Embedded

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 discussion, we talked about some other books and media:
Nonfiction:

Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI by Ayanna Howard (Embedded episodes 367: Data of Our Lives and 207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head)

Embodied AI Safety: Reimagining safety engineering for artificial intelligence in physical systems by Philip Koopman (related Embedded episode 514: Just Turn Off All the Computers) 

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

Waki Kamino's research on robot umpires: Beyond Accuracy: Rethinking the Value of AI in Decision-Making Through Baseball's Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) System (or see the summary in the Cornell Chronicle: AI on deck: assessing impact of MLB's new ball-strike system)

Fiction:

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chalmers 

Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries Book 8) by Martha Wells (Embedded episode 432: Robot Bechdel Test) 

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

The Good Place TV show was mentioned a few times as an introduction to ethics for people who prefer their education crammed with amusement.

Critical Role web series

There was a discussion about water use in AI. Tom recommends Why is Everyone So Wrong About AI Water Use?? while Elecia unsurprisingly mispronounces synecdoche. 
Tom is a computer science professor at the Colorado School of Mines where he runs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab (MIRROR lab). See also Tom's page on mines.edu.
The final quote is from an essay written by Karel Capek and translated to English in in The Man Who Coined the Word "Robot" Defends Himself - IEEE Spectrum.

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 Part 2 which discusses the MITRE embedded CTF (Capture the Flag) challenge. See his EmbeddedRelated profile and Digikey profile. And Nathan's excellent Embedded for Everyone Github repo.
Nathan recommends The Hardware Hacking Handbook by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn. It is an excellent resource on embedded security. We spoke with Jasper about the book in 431: Becoming More of a Smurf and with Colin about the Chip Whisperer in 286: Twenty Cans of Gas.
The European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has specific features that are required to be implemented by all devices that want the safety CE label. This is important for products shipping to Europe.
If you are going to the Embedded Online Conference, you can get a discount with the code JONES100. Nathan will be giving a workshop on the Chip Whisperer Nano. (Recent guest Mark Omo will also be presenting: Security for the Rest of Us: What Matters and Where to Start.)
Another conference for the security-minded is Hardwear.io which is in Santa Clara, CA, USA at the end of May and in Amsterdam in November.
Last year, Nathan spoke about Exception Handling for EOC 2025 (video). Elecia mentioned her own Creating Chaos and Hard Faults from EOC 2024.
The Embedded Slack book club is reading The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition. Well, some of us are just watching. 
The quote came from Elizabeth Bear's Ancestral Night (White Space) which is part of a series with some neat mechanics around brain chemistry. 
Transcript

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 capacitive touch (capacitive touch was used on the globe as well… the latest globe also has a screen).

Why does Elecia want an award? Who knows? But right now, she's getting ready for a listener to nominate the show (Chris and Elecia) for IEEE's Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. Probably. But we've got nominators and endorsers so that's mostly sorted. She also signed Embedded up for the Women Podcasters Award which is a popularity contest. You can vote here: www.womenpodcasters.com/awards-voting. The show is under the Science Podcasters category.
Some things we like:
Ctrl-R: In a command shell, ctrl-r searches your history. Better than ! because you don't have to remember as much.

Data bars in Excel: This can create a plot of your data in the column.

Merlin Bird ID: Want to know what bird is making that sound? Want to know the name of the bird you just saw? Merlin Bird ID is a free app that is amazing.

Plucky Cards: Want to have a 1:1 where you talk about more than your status? Choose a card, any card. Or maybe just look through and have a 1:1 by yourself

Just reading about Bunnie Huang's new RISCV board Dabao Evaluation Board for Baochip-1x taught us things! We're not sure what we'd use it for yet but it does spark a few ideas. 
The Embedded.fm Patreon Slack book club is reading Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition.
Talking about open source projects and governance models, we referenced three contributing guidelines: Valetudo, ESPHome, and Zephyr. Some later research led to Leadership and Governance | Open Source Guides and presentation by Cornelius Schumacher – The spectrum of FOSS governance models (Slides). The link between the politics associated with the size of companies and the open source governance models clearly needs a bit more thought.
Transcript

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 @[email protected] 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