Embedded firmware
Product design & engineering
1,243 episodes across 41 shows cover embedded firmware. The shows that cover it most are Embedded.fm, The Amp Hour and Hackaday Podcast. The most recent, from 13 Oct 2026, is “Testing Embedded Systems in the Cloud and On-Prem with Marie Meyer and Joel Schulz-Andres” from The Pragmatic Embedded Podcast.
Software that runs on the device: firmware architecture, RTOS, toolchains, debugging code on hardware, testing firmware.
1243 episodes from 41 shows, most relevant and most recent first.
1243 episodes
TDD: The Hard Parts - Getting Started with Test-Driven Development
Jeff Gable and Luca Ingianni discuss the practical challenges of adopting Test-Driven Development (TDD) in embedded software, specifically addressing the difficulty of starting with a blank screen. They outline a process that begins with…
Factory Firmware Flashing with Pete Staples
Pete Staples, founder of Blue Clover Devices, explains the disconnect between engineering and manufacturing, noting that factory firmware flashing is often a dusty, manual afterthought rather than a sophisticated process. He details how…
Linux Profiling with Mohammed Billoo
Mohammed Billoo, founder of Mab Labs Embedded Solutions and author of the Embedded Linux Essentials Handbook, explains how to profile embedded Linux systems by distinguishing between VM size and VM RSS to identify memory leaks in…
Futurelock
Oxide engineers Dave Pacheco, John Gallagher, Sean Klein, and Eliza Weisman explain 'Futurelock,' a deadlock in async Rust where a Tokio task holds a permit on an MPSC channel but fails to insert a message, causing the receiver to block…
528: Goldfish Chunks
Tyler Hoffman, co-founder of Memfault (now part of Nordic Semiconductor), discusses the architecture and philosophy of Memfault, a platform for embedded device diagnostics and observability. He explains the separation of operational data…
506: How Do I Fit a Whale Into an Apartment Building?
Dmitry Grinberg, a software engineer known for running Linux on extremely constrained hardware, explains his projects including 8-pin Linux and Linux on the Intel 4004. He details how he emulates a MIPS processor on small microcontrollers…
500: Nerding Out About the Ducks
Komathi Sundaram, a principal test engineer at Cruise, discusses her career transition from software development to embedded testing and her philosophy on automation. She details the architecture of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test benches…
#021: Hardware at Software Speed: How BootLoop Is Bringing AI to the Bench for Firmware Teams
Noah Pasek-Nelson and Chris Markus, co-founders of BootLoop, explain how their AI platform accelerates the firmware lifecycle by combining deep hardware context with automated hardware-in-the-loop testing. They discuss how ingesting…
Rubber Duck Incarnate
Dave Jones and Chris Gammell discuss the recent public falling out between SparkFun and Adafruit, which resulted in Adafruit losing the right to resell the Teensy microcontroller board designed by Paul Stoffregen. They analyze the…
Death by Uptime
Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Cliff Biffle, Matt Keeter, and Will Chandler of Oxide Computer Company discuss debugging a production failure where all 16 compute sled service processors (SPs) became unresponsive after ~188 days of uptime…
Test-Driven Development in the Age of AI
Luca Jani, an embedded systems expert and host of the Embedded AI Podcast, explains his test-driven development (TDD) workflow using Claude Code, arguing that TDD provides essential control and confidence when AI generates code. He details…
Rust with Milica Kostic
Milica Kostic, an embedded software architect with a background in electrical engineering and safety-critical industries like medical devices, discusses her journey from C/C++ to adopting Rust in production. She explains that the most…
MicroPython with Matt Trentini
Matt Trentini, Principal Software Engineer at Planet Innovation, explains how his team uses MicroPython for professional embedded development, including Class B medical devices. He details the benefits of the interactive REPL and the Unix…
A Crate is Born
Oxide colleagues Andrew Stone, Rain Paharia, and John Gallagher join Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to discuss the creation of 'daft', a Rust crate for semantic diffing of data structures. The team explains how manual diffing code for…
488: Two Slices of Complimentary Bread
Adrienne Braganza Tacke, author of 'Looks Good To Me: Constructive Code Reviews,' explains why code reviews are often dreaded and how to make them effective. She advocates for creating a Team Working Agreement to make implicit expectations…
#009: Zephyr’s Meteoric Rise and What It Means for the Future of Embedded
Kate Stewart, VP of Dependable Embedded Systems at the Linux Foundation, explains how Zephyr RTOS evolved from Intel’s Wind River roots into a multi-vendor open-source project with a governance model designed to prevent corporate capture…
When AI Gets a Body: Physical AI, Humanoids and the Future of Silicon
Hezi Saar, Executive Director of Product Marketing at Synopsys, discusses the rise of Physical AI, focusing on the semiconductor demands of humanoid robots and autonomous systems. He explains the shift from cloud-only AI to hybrid…
#007: AI, Open Source, and the Future of Embedded Development: How Much Code Will We Actually Write?
François Baldassari, CEO of Memfault, and Thomas Sarlandie, Field CTO of Memfault, host a panel with Jonathan Beri, CEO of Golioth, and Dan Mangum, CTO of Golioth, to discuss the intersection of AI, open source, and embedded development…
#006: Pebble’s Code is Free: Three Former Pebble Engineers Discuss Why It's Important (PART 2/2)
Brad Murray, former head of Pebble firmware, and Tomas, former developer evangelist at Pebble, discuss the risks and decisions behind building firmware for Pebble smartwatches. They detail a critical OTA update bug that nearly bricked…
Can the Nvidia Monopoly on AI Chips Be Broken?
Sally Ward-Foxton of EE Times discusses the AI chip market with hosts Dr. Sunny Bains and Dr. Giulia D’Angelo, analyzing the dominance of Nvidia and the potential for neuromorphic and specialized inference chips to break its monopoly. The…
Terrible Habits of the Solo Developer
Jeff Gable and Luca Jani, both solo embedded software consultants, discuss the unique challenges of working alone, such as multitasking pressure and wearing multiple hats. They identify five bad habits: skipping documentation, avoiding…
Crossover with Embedded AI Podcast
Jeff Gable, Luca, and Ryan Torvik discuss integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into embedded systems engineering workflows, emphasizing that AI must augment rather than replace rigorous engineering discipline. They identify 'vibe…
AI-enhanced Embedded Development (May 2025 Edition)
Luca, an embedded software expert, discusses his experience at the Embedded Online Conference and a German conference, highlighting an LLM-only hackathon where participants were forbidden from writing code manually. He explains that…
479: Make Your Voice Heard
Carles Cufí, an open source software engineer at Nordic Semiconductor, discusses the company's strategic shift to Zephyr and the development of the nRF Connect SDK. He explains the architectural decisions behind maintaining a downstream…
070 - I Have a DediProblem
Jesse Michael and Mickey Shkatov from Eclypsium discuss the intricacies of BIOS and UEFI reverse engineering, tracing their careers from Intel to their current startup. They detail specific research projects, including an exploit of a…
#003: Pebble's Code is Free: Three Former Pebble Engineers Discuss Why It's Important (PART 1/2)
Francois Baldassari, Chris Coleman, and Brad Murray, former engineers at Pebble, discuss the technical architecture and engineering decisions behind PebbleOS. They explain how a single codebase supported multiple hardware variants…
473: Math Is Not the Answer
Philip Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and author of 'Understanding Checksums and Cyclic Redundancy Checks,' explains why empirical analysis and engineering trade-offs are superior to pure mathematics for selecting error…
#002: The secrets to building secure & scalable OTA infrastructure with Nick Sinas
Nick Sinas, CTO at Oval, and Chris Coleman, CTO at Memfault, discuss the critical importance of Over-the-Air (OTA) updates for connected devices, emphasizing that OTA must be designed into the hardware architecture from day one. They…
From Combat to Space: Mike LeBlanc on Humanoid Robotics
Mike LeBlanc, co-founder of Foundation and former founder of Cobalt Robotics, discusses his transition from security robots to building the Phantom Mark One humanoid for military and space applications. He explains how Foundation’s…
Software Validation and Testing in IoT | Doppelio's Gaurav Johri | Internet of Things Podcast
Gaurav Johri, co-founder and CEO of Doppelio, explains why software validation is critical for connected products as value shifts from hardware to cloud and edge software. He details how Doppelio uses device virtualization to create…
Zephyr with Luka Mustafa
Luka Mustafa, founder and CEO of Irnas Product Development, explains how Zephyr RTOS, a Linux Foundation-backed project, enables hardware-agnostic embedded development by abstracting low-level details through device trees and a…
Crossover with Mob Mentailty Part 2
Austin Chadwick and Chris Lucian, hosts of the Mob Mentality podcast, explain how mob programming applies to embedded systems by involving firmware and hardware engineers in collaborative coding sessions. They argue that mobbing reduces…
Crossover with Mob Mentality part 1
Jeff Gable and Luca Johnny of the Agile Embedded Podcast join Chris Lucian and Austin Chadwick of the Mob Mentality Show to discuss bridging hardware-software gaps in embedded systems. They argue that hardware abstraction layers and…
Benjamin Cabé Nose Zephyr
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…
466: Attacked by a Goose on the Way to the Office
Ralph Hempel, formerly Senior Manager of Firmware at the Lego Group and currently a staff firmware engineer at Edwards Fire and Safety, discusses the engineering and community hacking surrounding Lego Mindstorms. He details the reverse…
BrainChip’s IP for Targeting AI Applications at the Edge
Dr. Tony Lewis, CTO of BrainChip, and scientists Dr. Rudy Rupay, Dr. Olivier Quinan, and Dr. Chris Carlson discuss the company's temporal event-based neural network (TENN) and its application in the Akida chip. They explain how TENN uses…
When Nine Nines Isn't Enough
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company, joined by Nathanael Huffman, Alan Hanson, Cliff Biffle, Eric Aasen, Robert Keith, and Jordan Hendricks, detail a two-and-a-half-year investigation into mysterious hardware…
134 - ISO62304, Software Development Process, SaMD, Closed Loop Systems, Complexities with Cloud and Better Software in MedTech with Richard Koch
Richard Koch, founder of KochSaMD, explains the complexities of developing cloud-based medical devices, using a closed-loop insulin pump system as a primary case study. He details how ISO 62304 governs software development within the…
#011: Memfault Joins Nordic Semiconductor: What This Means for the Future of Connected Product Development
François Baldassari and Chris from Memfault, joined by Kjetil Holstad from Nordic Semiconductor, discuss Memfault's acquisition by Nordic and the strategic vision for a 'chip-to-cloud' platform. They trace Nordic’s history from design…
Ep. 17: Today's Humanoid Robots Have Toddler Hands, Not Adult Ones.
Jay Li, CEO and Founder of Proception, explains that current humanoid robots possess 'toddler-level' dexterity, lacking the tactile sensing required for useful work. He argues that while hardware and range of motion have improved, tactile…
BONUS: Listener Question on Repository Organization
Luca Ingianni responds to a listener's question about repository granularity in safety-critical embedded development, arguing against the use of separate repositories for different work products. He advocates for a monorepo approach with…
MinimumCD
Hosts Jeff Gable and Luca Engineer discuss Minimum CD, a set of essential practices for continuous delivery that serves as a counter-movement to heavyweight frameworks like SAFe. They detail core principles including trunk-based…
BDD with Steve Branam
Steve Branam, an embedded software veteran with 40 years of experience including work on iRobot Roombas and automotive systems, explains how Behavior Driven Development (BDD) provides a disciplined layer on top of Test Driven Development…
When Async Attacks!
Oxide Computer Company engineers Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Dave Pacheco, Eliza Weisman, and Augustus Mayo explain how they debugged severe latency in their production rack by tracing a database connection pool issue to the Tokio…
S7E8 Matt Ketterer | Professional Growth through Interdisciplinary Exploration
Matt Ketterer, a controls and mechanical engineer, discusses his career transition from medical device design to automation and software engineering. He details his early work at Becton Dickinson on extrusion and molding processes, and his…
#019: END-OF-YEAR CELEBRATION: Moments You Loved, Stories You Missed, and 2026 Predictions You Need
François Baldassari and Chris Coleman, co-founders of Memfault, reflect on the 20th episode of Coredump Sessions, highlighting lessons from guests like Nick Sinas of Oval, Dan Mangum of Golioth, and Chad from Gabb. They discuss the…
Building Real-Time Voice AI Experiences | Agora's Patrick Ferriter | Internet of Things Podcast
Patrick Ferriter, SVP of Product at Agora, discusses the architecture and challenges of building real-time voice AI for physical devices, such as AI companions and plush toys. He explains how Agora’s SD-RTN network and orchestration layer…
Where it comes up12:56
AI and Connectivity at the Edge and Endpoint
Kaushal Vora and Mo Dogar from Renesas discuss the convergence of AI and IoT (AIoT) at the edge, distinguishing between resource-intensive generative AI and predictive AI suited for constrained endpoint devices. They highlight Renesas'…
AI for climate: a real world test
Duncan Campbell, vice president at Scale Microgrids, and Seyed Madaeni, CEO of Verse, test whether a non-coder can use ChatGPT-4 to build battery dispatch software. Campbell iteratively prompts the model to create a Python optimizer for a…
S2 E1: From Code to Creation: The Building Blocks of Firmware with Elecia White
Elecia White, founder of Logical Elegance and host of the Embedded FM podcast, explains the unique constraints of firmware development for hardware entrepreneurs. She outlines the typical firmware build-out process, emphasizing the…