The Change Log Co-host

Usually.

On platforms like the web, it's so easy. You can get to that moment in minutes because you can load up their favorite web page and show them how to open up the dev tools and change the background color or something or delete a line and the title disappears. And you see that aha moment very quickly because And I know in embedded systems, a lot of times now it's the blinking lights, right?

It's the Arduino or whatever it is. And that moment of turning a light on, that's so cool. When you mentor, when you teach, what do you do? How do you get people to that moment? What do you show them? And how long does that take? Because it has historically been considerably more steps in embedded than on platforms like the web.

I had no idea it existed. How big is the chasm between... I'm able to use a simulator in Python or maybe it's even in C. Or I'm even able to get something onto some device and have it do stuff. And your world of I'm writing professional embedded software for autonomous vehicles that go underwater and sense things. How big is that chasm?

Well, there's a sideways application of Parkinson's law here, which, you know, Parkinson's law is the one that the scope of a project will expand to match the time allowed for the project. Something like this. That's a bad paraphrase.

And I was just teaching my kids about budgeting this morning and was talking about how if you're not diligent that your lifestyle will expand to match the size of your income, right? Sometimes beyond. It's just kind of like a human nature thing. And I think our software expands to... you know, match the size of the hardware that it's running on to use every last bit.

And has allowed for many of us, web developers like myself included, to be lazy and do things the easy way, the fast way, the cheap way. But in that embedded world where like every resource counts and it's heavily constrained, you must have to know all of the all the little tricks, the way to manage your memory so as not to bloat or leak. Do you like, I mean, you must like that.

I mean, it's literally a constraint. Puzzle. The challenge of, yeah, it's a puzzle. Yeah. And to many of us, that would be a huge bummer, you know, because it's hard and there's things to do. But you must like puzzle solving a lot.

Sure.

There you go. There you go. Yeah. So what about open source? Has that permeated your crew yet?

What's that?

Gotcha. And so the vendors of the device would provide like a set of filters for you to use?

Okay, because they've done those tests and they understand the sensors and their error rates and these other things.

Better than you do.

Yeah, I mean, after a while, you may understand them better than they do. But those used to be closed source or they used to be unavailable to you and now they're just provided.

So you helped invent these things?

Okay.

Gotcha. So you mentioned self-driving cars and you mentioned LIDAR. So I have to ask your take as an embedded person on Tesla's proposition that they can get to autonomous or whatever level you need to get to with cameras only. And then Waymo's using LiDARs. Other people are using LiDARs.

How important is the LiDAR, do you think, pure opinion, versus having a bunch of cameras and letting that be your only input or your only data streams?

That's what a lot of people say.

Right. Like all we have is eyes, right?

Such as?

Okay.

Okay. I'm tracking you.

All right, we are here with Alicia White from Embedded FM. Alicia, welcome to The Change Log.

Nice to have you. See, you are on the other side of the microphone, so to speak, as a longtime podcaster. I think you've done 491 episodes, if the most recent one on your homepage is in fact the highest number.

Right. Yeah, I think your point about the horizontal scale, Alicia, if that's just the way I'll say it, is that we have crazily bad 16-year-old drivers... But it's not like at a specific moment in time, this percentage of all cars on the road are going to turn into that.

The error that happens spread across a fleet of cars all running the same software, for instance, that makes the same mistake all at once. is catastrophic. Of course, the famous or infamous, I think this was the one that the first Tesla that killed somebody that was in FSD mode was because it came over a hill and the sun was coming up And the sun shone into all the cameras at once.

I'm just giving my depiction of what happened. It's roughly that. And the thing, I mean, it couldn't handle it. Well, of course, a human couldn't handle that either because your eyes are completely blinded. And so likely, maybe the same result in that one instance. But if something like that happens across 50,000 cars at the same time.

Oh, so it must be a new one out today. What's the most recent?

Yeah.

Oh, I see it right there. You know what? I scrolled right past it. Two oscillators oscillating other oscillators, which is a great title.

One of the reasons why I've been tentatively positive about this progress is because of how many accidents there are and because how distracted and bad we are at driving, even though we are amazing, Alicia, to your point about the actual physicality of observing the world that we're in and that connection between our hands and our eyes being just grounded in, I don't know, biology.

We're pretty amazing computers. But I don't think these cars have to get so good to be better than us because we have so many failure rates already. The failure rate's very high. That being said, it does seem fraught. It's always been, it's 18 months around the corner for the last 10 years. There's progress being made. I mean, Waymo is opening in new cities.

It seems like maybe a city-by-city rollout, and I believe they have LiDAR involved as well, is working. They also, I think they have a call center, I believe. I could be spreading fake news, but I think they have actual humans, not in the loop, but available in order to take over a car if need be. That seems like a good fail-safe. There's progress being made, but it does seem like

I love that. Yes. That is my brand. That's your brand.

I don't want to call it an impossibility, but at this point, I just don't feel like we're close.

Right.

Right. And a smaller problem set.

I need to invest in a smart rock company because we're going to be selling a lot of smart rock. Yeah.

That's crazy. What do the scripts do for you?

It's just a world that I've not been introduced to, so I don't know what exists. Yeah. But yours is custom curved origami that you want to make. Yes. And so your scripts give you the crease lines.

Well, you started a podcast called Embedded. So at a certain point, you decided to embrace it, at least.

No, we're with you. We are with you. I'm listening.

Right.

Right. You just know that somebody else is there doing something. It's a connection.

Cool.

Yes. Love it. It seems like the, you said you get intimidated by mechanical and it seems like the pusher would be the... the hardest part of that, maybe you could utilize gravity to just have like, you know, an opener and shutter versus a pusher. And then you're dropping the pellets in. I'm not sure how triggers work.

Binder clip.

Like during your interview with her?

We've gotten so many amazing links from this conversation. Are there others? If we're like Alicia, what's another cool thing you just showed us? Chibitronics first. Firstinspires.org is the first robots people met or met. Adam pointed us to Crunch Labs. Of course, we have MicroPython, Adafruit, the WalkWe. What else you got?

Oh, Hackaday I'm well aware of. What was the first one you said?

And privacy too, which those two are kind of eternally linked, aren't they now? Because being able to throw a smart rock into a river and monitor things is awesome. But being able to throw it into my pool and monitor my swimming, maybe not so much. Just for instance, you know?

The Internet of Things. And also, for IoT makers out there, you know, just leave us physical buttons. You know, like give us, let us opt out every once in a while and just use the dishwasher without having to launch an app. Oh, yes.

No. I never want almost any. Sometimes you're like, oh, this actually is kind of nice. Once you start using the feature, you're like, yeah, I kind of appreciate this, but it was never.

Yeah, it never has sold me on any piece of appliance.

But you know, those... Those bits of information that they're showing to you can also just seep out of your local area network and into the hands of somebody.

You know, someday you're going to get an email from a hacker and he's going to be like, Adam, you're out of underwear.

Okay? All right, Alicia. I assume the website is embedded.fm. Where else can folks connect with you?

Look for the one with a robot.

Nice.

Congrats.

There you go. Or one of those things you can touch that we know like Alicia is still there. She can just send a sensor to the conf. Still here. Like light up a light, you know, blinking lights. We hear you like those.

um heaters no because i'm really neurotic about setting the house on fire but what if it was water cooled or water warmed warm water yeah smart rocks i'm just i never got over that i'm like he just said smart rock and i'm like that's that's new to me you're dumb as a rock no you're smart as a rock i know it's like a whole new world where rocks are smart cats and dogs living together

Or something. I don't know. See well enough.

Yes.

No.

But that'd be so cool. Oh, yeah. I have the... I still have the pie. Okay. and I was using it for something. I was using it as a, what's that thing called, the blocker pie? The pie hole. Yeah, I was using it as a pie hole, and then I quit using that, and I'm using XDNS instead. And so the pie is just sitting down there, and it's relatively close to the freezer.

I just want to make sure, at least here we have, we buy like half a cow once a year kind of a thing, and like that's very expensive.

So what are some non-computers that you've programmed?

Smart rocks. Is that what you call them? Smart rocks?

Wow. Okay. Never heard of that.

You can't top that one, can you?

You've done a lot of cool stuff. How did you get into this world?