Embedded

Chris and Elecia talk about pushing out of their comfort zone, networking advice, adding STARs and action verbs to resumes, using rust, thermo forming plastics, soldering together audio gear, and winning awards. 
If you are looking for an update to your resume or are interviewing for a new job and you haven't heard of the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result), it is a good way to formulate what you've done in a way that helps people see your impact. The Rutgers College Career Development Center has a STAR description that includes how to take your current, boring "did the task" resume bullet point and move it into STAR format and then into resume format to say "got great things done". There are lots of examples of STAR in practice (ex 1, ex 2). We mainly talked about resumes but it is very useful for having coherent stories during interviews. (Search "STAR resume", "STAR interview", "STAR engineering" to find a presentation that works for you. The college career sites are probably the best ones I've found.)
On the topic of resumes, if you don't know about resume action verbs, let us share some lists that will make writing your resume 25% less painful. Again, college career development centers have the best ones (Harvard Business School's action verb list is good for managers, Penn State has a nice set of verbs for engineering or see University of Houston's verb list for engineering.)
And on the topic of interviewing and networking, do you have an elevator pitch for yourself? A short introduction of who you are? It is really handy to have that for conferences as well. Princeton has a short write up on putting one together; UPenn has a long write up (ironic given the topic but still useful).
Will Chris be adding the Rust language to his resume? Too early to tell. He's been learning with Rust for Embedded C Programmers - OpenTitan Documentation. 
Elecia has been playing with origami molded fabrics, as learned on Instructable Paper Mold Origami Fabrics 3.  The term on Instagram seems to be #plissage and it is covered in (super famous origami guy) Paul Jackson's encyclopedic Complete Pleats. 
Chris has built a Colour Duo 2-Channel Colour Channel Strip Kit (a preamp with modifiable analog processing). This kit is from DIY Recording Equipment. He's enjoying working with it while recording music. 
After Elecia's New Year's Resolution to apply for awards, we won a Communicator Award for Individual Episodes-Science & Technology, Distinction 2026 for an episode about engineering the landscape of fear and conservation technology in the wild: 501: Inside the Armpit of a Giraffe. This was quite the honor but after some consideration, we are even more honored to be nominated by listeners for the IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB) Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. This award "recognizes IEEE members who volunteer their time and effort to improve the informal education community, helping to promote engineering to students, parents, and the general public."
Having fulfilled the objective and gone beyond, Elecia is still planning to apply for the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards where we'll need to find one or two episodes from July 2025 to July 2026 that show off "scientific accuracy, initiative, originality, clarity of interpretation, and value in fostering a better public understanding of science and its impact."
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Dr. Victoria Serrano spoke with us about STEM outreach, fostering curiosity, and inspiring students with engineering education.

Victoria is a professor at the Technological University of Panama (her faculty page: UTP | Dra. Victoria Serrano). Her youtube channel is CIATEC PANAMA which talks about circuits, electronics, and robotics. The channel goes along with her ciatecpanama.com website which shows the types of courses and outreach she does with Arduino UNOs and other low cost equipment. 
Victoria is also a Fulbright Scholar, an IEEE STEM Champion 2023, and Honorable Mention IEEE Rising Stars Conference 2024. She also received the IEEE EAB Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education in 2019 (the award Elecia and Chris believe is related to their work on Embedded.fm and for which they were honored to be nominated).
The final quote was from Haben Girma's book: Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law. 

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Dr. Tom Williams spoke with us about robots, ethics, teaching, and books. Then we talked about mines, umpires, water, and more books.
Tom is the author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice (free at MIT Press: Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice!). 
As part of the discussion, we talked about some other books and media:
Nonfiction:

Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI by Ayanna Howard (Embedded episodes 367: Data of Our Lives and 207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head)

Embodied AI Safety: Reimagining safety engineering for artificial intelligence in physical systems by Philip Koopman (related Embedded episode 514: Just Turn Off All the Computers) 

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

Waki Kamino's research on robot umpires: Beyond Accuracy: Rethinking the Value of AI in Decision-Making Through Baseball's Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) System (or see the summary in the Cornell Chronicle: AI on deck: assessing impact of MLB's new ball-strike system)

Fiction:

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chalmers 

Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries Book 8) by Martha Wells (Embedded episode 432: Robot Bechdel Test) 

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

The Good Place TV show was mentioned a few times as an introduction to ethics for people who prefer their education crammed with amusement.

Critical Role web series

There was a discussion about water use in AI. Tom recommends Why is Everyone So Wrong About AI Water Use?? while Elecia unsurprisingly mispronounces synecdoche. 
Tom is a computer science professor at the Colorado School of Mines where he runs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab (MIRROR lab). See also Tom's page on mines.edu.
The final quote is from an essay written by Karel Capek and translated to English in in The Man Who Coined the Word "Robot" Defends Himself - IEEE Spectrum.

Nathan Jones spoke with us about hardware security, motivation, conference talks, and writing.
Nathan wrote an in-depth series of posts about the benefits of superloops vs RTOS: You Don't Need an RTOS (Part 1), Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. He also wrote about
How Hardware Gets Hacked (Part 1) and Part 2 which discusses the MITRE embedded CTF (Capture the Flag) challenge. See his EmbeddedRelated profile and Digikey profile. And Nathan's excellent Embedded for Everyone Github repo.
Nathan recommends The Hardware Hacking Handbook by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn. It is an excellent resource on embedded security. We spoke with Jasper about the book in 431: Becoming More of a Smurf and with Colin about the Chip Whisperer in 286: Twenty Cans of Gas.
The European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has specific features that are required to be implemented by all devices that want the safety CE label. This is important for products shipping to Europe.
If you are going to the Embedded Online Conference, you can get a discount with the code JONES100. Nathan will be giving a workshop on the Chip Whisperer Nano. (Recent guest Mark Omo will also be presenting: Security for the Rest of Us: What Matters and Where to Start.)
Another conference for the security-minded is Hardwear.io which is in Santa Clara, CA, USA at the end of May and in Amsterdam in November.
Last year, Nathan spoke about Exception Handling for EOC 2025 (video). Elecia mentioned her own Creating Chaos and Hard Faults from EOC 2024.
The Embedded Slack book club is reading The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition. Well, some of us are just watching. 
The quote came from Elizabeth Bear's Ancestral Night (White Space) which is part of a series with some neat mechanics around brain chemistry. 
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Chris and Elecia chat about Leapfrog toys, things they like, large company politics, awards, and open source governance. 
The Toy Story 5 Trailer with LilyPad toy which is suspiciously similar to the LeapFrog LeapPad tablet. Which is different from the original LeapPad which had cartridges and capacitive touch (capacitive touch was used on the globe as well… the latest globe also has a screen).

Why does Elecia want an award? Who knows? But right now, she's getting ready for a listener to nominate the show (Chris and Elecia) for IEEE's Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. Probably. But we've got nominators and endorsers so that's mostly sorted. She also signed Embedded up for the Women Podcasters Award which is a popularity contest. You can vote here: www.womenpodcasters.com/awards-voting. The show is under the Science Podcasters category.
Some things we like:
Ctrl-R: In a command shell, ctrl-r searches your history. Better than ! because you don't have to remember as much.

Data bars in Excel: This can create a plot of your data in the column.

Merlin Bird ID: Want to know what bird is making that sound? Want to know the name of the bird you just saw? Merlin Bird ID is a free app that is amazing.

Plucky Cards: Want to have a 1:1 where you talk about more than your status? Choose a card, any card. Or maybe just look through and have a 1:1 by yourself

Just reading about Bunnie Huang's new RISCV board Dabao Evaluation Board for Baochip-1x taught us things! We're not sure what we'd use it for yet but it does spark a few ideas. 
The Embedded.fm Patreon Slack book club is reading Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition.
Talking about open source projects and governance models, we referenced three contributing guidelines: Valetudo, ESPHome, and Zephyr. Some later research led to Leadership and Governance | Open Source Guides and presentation by Cornelius Schumacher – The spectrum of FOSS governance models (Slides). The link between the politics associated with the size of companies and the open source governance models clearly needs a bit more thought.
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