. 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.