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• Hardware.io conference for security and international attendees |
• Importance of in-person (IRL) events and conferences |
**Jerod Santo:** Alright, we are here with Elecia White from Embedded.fm. Elecia, welcome to the Changelog. |
**Elecia White:** Hi. It's nice to be here. |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice to have you. See, you are on the other side of the microphone, so to speak, as a longtime podcaster. I think you've done 491 episodes, if the most recent one on your homepage is, in fact, the highest number. |
**Elecia White:** I think it's 492 today. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh. So there must be a new one out today. What's the most recent? |
**Elecia White:** Octopus Army. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, I see it right there. You know what? I scrolled right past it to "Oscillators Oscillating Other Oscillators", which is a great title. |
**Elecia White:** Like you, we like our titles to be amusing. |
**Jerod Santo:** I love that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. |
**Jerod Santo:** And you're here today because of a Changelog++ listener; shout-out to Andrew O'Brien, who pointed us in your direction, a longtime listener of yours and ours, and thought "Hey, let's get them together and have them talk." So we're thankful to Andrew for pointing us your way, and we're thankful to you f... |
**Elecia White:** That is my brand. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's your brand. |
**Elecia White:** I guess so. I never really intended it, but that's where it is... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well, you started a podcast called Embedded, so at a certain point you decided to embrace it, at least. |
**Elecia White:** Actually, the podcast was originally called "Making Embedded Systems", which is the title of my book. But then everybody just kept calling it Embedded, and we're like "Fine, okay..." And then NPR came and said "We want to have Embedded, too." And we're like "No, it's ours." But actually, we just said ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Cool. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What was their approach to ask you about having Embedded? What does that mean? What's the backstory? |
**Elecia White:** Well, okay. Picture this. You are just sitting there and doing your work, coding away, and you get an email from NPR... And it's real NPR people, and they say "We'd like to talk to you", and you're like "Oh my God, it's my big moment. Finally, engineers are going to get to be on NPR, and we're going t... |
**Jerod Santo:** Like, during your interview with her? |
**Elecia White:** Yes, yes. She was in the NPR studio, and she was like "Yeah, I have to go. People are doing this." |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, wow. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Huh. |
**Elecia White:** So now we're Embedded, or Embedded.fm. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So they also have Embedded. |
**Elecia White:** Yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There's two Embedded podcasts out there. |
**Elecia White:** There are. One is about how engineering is pretty cool, and how technology is interesting, and how you can make cool devices that interact with the world... And the other is about all the depressing stuff that happens in the world. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:10\] Well, that's a sad dichotomy. |
**Elecia White:** I hope ours is the former. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I would stop at one. |
**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, I was interested in that first one. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** It sounded cool to me. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's interesting, I think -- what I think Embedded is, is this idea of creating... I would say more so in the last, I don't know -- maybe since the Raspberry Pi came out, this idea of "I can do things myself. I can take this small thing, that is just a single-board computer, and I can learn to pro... |
**Elecia White:** I like to say that I write software for things that aren't computers. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Elecia White:** That pushes the definition onto "What is a computer?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You've got my interest. Go. |
**Elecia White:** If you're working on like servers, then developing an iPhone app is Embedded. But if you've been doing 8-bit microcontrollers, anything with an RTOS doesn't really feel embedded. So it is definitely a loose definition, but the whole software for things that aren't computers actually makes you think ab... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a good explanation of it, but I was thinking a very simple one from my recent Christmas holiday... We got my oldest son some eDrums. So he has a drum kit; as you can imagine, an eight-year-old going on nine, banging on some drums is cool. But it's also, as a parent, not always the appropriate... |
**Elecia White:** Exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...and maybe I could even write my own software for it, if there was a way to. Is that part of what you do as embedded, is like you start to find ways to add to the non-computer computer? |
**Elecia White:** Well, I mean, I do it as a career. So most of the time people bring me ideas, and I help them build their systems. I may have taken apart a few toys... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. |
**Elecia White:** \[11:41\] BB-8 was one of my favorite ones when it first came out. Figuring out how to get its IMU data and maybe control it so that it did weird things... That was fun. So I don't do a lot of hacking and reverse-engineering, except for my own amusement. But the same tools are necessary. The way that ... |
**Jerod Santo:** So what are some non-computers that you've programmed? |
**Elecia White:** Well, I have a autonomous underwater vehicle that I worked on last year, and it wanders around its area. For example, one is in the Monterey Bay, in California. And it checks in with all of the various sensors that are on the seafloor. I also have worked on some of the sensors on the seafloor, measuri... |
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