The Amp Hour · 9 Dec 2019 · 1h 09m · Episode 470
Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics and Dave Jones of EEV Blog discuss Gammell's purchase of a vintage HP 8753D VNA and the high cost of test equipment. They analyze the complexity of setting up a firmware development environment for an STM32 microcontroller, debating the trade-offs between using vendor IDEs like STM32CubeIDE versus manual toolchains like GCC and Visual Studio Code. The conversation also covers the limitations of current AI auto-routing tools for PCBs and a review of university-level electronics textbooks.
makers and hobbyists
Other shows on the same ground, closest first.
Chris Gammell, founder of Contextual Electronics and host of The Amp Hour, discusses his journey learning embedded firmware as a hardware consultant. He details his personal project using an STM32F030 and an EFM8 microcontroller, the challenges of debugging with GDB and Vim, and the value of hiring tutors and using books like 'Making Embedded Systems' to build confidence and technical depth.
Christopher White discusses his viral moment involving a Chevy dealership's ChatGPT-powered chatbot, his struggles with contractor burnout, and the frustrating state of embedded development tools. He details specific technical failures with STM32CubeIDE, CMSIS drivers, and J-Link debuggers, highlighting the lack of standardization in the industry. The episode also covers personal updates, including his music with Flavigula, the Pass the Bricks charity, and Nelson Asinowski's donation of 8051 microcontrollers.
Eric Hankinson, an instructor at Contextual Electronics and developer at Lean Dog, discusses the embedded software components of his online apprenticeship program. He explains how he uses Vagrant and VirtualBox to create consistent development environments for students using STMicroelectronics Nucleo-F030R8 boards and open-source tools like OpenOCD and KiCad. Hankinson also covers the pedagogical challenges of teaching bare-metal C programming, the role of CMSIS in hardware abstraction, and the transition from Arduino to more powerful microcontrollers.
Carmen Parisi, a senior electrical engineer at Wasatch Photonics, discusses her recent career shift from Texas Instruments to a generalist role building Raman spectrometers. She details the challenges of moving from semiconductor power design to multidisciplinary work involving optics, firmware, and software, highlighting the difficulty of setting up the Zephyr toolchain and STM32CubeIDE. Parisi also shares practical advice for engineers, such as using app notes for learning and debugging firmware by checking map files and ensuring code is actually loaded.
Elecia White and Christopher White discuss the painful process of migrating from a vendor IDE to a free GCC and VS Code toolchain, highlighting issues with brittle dependencies, Python version conflicts, and Windows ARM virtualization. They then shift to a pedagogical discussion on embedded interrupts, distinguishing ISRs from asserts and callbacks, and explaining concepts like weak symbols and vector tables to students. The episode concludes with community news, including a new book club, a panel on device observability, and updates on WSL USB support.
The summary, chapters and topics are generated from the episode’s audio by this directory, not written by The Amp Hour. The episode itself belongs to its publisher.