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**Elecia White:** But I really enjoy the puzzle part. And like I said, I really enjoy the motor moving. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Yeah. |
**Elecia White:** And when the robot -- for a personal project, I wanted to do some higher level software, so I got a Jetson, which is NVIDIA's AI embedded system. It's a Linux system. It's a computer. I used it as a computer for like two weeks. And I wanted to get a really janky arm, a robotic arm, that could go up, a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I'm wondering maybe if it wasn't a Fiona moment. My friends who are big fans of a very awesome TV show called Silicon Valley would know what I'm talking about... Because in this episode - spoiler, for those who haven't watched it yet - she asks for help. She is a robot. She needed help. I'm wo... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] It might have. |
**Elecia White:** It certainly did. \[laughter\] It was in the way of "How much software can I throw at a problem to make the hardware that is very bad better?" It turns out you can throw a lot of software at some bad hardware, and it still is bad hardware. But it can be really fun. |
**Break**: \[35:48\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm curious about the possibilities of embedded systems. Jerod, maybe your question regarding the chasm is "If I begin, how far is that dip, so to speak?" How far is it from beginner to potentially professional? How big is this embedded world? Is it an underserved world? Is there a lot of opportunit... |
**Elecia White:** You might've noticed that your home has more blinking lights than it used to. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I'm sad about that. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Elecia White:** Electrical tape. |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. |
**Elecia White:** It is growing. Some things are becoming easier, some things are becoming more straightforward... But I see more job openings than people looking for jobs. So I would say that's pretty good. How do you get there? There are a lot of paths, because like I said, what is an embedded system depends on your ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Elecia White:** ...but it's not -- some of the software engineers I work with, Jenkins is just like obvious. Every part of it is obvious. And to me it's like, I can do what I need to do, and when you ask me to set up a new project, I just go home and I, I don't know, turn off my computer for the rest of the day. |
Design patterns was one of those things that I really wanted to bring to embedded systems. And I feel like I have kind of talked about it for the last 20 years, about how important it is to not keep solving the problems in new ways, but to start solving the same problems in the same ways each time, so that we don't hav... |
\[41:59\] And things like object-oriented programming... It's not new. And a lot of embedded people really understand it. And yet we mostly program in C still. I know the gasps, the horrifying screams... Yes, we still mostly program in C. But we don't usually program in an assembly anymore. We're making progress. |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So what about open source? Has that permeated your crew? |
**Elecia White:** Yes. There's open source -- I mean, the vendors of our chips have figured out that they don't really want to keep giving us their crummy software in ways that only they can manage it... So like ST and Microchip and Nordic all have big repositories, and they have examples of working with different sens... |
The sensor vendors, the IMU vendors will give us code. And sometimes that's partially open source, and sometimes it is not. But the easy stuff now, the common filters that used tot be so complicated, now that's code they just give you. They tell you how to do. |
**Jerod Santo:** What's that? |
**Elecia White:** A Kalman filter is a way of -- I could talk about this for like three hours, so I'm trying not to... \[laughter\] Okay, accelerometers and gyroscopes. Accelerometers measure gravity. They measure acceleration too, that's what they say, but really, they just measure gravity. Gyroscopes measure spinnine... |
When you are in a car and you're going around a cloverleaf, you're spinning and you feel acceleration. You feel acceleration, the outward push of you as you're spinning around. An inertial measurement unit can use both of these sensors, and know which one is wrong. And it's kind of like your ears and your eyes. If you ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. And so the vendors of the device would provide a set of filters for you to use? |
**Elecia White:** \[45:58\] They would provide the algorithm, yeah. And they would provide the base code for how good each of their sensors are. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. Because they've done those tests and they understand the sensors and their error rates, and these other things. |
**Elecia White:** Exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** Better than you do. |
**Elecia White:** Better than I want to. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Yeah. I mean, after a while you may understand them better than they do. But those used to be closed source, or they used to be unavailable to you, and now they're just provided. |
**Elecia White:** In 1990, it was a patent I worked on. |
**Jerod Santo:** So you helped invent these things. |
**Elecia White:** Well, no, I helped implement them. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Elecia White:** It came out of a -- and to be fair, a lot of people started doing IMUs and Kalman filters in the early to mid '90s. And it exploded as to the applications... But a bunch of PhDs were done at that time. And so they became very, very popular because they solved the inertial measurement unit problem pret... |
Usually, when we talk about self-driving cars, the GPS has one set of errors, mostly; it's really slow. The LiDAR or camera can have another set of errors, and it provides a different set of information, and the different types of Kalmans can put all of these together. And the idea is just you put the errors here and y... |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. So you mentioned self-driving cars and you mentioned LiDAR... So I have to ask your take as an embedded person on Tesla's proposition that they can get to autonomous, or whatever level you need to get to, with cameras only. And then Waymos using LiDARs, other people using LiDARs. How important ... |
**Elecia White:** I can't picture doing it only with cameras. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's what a lot of people say. |
**Elecia White:** I mean, the argument is humans do it only with cameras. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Like, all we have is eyes, right? |
**Elecia White:** But we have a few other things. |
**Jerod Santo:** Such as...? |
**Elecia White:** Our eyes and our inertial measurement units are very well connected. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Elecia White:** So there is no disconnect that if you jerk the wheel, you know what your vision's gonna do. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay, I'm tracking you. |
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