The Electromaker Show · 24 May 2024 · 42m · Episode 144
Eli Hughes, a full-stack embedded engineer and educator, discusses his 'Super Monkey' guitar active pickguard project, which uses an NXP i.MX RT685 processor for DSP and a Nordic nRF7002 Wi-Fi chip for cloud data upload. He explains the technical rationale for choosing Zephyr OS for its standardized, reusable software stack and emphasizes the importance of a 'beginner's mindset' and rigorous hardware bring-up procedures. The episode also covers news items including the Waveshare BG95-M3 Zero cellular SBC, the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+, and Breadboard OS for the Pi Pico.
makers and hobbyists
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Eli Hughes of TZero Research and Development discusses building a connected brewery monitoring system using acoustic sensors and cellular connectivity. He details his transition from FreeRTOS to the Zephyr RTOS, highlighting Zephyr's benefits for standardizing builds and enabling PC-based simulation. Hughes also shares his experience as an NXP Pro Support engineer and the business lessons learned from validating product-market fit with craft brewers.
Alvaro Prieto, an electrical and firmware engineer at Sofar Ocean, discusses his work on oceanic remote-sensing buoys and his personal passion projects, including making cheese and building weather stations. He details the evolution of his cheese-monitoring device from an over-engineered prototype to a low-power Bluetooth wedge using an nRF52, and explains how these side projects helped him secure jobs at companies like Apple and Verily. Prieto also shares insights on choosing wireless protocols (Zigbee, BLE, LoRa) for his weather station and the importance of getting a working prototype before optimizing.
Chris Gammell, Developer Relations Lead at Golioth, explains how their platform simplifies IoT development by bridging constrained microcontrollers and the cloud using CoAP and Zephyr RTOS. He details the device-side SDKs for ESP32, nRF, and NXP, and discusses the business model of licensing the cloud software for on-premise deployment. The conversation also covers the shift in chip ecosystems, noting Espressif's move to RISC-V and the challenges of integrating Wi-Fi modules with low-power MCUs.
Benjamin Cabé, Developer Advocate for the Zephyr Project, explains that Zephyr is an open-source RTOS and ecosystem that provides hardware abstraction, device trees, and subsystems to simplify embedded development. He highlights how major vendors like STMicroelectronics, NXP, and Espressif integrate with Zephyr, allowing developers to swap silicon without rewriting application code, a feature that proved crucial during recent silicon shortages. Cabé also shares his personal project, an 'artificial nose' for sourdough monitoring, which he migrated from Arduino to Zephyr to leverage its multitasking, state machines, and simulation tools like Renode.
Elecia White and Christopher White discuss winning the IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award for their podcast, Embedded.fm, and celebrate the milestone with informal education outreach. Christopher details his work integrating Rust libraries into Zephyr RTOS and struggling with Memfault's data extraction capabilities, while Elecia manages a complex robotics project. They also review books like Cory Doctorow's 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI' and 'Programmers at Work,' debating the ethics of taking advice from controversial figures and the societal impact of AI.
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