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Welcome, Elecia White of Logical Elegance and the Making Embedded Systems podcast (and book)!
- Elecia’s wonderful book is called “Making Embedded Systems” and is published by O’Reilly. You can get a discount by going to this site and using the code ‘authd’
- The notebooks discussed are the SNCO 2001
- Her career so far has taken her to the depths of management and back. She was a full time manager at Shotspotter.
- Dave loves it when his reputation precedes him to an interview (shocker!), Elecia doesn’t.
- Want to get into embedded? Start with Arduino.
- Elecia sees lots of projects using the Cortex-M3, was surprised the Cortex-M0 didn’t do better.
- Unless a software stack is required (ethernet, bluetooth), Elecia doesn’t like RTOS’s because they often still don’t run fast enough (or aren’t deterministic enough).
- She has worked wit the c2000/Piccolo family and likes it for math heavy operations because of the DSP.
- The compilers aren’t getting any less expensive…or better. She prefers the GUI of Visual Studio but no embedded IDEs seem to have the same functionality.
- Power optimization is a challenging/fun part of Elecia’s jobs as well.
- She worked on some of the Fitbit devices out in the market today (one, flex, force).
- Also some of the toy lines at LeapFrog, such as the Violet.
- A common frustration among embedded engineers is when people expect embedded systems to be like their iPhones.
- Self commenting code is something to strive for, but is unrealistic.
- Elecia believes commented out code snippets should be deleted (and tracked by revision control).
- “If code is the main meeting that is happening, comments are the backchatter that happens between engineers over IM”
- She doesn’t dislike Git, the processing being used when she first started with it was poor.
- El likes touch feedback and sees haptics as a new area for innovation, especially for VR/AR.
- Writing a book is tough…she did it 3-5 hours a day for 6 months…while consulting!
- Making Embedded Systems was similar to the O’Reilly Head First series.
- Going to be at the EE Live event in April? You can go watch Elecia do a teardown and give a talk about IoT being disappointing.
- Elecia and Christopher have a Nest Thermostat and a Smoke Detector and they aren’t quite living up to expectations. At least not $3.2B expectations from the consumer perspective.
It was great to have Elecia come tell us more about the embedded world and about her vast experience in the field! Be sure to check out her podcast and all of the wonderful guests and banter on the show!
Added extra, which Dave thinks is hilarious: The Choke-A-Chicken Novelty Toy.
Basic rule with the corporations *Free* C-compilers is that they suck on making code. For example Microchip 8-bit Free-version produces over double the code size (and hald the speed) of the real compiler. So essentially they take their money back by selling bigger/faster parts.
Come to the wonderful world of AVR’s eheh.
Dave, your voice is fine, TBH it’s actually mellowed out a LOT since you started, the first EEVblog video I saw reminded me immediately of this; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LUNBIKe3is but these days, you’re fine.
Even if it did sound different, you’re a good speaker, casual and are pretty damn eloquent, which is far more important than a how the voice actually sounds!
Elecia worked so well versus Dave. I cried from laughter. Great show.
One of the best shows ever! The three of your together are a great. I just ordered Elecia’s book and download her podcast starting from January.
Well Done
Dave, I’m sure that someone has clued you in, but look in the Urban Dictionary for your Chicken … thing.
An Aussie spin on – “The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.” George Bernard Shaw.
Dave and Chris definitely have good radio voices in at least one aspect: I can hear you quite clearly although I’m riding my bike close to trafficked roads. Elecia’s voice does not get through as easy, which makes it harder for me to listen to her podcast.
Also, I can definitely notice that you have more experience at this, as the amp hour has a good flow and almost never pauses with “uuum”s. Maybe it’s because you are two hosts.
Anyway, keep up the good work everyone!
great show! so entertaining as usual. I just have to say this.
This is a podcast about electronics. your guest just said she has an electric car..
!!
an electric car! not many people have those so….. why didn’t you guys talk about it? what kind? how does she like it?
Beuller?
hopefully you can have her back someday or Dave could go on her show : )
I really enjoyed listening to 2 of my favorite electronics podcasts mashed together.
I agree with Elecia that AVR micros are adorable especially if you program them with .assembly. I prefer to code for the AVR with assembly rather than C and it would never even occur to me to use floating point on an AVR unless I had a real good reason. I love getting away with bit shifting or using the hardware multiplier instead of actually using a math routine.
The choker-chicken-connected-to-an-ipad already exists! It is called the Furby Boom. Sagan needs one, if only so Dave can do a teardown on it.
Also the concept of a game as a veneer on top of useful work (tetris as a facade on top of board layout) is described in Neal Stephenson’s book REAMDE, a highly recommended prescient techno-thriller. It is the natural evolution of gold farming as we figure out how to gamify things like Mechanical Turk.
Is there somewhere I can buy the book from in the UK and still use the discount code?
Only electronically: if you use the EELIVE one at OReilly.com, you get the PDF for 50% off (until April something), the one on the show is the same discount and lasts longer (forever!).
Great show like always!
I could actually hear Elicia this time. I have a hard time hearing her on her show, the volume level is too low. Did you guys lend her your audio recording equipment?
We just compress the hell out of our sound, so that helps. I notice on her show that the laughing is often the loudest part. I asked Chris (producer) about it and he said he doesn’t like the Levelator (which we use), but maybe I’ll encourage him to use more compression.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDzTHfuEKBI
I was listening to this from episode one for about a month, almost continuously and just got to this episode. It is the only thing that I may listen to in my wireless headphone while I’m working and it is a nice solution for the problem that Scott Driscoll mentioned a couple of weeks ago (when you work on something from home for an extended period of time with no human contact). Thank you guys. This is the first time that you interview someone who calls herself an “embedded engineer”. Well, I missed that episode and I hope that there is a way for me to contact her for advice. BTW, I think I’m going to switch to her podcast from now on 😉