494: All Tech Is Wearable

02/07/25 • 75 min

Debra Ansell joined us to talk about finding friends and exchanging neat gifts, accidentally tricking people into making unmanufacutable boards, and happy, blinking lights.

Debra is usually known by the moniker GeekMomProjects (also her website is geekmomprojects.com). She has been writing for Make Magazine.

Debra won one of the SuperCon badge add-on awards so her poseable Bendy SAO will be available at SuperCon Europe.

Some other things we mentioned:

Seeed Studio XIAO board
Adafruit QT Py
Debra’s Remoticon talk about PCB structures
Martin Oehler is Maketvee on YouTube and Mastodon
Janet Hansen is on Mastodon and has an incredible Enlightened Designs wearables website.
#makergiftexchange on your favorite social media platform

And some upcoming events that promise to have lots of LEDs:

Teardown 2025 | Crowd Supply (Jun ‘25)
Portland Winter Light Festival (Feb ‘25)

Transcript

Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.

Debra Ansell joined us to talk about finding friends and exchanging neat gifts, accidentally tricking people into making unmanufacutable boards, and happy, blinking lights.

Debra is usually known by the moniker GeekMomProjects (also her website is geekmomprojects.com). She has been writing for Make Magazine.

Debra won one of the SuperCon badge add-on awards so her poseable Bendy SAO will be available at SuperCon Europe.

Some other things we mentioned:

Seeed Studio XIAO board
Adafruit QT Py
Debra’s Remoticon talk about PCB structures
Martin Oehler is Maketvee on YouTube and Mastodon
Janet Hansen is on Mastodon and has an incredible Enlightened Designs wearables website.
#makergiftexchange on your favorite social media platform

And some upcoming events that promise to have lots of LEDs:

Teardown 2025 | Crowd Supply (Jun ‘25)
Portland Winter Light Festival (Feb ‘25)

Transcript

Previous Episode

493: Put the Peeps in the Chili Pot

Elecia and Chris talk with each other about the state of Chris’ mind, what makes an embedded developer stand out, “LEGO block” based design, unit tests, and astronomy. Whew!

Elecia was recently on the Changelog podcast, talking about the world of embedded systems.

Chris has been working with Micropython (we talked with Damien George about Micropython on episode 456). He’s using a Pyboard to start, but is looking to move on to this board from Sparkfun. Wikipedia has a nice reference on what the pulse-per-second signal is all about.

Elecia talked about her experience using CFFI to drive unit tests. She also talked about some facts from Information is Beautiful.

Chris’ telescope is the ZWO Seestar S50. There’s also a smaller Seestar S30 now which has a wider field-of-view.

Title reference (Chris and Elecia both thoroughly enjoyed The Good Place, the TV show this is taken from.)

Transcript

Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy MCUs and wireless SoCs since the early 2010s, and they offer solutions for low-power Wi-Fi and global Cellular IoT as well. If you plan on developing robust and battery-operated applications, check out their hardware, software, tools, and services. On academy.nordicsemi.com, you’ll find Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular IoT courses, and the Nordic DevZone community covers technical questions: devzone.nordicsemi.com. Oh, and don’t forget to enter Nordic Semiconductor’s giveaway contest! Just fill out the entrance form, and you're in the running. Good luck!

Here’s one of the astrophotos Chris has taken:

The Horsehead and Flame nebulae in Orion taken from a Seestar S50

Next Episode

495: Shortcut the Difficulties of Reality

Professor Cindy Harnett spoke to us about new and different sensors and actuators, primarily designed for soft robotics and fabricated with relatively low cost materials.

Cindy is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Louisville where she runs the Harnett Lab.

The papers we discussed are here. You can find a longer list of Cindy’s papers on Google Scholar. The video of the SESAME actuator is especially interesting.

Transcript