text stringlengths 0 2.68k |
|---|
**Jerod Santo:** Smart rocks? Is that what you call them? Smart rocks? |
**Elecia White:** Smart rocks, yes. |
**Jerod Santo:** Wow. Okay. Never heard of that. |
**Elecia White:** And then when something happens, when there's an event that causes a mudslide, or some weird currents happen, it monitors and it reports back to the little vehicle that wanders around the bay, and picks up all the data from all the sensors. |
So - I mean, those aren't entirely my projects. Those are working with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which is awesome... And they do lots of science and ocean-based technology. Let's see... What else? |
**Jerod Santo:** Can't top that one, can you? |
**Elecia White:** Well, I worked on a gunshot location system, where you sprinkle sensors and microphones around the city, and automatically call the police when there's a gunshot. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, that's cool. |
**Elecia White:** That was really cool technology, and had some amazing applications. I'm kind of glad I left... I mean, I am comfortable with the level of privacy associated with it, but I am less comfortable with how the company started being run. |
Children's toys... That was fun. I got to take some of my toys to a kindergarten, just volunteering. And one of them that I hated - it was a karaoke, and it was the most annoying toy. It would just sing constantly. And there was a voice changer that did not make anybody sound better. And I thought it was a dumb toy. I ... |
And I would take the toy to the kindergarten, and kids would play with them, and I'd watch, and it was fun. And then one of the boys, who was kind of behind, asked if he could take the karaoke home, and I was like "Good riddance." And a week later, he had caught up to his class. He had been really behind, but because s... |
I've worked on DNA scanners, twice now, actually... Once pre 1995, '98... Well, anyway, once when DNA scanners were really cool, and very hard. And more recently, when -- like, you can just make them on your desk. That progress has been just phenomenal and amazing. |
What else have I worked on...? I worked on inertial measurement units, which used to be the way, when I worked on them, that I would make anybody I was sitting next to in a plane just stop talking to me. "Oh yeah, I work on inertial measurement units." I could have said "I sell home insurance. Are you interested?" No, ... |
\[16:06\] But I didn't tell them what I was doing on this airplane... I was going to a racetrack, so that we could test them on high-speed vehicles, or airplanes, or any of the other places where inertial sensing becomes really interesting. |
This was the day before Wiimotes. And so the whole idea of accelerometers and gyroscopes as being interfaces was very different then. Now you flip over your phone, it turns on. That's what you expect. But how does it even know? I think sensors are probably my favorite area of embedded systems right now. |
**Jerod Santo:** You've done a lot of cool stuff. How did you get into this world? |
**Elecia White:** By accident. I mean, isn't that how it usually happens? |
**Jerod Santo:** Usually. |
**Elecia White:** So in college, I took applied CS courses, because I couldn't see the point of theoretical ones... And theoretical engineering, because I didn't really like any of the actual engineering. And what that gave me was Fourier and signal processing, as well as the ability to develop products. I went to HP, ... |
And as I kept going lower and lower in the stack, eventually I wandered over to HP Labs, and that was when we made DNA scanners. And I didn't know what I was getting into. My boss was just like -- or my perspective boss was like "You'll really enjoy this. I promise." And I was just like HP Labs. That is the best locati... |
And the first time I moved a motor -- because I told it to, not just because I powered on it something. But the first time it was under my control, it was magical. It was like, software can touch the world. Software can change physical things. It's not just zeros and ones. It's "Move this here. Read what's actually hap... |
So that's how I got into embedded, is I found out you can actually write software that changes things, and not just other software. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That moment of discovery is the fun part, right? When you get that "Oh man, I had no idea that's what that really meant." When you kind of get that taste. And it sparks this perpetual curiosity, I would say... Because that's -- I mean, mine is not as cool as yours. I was writing CSS, and my mom was ... |
**Elecia White:** Teaching people - it's always amazing to get to see that moment, or to see part of it. I like mentoring folks, in hopes that I can be there when it hits. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[20:15\] On platforms like the web, it's so easy. You can get to that moment in minutes, because you can load up their favorite web page, and show them how to open up the dev tools, and change the background color, or something; or delete a line, and the title disappears. And you see that a-ha moment ... |
When you mentor, when you teach, what do you do? How do you get people to that moment? What do you show them? And how long does that take? Because it has historically been considerably more steps in embedded than on platforms like the web. |
**Elecia White:** Yes. I mean, teaching now, there are some simulators. There's one called Wokwi, and it will simulate an Arduino. And you can program it under C, or Arduino, or MicroPython; lots of interfaces. And it takes out that pain of wiring, getting the wiring wrong, blowing it up... All the things that can happ... |
If anybody wants to try it today, we've said Arduino. Arduino is really great. It was the system developed for helping artists do installations. And so the whole system is very directed towards art, and making things accessible that way. They don't expect you to have 20 years of C experience. The other one is one of th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Elecia White:** And with MicroPython or CircuitPython, which are very similar things, you can get started right away, making bigger and bigger things. Arduino - I love Arduino. There's a lot of Arduinos, there's a lot of good things you can do with Arduino, but it's an old system, and it's really expensive for what i... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I pulled up the Wokwi, and I'm a couple layers deep, while you're talking... |
**Elecia White:** \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I'm on the Wokwi for VS Code, and I'm like "Wow, this is so cool." I mean, you can do it in the web too, but a lot of people are really happy in VS Code. I'm not unhappy in VS Code. It's not my favorite, but it's certainly a quite usable code editor... And I think it's a great platform for a lot... |
\[24:09\] So the fact that you can have another tab next to your code in VS Code, and it's Wokwi, and you're kind of like programming in software what could be future hardware, and learning... That's so cool. I've personally been intimidated by, I suppose, hardware coding like this, or things that do stuff, that isn't ... |
**Elecia White:** It's a great system. Uri Shaked is the developer, and he's very responsive, and they've got a Discord... It's really fun. And we have an episode about it, if anybody wants to look up that. |
The other -- and I feel you for "How do I get started without breaking everything?" Adafruit and Sparkfun are two companies that are for hobbyist electronics, and they both have boards you plug together. You're not going to solder these. I mean, you can, but the goal for them is you just click these things together and... |
On the other hand, Wokwi lets you do things like have a robot army that you control from an Arduino, because you can put in 500 motors, and Wokwi doesn't care. If you do that in real life, you're talking about a lot of power, and figuring these things out. But if you do it on Wokwi, it's all just really fun. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I like the idea that, one, it is software, so you can scale, just like you said. Which is a great thing. But at the same time, it's like "Well, this isn't real. It's software." But the moment I feel comfortable literally buying or spending my cash on some hardware and some wires, and a kit or whatev... |
**Elecia White:** Yes. Yes, indeed. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's so cool. That's dope. I had no idea it existed. |
**Jerod Santo:** How big is the chasm between "I'm able to use a simulator in Python", or maybe it's even in C, or "I'm even able to get something onto some device and have it do stuff", and your world, of "I'm writing professional embedded software for autonomous vehicles that go underwater, and sense things"? How big... |
**Elecia White:** Everybody come to embedded says "It's not that bad. You just read my book. It's all fine." |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Right. |
**Elecia White:** \[27:50\] The real me has to admit that over-the-air updates are never going to be easy. Security is never going to be easy. Low battery... All these things where you have -- like in toys, where you have to shave off pennies, so you end up with a processor that should not be able to do this much, but ... |
Yeah, there's a lot. There really is a lot. It's not insurmountable, and there are companies all the time that are trying to make it simpler. Do they succeed? Some of them... Some of them succeed pretty well. But it's never... Sometimes they talk about it being Lego blocks. Like, I used to have to develop a lot more st... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[31:49\] Well, there's a sideways application of Parkinson's law here... Which, you know, Parkinson's law is the one that the scope of a project will expand to match the time allowed for the project. Something like this. That's a bad paraphrase. And I was just teaching my kids about budgeting this mor... |
**Elecia White:** A puzzle. |
**Jerod Santo:** The challenge of -- yeah, it's a puzzle. And to many of us that would be a huge bummer, you know? Because it's hard. And there's things to do. But you must like puzzle solving a lot. |
**Elecia White:** I do, I do. I really like puzzle solving. And I'm not super-afraid of math. So if I need to add up where all of my memory is going, or be able to look at a memory map file and see hex addresses, those don't really scare me. I know that they're just addresses. They just look funny. |
**Jerod Santo:** Mm-hm. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.