Crossovers and Call-ins

Welcome, Elecia and Chris White from Embedded.fm! Our 3rd Call-in Show for The Amp Hour, this one focused more on the embedded side of things with some other electronics thrown in!

• Elecia is no longer working on mice containment but is still playing around with BB8. The newest project is disassembling tiny quadcopters. Check out the mentioned diagram here and ping her with any thoughts using the contact link on embedded.fm.
• Chris asked if El/Chris had seen the Seeed WIO (kickstarter). It's interesting because of the app configuration of devices.
• Guest calls!
  • Steve Dalton (@spidie)
    • called in asking about pro makers and how they are perceived by traditional engineers.
    • He was a former guest on episode 63 of Embedded.fm
    • The Maker Pro book
  • Lee Wiggins (@wigman27)
    • He wanted to know when to jump out of Arduino.
    • Lee has a popular Dummy load that is on instructables and Tindie.
    • Elecia recommends using mbed
    • Lee has used a SPI display from Adafruit in the past.
  • Stuart McAndrew (@ssshocker)
    • Stuart wanted to know whether to use external or internal watchdog timers.
    • Jack Ganssle wrote about watchdogs.
    • He is working on the ozQube, a 5cmx5cm satellite.
  • Jonathan McDonald (@5onathan)
    • Jon currently uses Flow code 5 and wants to know which language to switch to next.
    • The current software stack is used for tasks like controlling ladders on mining equipment.
    • Chris W suggests starting with Arduino, as Jon already has experience with system design.
  • Chris Svec (@christophersvec)
    • Chris was also a guest on Embedded.fm in the past, episode 78.
    • He wanted to know what products should exist for embedded that don't already.
    • Elecia pointed out that there are many product/services that the founders started to "scratch their own itch". OSHpark, Small Batch Assembly, Tindie were given as examples.
    • Clang is a newer open source compiler, as opposed to using GCC.
    • Chris always wanted a serial output logging system that uses wifi, like a wifi bus pirate. It doesn't appear that anything like this exists but the ESP8266 is a good candidate for getting something working.

It was great having Chris and Elecia on the show again to help answer questions! Thanks to everyone who called in and chatted with us!

Thanks to Jeremy for the picture of the school bus