Show Notes
Elecia and Christopher celebrate winning the IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education! A huge thank you to Mark Omo and the wonderful listeners who submitted nomination letters. Chris and Elecia talk about learning Hungarian to qualify Chris for an EU passport. They also cover Cory Doctorow's new book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, smart ways to hand off codebases, and the most valuable skills they've relied on through their engineering careers. DISCUSSION RESOURCES & LINKS AWARDS & MILESTONES: IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education
"For creating and sustaining Embedded.fm, a long-running technical engineering podcast that bridges academic theory and industry practice, champions underrepresented groups in STEM, addresses professional ethics, and provides informal technical mentorship to a global audience." Huge thanks to Mark Omo for submitting the nomination and to the other nominators for advocating for our work. To the 450+ guests—artists, makers, educators, entrepreneurs, and traditional engineers—who have generously shared their time and deep expertise with us: this award belongs to you too. And to our incredible global listener community: thank you for tuning in, sharing episodes with your colleagues, and keeping the STEM pipeline strong. If Embedded.fm has ever helped you solve a tricky bug, navigate a career transition, or stay inspired in hardware/software design, we'd love for you to celebrate with us by sharing your favorite episode with an early-career engineer or student this week! Embedded episode 501: Inside the Armpit of a Giraffe, an interview with biologist Meredith Palmer and engineer Akiba, won a Communicator Award for an Individual Episodes-Science & Technology, Distinction 2026.
BOOKS & READING LIST: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow
Programmers at Work: Interviews With 19 Developers Who Shaped the Computer Industry by Susan Lammers (1986)
Embedded AI: Intelligence at the Deep End by David Such (No Starch Press, Early Access)
TECHNICAL & LANGUAGE MENTIONS: The Hungarian phrase "Boldog vagyok" ("I am happy"). Elecia's Duolingo page
Zephyr RTOS and embedding Rust libraries into Zephyr environments
Memfault observability, CSV data extractions, and battery performance analytics
AI models escaping sandboxes (The OpenAI and Anthropic benchmark incidents)
Transcript
More from Embedded
David Such joins us to discuss his new book, Embedded AI: Intelligence at the Deep Edge. We explore the boundary between classical signal processing, heuristics, and edge machine learning; IMU processing and sensor fusion; and how to determine what sort of ML fits on your processor. David also shares his experiences writing for No Starch Press and why future robotic architectures need a digital cerebellum for low-level reflexes. David Such is an electrical engineer based in Sydney. He is the director of Reefwing Software. DISCUSSION RESOURCES & LINKS David's Website & Book Resources: Embedded AI: Intelligence at the Deep Edge (No Starch Press, on Amazon)
Adam Smith from UC Santa Cruz joins us to discuss local Small Language Models (SLMs) and building open, autonomous tools. We explore his BayLeaf AI counterplatform, transagency (the "me-and-the-car" concept of human-agent collaboration), context distillation, and running models locally without relying on data-harvesting corporate clouds. Adam also shares practical strategies for working with coding agents, including why plain-text AGENTS.md files outperform model weight fine-tuning for long-term knowledge retention. He also describes how he uses open-source tools like OpenWebUI, OpenCode and OpenChamber to integrate small and local LLM integration into development environments and web chats. Discussion Resources & Links Adam's Projects & Research: BayLeaf AI Counterplatform: Hyper-local, open-source AI infrastructure built for UC Santa Cruz. See also the BayLeaf Getting Started Guide and BayLeaf Blog.
Aaed Musa joins us to talk about building robot dogs, custom actuators, and his YouTube channel. He shares how he moved from 3D-printing servo robots in his parents' garage to designing capstan drives, and how he uses reinforcement learning to train quadrupedal walking gaits. We also talk about his senior design project (CARA 2.0), his Spider-Man web-shooter build, lessons in storytelling and video editing, and why he's starting a company to bring friendly, expressive quadrupeds into the home. Aaed Musa is a mechanical engineering graduate from Purdue University, a hardware creator on YouTube, and co-founder of the robotics startup Mecha. DISCUSSION RESOURCES & LINKS AAED'S CHANNELS & PROJECTS: Aaed Musa on YouTube: Project videos covering quadrupedal robot dogs, Spider-Man web shooters, and custom actuators. Oh, and planetary gears.
Author Susan Lammers joins the show to discuss the 40th anniversary edition of her classic book, Programmers at Work. We discuss what it was like to interview young and pioneering software developers like Toru Iwatani, C. Wayne Ratliff, and Michael Hawley and how the personal computer revolution was built by individuals seeking freedom from corporate mainframes. Susan also shares her experiences as Editor-in-Chief at Microsoft Press, leading Microsoft's early interactive CD-ROM division, founding Headbone Interactive in the 1990s, and why she's bringing retro games like Elroy Goes Bugzerk back to Steam today. SUSAN'S BOOK & WEB RESOURCES: Programmers at Work: 40th Anniversary Edition – Official site featuring updated bios, excerpts, and current career paths of the 19 interviewees
Kevin Santo Cappuccio, founder of Architeuthis Flux, joins the show to discuss creating Jumperless, an open-source breadboard that replaces physical jumper wires with software-controlled analog crossbar switches. We explore the need for 445 RGB LEDs on a breadboard, using MicroPython to create scriptable circuits, some of the lessons that can be implemented with the Jumperless, and how it might be used to create new instruments. Kevin also shares the story behind his upcoming Barnacle Board. DISCUSSION RESOURCES & LINKS Jumperless Project & Hardware Resources: Jumperless Docs and Discord