Posts Tagged ‘mundane’

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Call for Proposals

December 4, 2014

The embedded systems conference (finally renamed the “Embedded Systems Conference”, yay!) and O’Reilly’s Solid conference have opened their call for proposals (Solid’s and ESC’s). After telling everyone that I’m tired of giving conference presentations, tired of attending conferences without talks that I want to see, that presentations take way too much time to prepare, presenting leads to no goodness for me, I have nothing to talk about, and I have way more fun (and reach more people) on the podcast, I’ve put in three proposals.

Faker to Maker in 30 Minutes

The Maker revolution is obviously here.

What does that mean for those of us who aren’t Makers? We worked hard for these engineering degrees and now sometimes feel daunted (even intimidated?) by the free sharing, open source, do anything, tinker in their obviously copious spare time hackers.

Wait, weren’t hackers the bad guys? (Sometimes, semantics change.)

Will there still be a space for careful, professional engineering? (Hint: yes.)

Most importantly, how can we join forces to get the best of both worlds?

Low Power Strategies for Wearables (and Everything Else)

Sleep early and often. Reduce your clock speed. Turn off your IOs and unneeded subsystems.

Excellent tactical advice only goes so far, this talk will help you understand how to architect software to reduce power usage. Focusing on ST’s Cortex-M0 and Atmel’s ATMega328, Elecia White will describe how to start from a clean slate to get great results and how to utilize some of these techniques on to existing code bases.

Intro to Inertial Sensors: From Taps to Gestures to Location

What is the difference between an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a magnetometer? What would you use each for? If you aren’t sure, let me explain.

The entertaining host of the Embedded.fm podcast, Elecia White will explain the differences and each sensor’s best uses, on their own and in combination. She will detail the most common ways to put them together and help you determine which are the best choices for your products.

The talk will discuss how to replace buttons with accelerometers, how that leads to gesture recognition, and why integrating to get location is a more difficult problem that it sounds. While you might not be able to implement a Kalman filter by the end of the talk, you will know why it matters.

***

What do you think? One fluffy and two technical. I had a third technical one but it seemed like an awful lot of prep work:

How to Choose a Micro for Your Application

Price, performance, and power war for supremacy. We all want the cheapest, lowest-power processor for our application. But at the beginning of development, we may not know how much performance we truly need. Choosing the wrong processor may lead to a complete redesign, a time to market disaster. How to estimate which family of processors is the best for your application?

Unaffiliated with any chip or compiler vendors, Elecia White is an experienced embedded systems consultant and host of the Embedded.fm podcast. She will explain her methodology, using examples across consumer applications.

The talk will tackle such estimation issues as where to start if you need to run WiFi—that often means running an Ethernet (TCP/IP) stack which means you probably need an RTOS. If you need an RTOS, you probably don’t want an 8-bit ATMega (not that it isn’t possible, just that it isn’t likely to be timely). Start with a Cortex-M3 range and look for the next set of requirements. Power might push you down to a cramped Cortex-M0 or heavy processing might sends you up to the Cortex-M4 (or a dual processor DSP/C-M0 option).

There are tradeoffs everywhere; this road map will help you choose a path.

***

That one also seems like one hundred thousand ways to be wrong since someone will always disagree. I can offer my opinion but I’m sure to frustrate some developer with a crush on PICs. (Because PICs are my least favorite processor. I don’t know why you’d choose a PIC over an ATTiny or an MSP430. Ok, I said it. AVR Freaks unite!)

Anyway, the proposals have been submitted on the idea that I should want to speak, that I should do my part for women-in-tech (bleah), and that I want more listeners for the podcast (which I should remember to mention this time, not like the last presentation I gave, urk).

The proposal deadlines are Jan 9th and 12th so get yours in. I’m only going to the conferences if there is someone I want to see speak. Go propose something amusing and informative, please.

 

 

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Still Alive

November 18, 2014

I haven’t been writing here so much. At first, it was because I was frantically busy, trying to impress clients with knowledge by reading ahead in the textbook the night before. Then there was a wedding which I maybe over-planned because that’s what I do when nervous (it was great, we stuck to plan A nearly the whole time; I probably didn’t need to create plan N, let alone Q).

I finished with my clients the week before the wedding. I’d rather do something closer to my skillset. I like learning but I want to build closer to what I already know instead of continuing to cantilever ever more esoteric information.

I’ve been contract-free for a couple weeks now. That used to freak me out. I was ok for one week but not much more than that: OMG, will I ever find work again?!?

As I did the accounting, I found that the business can pay us for the rest of the year with the money we have in the bank (not even counting outstanding invoices). Sweet! I have three potential clients starting in the New Year, probably one will work out.

And, yet, I still didn’t write. There was hackaday judging but that finished a while ago, writing up my thoughts didn’t talk all that long since I had plenty of notes. There was some planning involved with my birthday party (cake, check; guests, check; champagne, check; flowers, check; planning done!).

I did go to a class from ST Microelectronics, acquiring an M0+ discovery board,  M0+ nucleo board with a BTLE daughter card. That was interesting. I wanted more “how to do low energy” and they had “look at our super shiney parts you can use to do low energy”. There were some hints but nothing new to me (sleep early, sleep often, sleep deeply). I also got a potential podcast guest to talk about Cortex processors but he was baffled by the idea people would listen to a whole hour of reasonably technical information. (Yes, this does concern me, we’ll see.)

And now I’m at a class about 3D printing, getting terrible and expensive ideas about things to buy for our business. This afternoon, I plan to attend a class about wearables and electronic textiles (stretchy conductors!). I’m here on a press pass (boggle), mostly signed up to attend because I have free time and I’m procrastinating about other things.

Both SOLID and the embedded systems conference have opened their call for speaking proposals. These are both “in my wheelhouse” (I hate that phrase but I find myself using it far too much, I suppose it allows me to say “in my area of subject matter expertise” without sounding like a total nerd). I don’t have a plan for them. I’m tempted to take a chapter from my book and talk about it. I’m tempted to compile a bunch of low power tips and making a presentation. I thought about updating my network comparison presentation (see Element14 text version). But these all seem like so much work. Can’t we just have a podcast about it?

I do have a little project I’ve been working on involving my MicroView (tiny Arduino based system with a pretty OLED screen). I’ll write about that separately since I’ll put the code up (even ask for input!).

Anyway, I’ve been distant for a month or two but you’ll probably hear more from me in the next month or two. I should be looking for a contract but I’m goofing off instead. For a little while.

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Unsweetened

July 6, 2013

Every week this year I have a resolution, something to make me healthier, happier, or more productive. A friend mentioned that Jefferson did something similar through his whole life, focusing on one virtue for a fortnight before moving on to another, cycling through thirteen of them. I’m trying out all sorts, opening up myself to different ideas.

My resolution for the last 3.5 weeks is “no sugar”. And by that, I mean no sugar, no sugar substitutes, no honey, no maple syrup, no fruit juice (*), no dried fruit, no agave syrup, no sorbitol, no xylitol (which is poisonous to dogs!), nothing sweeter than fruit, eaten as fruit.

I’m hoping to get control of my sweet tooth, reset it to a different level so I don’t crave FROSTING levels of sweetness. My goal was to make it 4 weeks. I don’t think I’ll have a problem with it though it has been both easier and harder than I thought.

I consciously made an exception for alcohol; I have been drinking wine and sake. And I had one fruit juice cocktail (that was yummy but tasted way too sweet though it did an excellent job of delivering rum to my overtired system). There were a two other intentional exceptions: cough drops and calcium chews. There were two sweetened foods that I repeated even knowing they were sweetened: teriyaki sauce that didn’t end up on the side of my salmon and grape juice sweetened blueberries encrusting the Trader Joe’s goat cheese (rationalization: this was so good, killed sweet cravings, and I was already drinking grape juice).

I have been reading labels, put back potato chips, salad dressing, bread, (veggie) deli met, and frozen vegetable packages that had sugar (or other sweetener) as an ingredient. I came to the conclusion that sugar is lurking everywhere. I ordered dishes in restaurants that had the least likelihood of being spiked (except for salmon teriyaki).

We cleaned the house of ice cream, cookies, popsicles, and sweetened crackers. We talked about how we’d keep the house sugar-free for the foreseeable future (ideally forever) and limit our sugar intake to outside the house. But that plan would start after my 4 week long no-sugar plan. Even so, merely talking about it led to me daydreaming of going to the bakery, getting an icing shot (yes, our bakery has little cups of their excellent frosting available for purchase), and just doing the hit of sugar, right there, on the street.

The minute-to-minute implementation of being unsweetened wasn’t that difficult. Snacking on potato chips or bread and butter or string cheese sticks, there are always foods to eat (I didn’t lose any weight). Yogurt was tough, though after a 2 minute wait frozen fruit + plain yogurt leads to cold fruit covered in frozen yogurt. Actually, the latest technology for frozen berries without ice crystals has been wonderful, I’ve eaten a lot of still frozen fruit. That got me though the heat wave we had.

Breakfast was the hardest meal. I usually eat protein bars (I usually want to work with I wake up; making a nice breakfast gets in the way of me melding with my computer). I thought oatmeal and cream of wheat were a lost cause but when I went savory (adding sundried tomatoes and parmesan and a bit of butter), those were surprisingly yummy. Once I got oatmeal and cream of wheat working, I’d mix those up with the uberfast hunk of baguette and microwaved veggie sausage. I really didn’t have trouble finding good food to eat.

It was the daydreams and cravings that nearly killed me. Upon hearing my resolution, three people told me that they’d heard about a study that showed sugar was as addictive as crack. Two of them were eating dessert in front of me as they said this.

The worst time I had was at a birthday party. The social pressure of sharing cake is one thing, the vision of my husband scarfing up the moist cake and frosting (!!!!) haunted me for days. (Just writing about that, my mouth is all watery.) He ate maybe three bites but, still, to do it in front me… (never mind that everyone else there had a plate of cake, he gets all the blame).

I had a dream one night that I ate a bite of that cake. I could taste it. And since I’d broken my resolution, I woke up thinking I might as well have pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast. Lots of syrup.

If I felt about alcohol the way I feel about sugar, I think I would be an alcoholic. I’m embarrassed at how much time I spend plotting to get sweets and the many, varied forms that I want to consume. It is dumb and annoying, making me feel less in control of my life. Really annoying. Really embarrassing.

Like the resolution to eat whole grains, I’m happy I chose this as a resolution. It has given me a new bar for living as I want to live. It has made me comfortable with turning down sweets in social situations, enough that I think I could do it in the future. Keeping the house sweet-free is obviously the way to go (why didn’t we do this before?).

And yet, I’m still very much looking forward to this resolution ending and what I’m going to have for breakfast on Wednesday morning.

Taken in the salad section of a deli in a Flagstaff.

Taken in the salad section of a deli in a Flagstaff.

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A new week, a new resolution

March 24, 2013

I don’t normally do New Year’s resolutions. However, I did this year so here is my quarterly report.

Oh, but I didn’t exactly do a normal resolution. Instead, my plan is to have different resolution each week. Each resolution lasts Wednesday to Wednesday and should take 15-60 minutes of daily activity or thought. The goal overall is to try new things, see which better-for-me habits are easy to incorporate into my life and which ones are too difficult to maintain.

Week 1: Health: 10,000 steps and some time on the exercise. Success. Most days did more than five miles on the bike, only one day did I not want to bike at all.

Week 2: Happiness: more quality snuggling time with my husband. Mixed. It was nice but it require being in sync though it did keep us more in sync for a week or two after.

Week 3: Health: every day have one meal with a whole grain as a main component. Success. The whole grains made me feel a little better in general, more balanced sugar-wise. I found lots of whole grain things that I like, including plain old oatmeal packets, an easy meal I’d forgotten about. This resolution was a really, really good one and even 9 weeks later, most days I have something whole grain because I like how it makes me feel more full.

Week 4: Social: spend at least one hour a day talking to someone who is not my husband. Success but exhausting. Victims: house guest Nate (two days), She’s Geeky various people (three days), Ingo (birthday), and Jen + Alissa (on the embedded systems panel).

Week 5: Health: sixty minutes of at-least-slightly sweaty exercise. It’s funny, I think I usually mange 30-45 minutes of exercise (almost) everyday so I didn’t think this would be a big deal. However, I had one of Those Weeks and just failed at this one. Too much work, too much crankiness, too much “does this activity count?”. I’ll need to have more specificity in the future.

Week 6: Health: a different breakfast every day. My morning meal is exceedingly monotonous: a high protein food bar with low glycemic index and about 190 calories. What other breakfasts can keep me going until 11am without needing a snack? The goal was to keep the calorie intake around 200. This one was more interesting than I expected, changing up my morning patterns as well as my breakfast.

Week 7: Health: 10 miles on the exerbike, no reading fiction books until after getting on bike. I often bike 10 miles but I’d gotten out of the habit and I’d been lazing away hours reading junk. So, getting back in the habit of a late afternoon bike helped both of these issues.

Week 8: Health and Social: dual resolutions: to drink 8oz of water before each meal and to go out after dark each night. Having two resolutions watered it all down so I don’t think I get credit for successfully completing either one. The water one I just forgot about and getting up halfway through a meal to pound a glass of water was silly. As for going out, I just didn’t have things to do each night and didn’t have enough oomph to make stuff up.

Week 9: Health: Count calories. Not trying to reduce calories (though counting them has that effect anyway).

Week 10: Health: Count calories and exercise, making sure the total falls under the (generous) guideline given by the counting program. Still gathering a baseline.

Week 11: Health: Eat a rainbow everyday. After two weeks of counting calories, I wanted to con myself into continuing. I decided to try the school-children challenge of eating a food from each color group each day (red, orange, yellow/white, green, blue/purple). This one I stopped because it was stupid: if I want carrots and snap peas with lunch then fennel with orange wedges for dinner, eating blueberries instead (or in addition to) is dumb. Plus, I don’t really like blueberries and I couldn’t bring myself to count wine as a purple fruit. Plus, plus, I don’t need ways to eat *more* food. So I failed this resolution intentionally.

Week 12: Diet: No bread. After a few Sundays of bread-induced coma due to the amazing, spectacular, phenomenal bread from Manresa’s bread stand at Campbell’s farmer’s market, I realized I have a problem. (Still counting calories.) The resolution was really “no bread as a major component of a meal” which meant I could have a piece of bread but no bread-and-olive-oil meals, no sandwiches, and (horrors) no pizza. However, I’m mid-way through and I suspect “no bread” entirely is fine. I do miss it though.

Other resolutions I might try:

  • Brush teeth after every meal/snack
  • Eat fruit/vegetable 20 minutes before any snacking
  • An hour of house or garden work every day
  • Bike ten miles and take a walk each day
  • No alcohol or no caffeine
  • No tv before 9pm
  • No non-fiction reading
  • Blog post every day
  • Cook main component of one meal each day from a cookbook (C to help choose recipes)
  • Artistic endeavor for an hour a day
  • 30 min/day updating all career related things with current info: linked in update, resume update, google self, speaker’s wikis, etc.
  • Write a program in numPy everyday
  • Get up and shower and dress everyday, as though I have a real job
  • Do something nice for someone
  • Write a novel proposal every day
  • Spend 1 hour/day working on book promotion
  • 10% decrease in calories (using newly calculated baseline from weeks 9-12).

What else? What thing to try might make a big difference in my happiness and health?

 

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Just saying hello

February 1, 2013

Hi!

How are you? I hope things are going well. Still working on neat stuff? And the family, everybody happy and healthy?

I’m doing well. It has been a little crazy since the start of the new year but I’m starting to get a handle on everything.

We’ve been doing a lot of work on the house and getting quotes for even more work (eek, a new roof). I’m super happy with the garage remodel, it is like a real room now. I’ve been pining for a microscope for the workbench so I could solder better. I could never have dreamt of that for the old garage, it would have just been another place for the spiders to live. I’m trying to be sensible and wait until I’ve needed it three times before I buy one.

I did kind of need it yesterday with a new board I got from a client. Work has been doing ok… there is plenty of it but the grass seems a little greener over there. One work project got cancelled so I immediately shifted over to a new one. It is interesting in an academic way but not really my cup of tea. I’m hoping the first one comes back or some other shiny object captures my attention. You know, I don’t really mind having to look around for shiny objects. If you hear of someone needing an embedded software consultant, do think of me, especially if they want to use an 8 or 16 bit processor.

I’ve been involved with DesignWest, the big embedded systems conference. So far, being a track chair isn’t too onerous. And I’ve been slowly working on my proposed talks. The moderator and I spoke with a panelist on the Sensors in Health panel. Scheduling it was difficult so we ended up on the phone. I was concerned about it meshing but I think we talked for all of three minutes before I thought, “This is going to rock!” I’m looking forward to repeating the interviews with the other panelists.

Let’s see, what else? The garden is a bit of a mess. We’ve had a few too many frosts this year so I’ve got a lot of damaged plants. I’m not sure the cold times are over so I haven’t cut back to new growth. It looks messy but in a few weeks, I’ll fix it.

Dogs are good. Well, not really. But they are cute so they continue to get fed. We lost Dylan, the big cat, over the holidays. That was sad. Ani, the littler, fuzzier cat, has gotten much friendlier. She’s always been really sweet but now she’s almost a lap kitty.

Oh, and my husband is great. Very excited about his new car/toy/spaceship.  He had a cold but is over it, working a lot this week since he got roped into working for one of my clients.

Well, I just wanted to drop you a note to say I’m still alive. I do hope things are going well for you.

Cheers,
Elecia