469: Saving the World Is Not a Hobby with Elecia and Chris

Chris and Elecia chat with each other about motor encoder reading methods, conferences coming up, soldering irons, schematic reviews, looking for a new job, and general life.?

Some conferences coming up in the embedded space:

• Embedded Online, April 29-May 4, virtual (Elecia will be speaking)
• Open Hardware Summit in May 3-4, Montreal, Canada
• Embedded World in April 9-11 in Nuremburg, Germany

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories was purchased by Bantam Tools!

Starter soldering irons? It seemed like small pen-style ones were more popular than big soldering stations. See the Adafruit USB C Powered Soldering Iron - Adjustable Temperature Pen-Style - TS80P. Or for much less (but you can write your own firmware!), the Pinecil. And one vote for the RT Soldering Pen on Tindie because it uses Weller RT tips (which are more expensive than the soldering pen but much less expensive than the Weller station that uses the RT tips).?

Embedded Artistry has excellent advice for the role of the firmware in schematic reviews.?

Adafruit Playgrounds looks like a neat place to write up your project.?

The?transcript?from the show is now available. Feel free to read, search and repost at your leisure.

Weekly links:

• Turn any ESP-32 S3 into a standalone debugger by running OpenCCD directly on it. Works over WiFi too!
• How to gain access to the UART (serial port) of your Pinecil soldering iron. It includes a cool side project of turning a RP2040 into a USB to Serial adaptor.
• Matt Godbolt (of godbolt.org fame) was recently on Computerphile talking about how CPUs do math.
• We forgot to put a link in the show notes about optimizing Super Mario 64, so here's a Hackaday article all about it.

Upcoming Show

Our next show will be February 8?with Helen Leigh about planning conferences and open source tools.

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