The Contextual Electronics Podcast

Zack Freedman is a prototyping engineer turned YouTuber who makes bombastic videos about 3D printed creations and getting projects across the finish line. He joins Chris to talk about his past hardware designs and what he will be building next.

Welcome, Jon Evans of the KiCad project! Jon Evans is a longtime developer on the KiCad project and practicing EE at Formlabs. He joins Chris to talk about the future of KiCad, including features that are coming in V6. Show Notes 0:00 Introduction 2:15 Making changes to the platform 4:00 History of the codebase - Chat with the KiCad team about V6 and beyond 5:05 Jon's work background - Jon works for Formlabs 8:20 What is coming in KiCad v6? 10:45 Working with legacy code in KiCad 13:30 Looking at an example project 14:50 Schematic editor 18:50 Changes to the schematic UI 21:00 Layout tool 22:45 Changes to the layout UI 24:10 The split of beginner vs advanced users 25:55 The benefits of an open source tool 26:25 Comparison to tools that are cloud based 27:45 The KiCad ecosystem 30:45 KiCad Professional Services 32:00 KiCon 2021 33:10 What is DRC? How is it changing? 37:40 The challenges of live DRC 40:15 Example of DRC 46:05 New python API 48:30 Example project for using python scripting with KiCad 50:00 How the KiCad project works with feature requests 52:15 Working with the console inside KiCad 53:55 What else is Jon excited about in V6? 56:20 KiCad as a professional tool? 1:00:05 Following Jon online 1:02:10 Conclusion Other links: Follow Jon on Twitter KiCad User Forum KiCad Discord KiCad Twitter Thank you for supporting The Contextual Electronics Podcast! Here's how you can follow and help us grow: Please follow us on social media: @ContextualElec on Twitter Contextual Electronics on Facebook Contextual Electronics on LinkedIn @Chris_Gammell on Twitter Please consider leaving us a review iTunes page for subscribing and reviewing   Video version of the podcast: Audio version

Kat Scott of Open Robotics joins Chris to talk about how to create high complexity robotic creations and also how to create the lower level electronics that integrate into larger ROS systems. Kat is also a member of OSHWA, which defines and certifies Open Source Hardware.

Becky Stern mixes electronics, crafts, and practical applications to create interesting products and projects. She talks with Chris about her library of work and how to get started pairing electronics with something other than plastic boxes.

Conservify is creating the FieldKit, a new modular system for environmental monitoring for research scientists and citizen scientists. The engineering team joins Chris to talk about deploying measurement systems into harsh environments and how to make things that last.

Timon (@timonsku) joins Chris to talk about his experience creating low volume products at low cost (two things not normally associated). His experience building technical exhibitions, and more recently CM4 boards, gives him the experience to offer Chris some suggestions on reducing the cost of the ABC board.

In this episode, Mike Cheich (Programming Electronics) and Phil FitzGerald (The Compelling Message) talk with Chris about how to learn and teach electronics. This discussion also covers how to construct your own electronics learning journey, so you can get to your destination faster and learn how to create the custom electronics you'd like to build.

Joe Barnard joins Chris to talk about building scale model rockets and using thrust vector control to try and land those rockets like SpaceX does. This is an ongoing rocketry and video experiment you can follow and watch on BPS.Space!

Sarah Petkus is an artist and a maker who combines illustration, electronics, 3D printing, and softgoods design to bring her visions to life.

Roy Chen, Field Application Engineer (FAE) for Quectel, joins Chris to talk about the cellular module design on the ABC board (part of Contextual Electronics). This acts as an insight into the relationship between engineers and FAEs.

Mike Fikes normally works on software, focusing on Clojure Script and other high level language implementations. Mike joins Chris to talk about bringing similar methodologies to the world of hardware, and how he learned how to work on hardware.

Elen from Fully Automated Technologies joins Chris to talk about building high current battery controllers. She also describes an exciting new site called EDeA, for offering circuit schematic and layout blocks in KiCad. That site will allow users to pull in open source, proven design blocks to their designs. All electronics designed at Fully Automated Technologies is open source.

Today we're talking with, Erik Larson, who is a firmware engineer with some interesting background! He joins Chris to review the Advanced BLE-Cell (ABC) board, which is also a new course on Contextual Electronics. Erik has worked at places like Honeywell Aerospace, Apriva and Hologram (where he and Chris met). Erik is now a full time consultant for his own company, Statropy Software LLC. Erik was the firmware engineer on the Hologram Dash, which was an embedded module that Hologram used to make for people to get started making cellular connected devices. During his career, he had to learn how to code remotely on a VAX! This meant being very careful with code check-ins Erik and Chris review some of the "Must check" sections of schematics, in order to get firmware and hardware talking properly: Pin selection on a microcontroller Programming elements, including the bootloader Understanding the peripherals of the specific chip you're using The board we're reviewing is the Advanced BLE-CELL (ABC) board, which is designed as part of a Contextual Electronics course. You can follow along and watch the entire design of this board if you're a member of Contextual Electronics. Here is the schematic, as shown in the video (has since been updated for the course, as has the layout) Check out the nRF52840 Product Specification (datasheet) Erik recommends getting a development board and breakout boards before the hardware arrives. You can hire Erik to help with your next firmware project on his website, Statropy Software, LLC   That's our third episode, which is the last in our initial release of shows! Please follow us on social media: @Chris_Gammell on Twitter @ContextualElec on Twitter Contextual Electronics on Facebook Contextual Electronics on LinkedIn Please consider leaving us a review iTunes page for subscribing and reviewing Video version of the podcast: Audio version of the podcast:

Today we're talking with, Stephen Hawes, an electronics engineer and maker who is building his own Pick and Place machine and sharing about the process on YouTube Stephen works at Formlabs during the day, and films videos at night! Controlling 30 feeders Using OpenPnP Adding vision to the PnP PnP Controller build The glowtie (which he did a crowdfunding campaign on) Video version of the podcast: Audio version of the podcast:

Sophy Wong is a designer and maker who combines 3D printing, soft goods, electronics and software to make a wide range of projects online. She also shares as she is learning, and creates tutorials so others may follow in her footsteps.

I started Contextual Electronics (CE) in 2014 to teach electronics by pairing theory and practice. We sometimes refer to this as "the online electronics apprenticeship", since our members follow along with electronics builds. Since then, hundreds have participated in project based education to improve their skills. In 2020, we're looking to feature people using electronics in their everyday work. This is a new podcast called, The Contextual Electronics Podcast. Listeners/viewers will gain a better grasp of required knowledge for their personal projects and how to work towards it. This will bring more context to your practice. How did we get here? Podcasting isn't new for me. Contextual Electronics started as the direct result of another podcast, The Amp Hour. Feedback from Amp Hour listeners helped me realized there was a need for a program such as CE. I designed a project based course that pairs theory and practice. Over time, the course and this site have changed. CE started as a 10 week course teaching electronics; then it split out into two 8 week courses instead. Then we released all of our KiCad videos online and kept releasing new ones to the public for teaching people how to use an open source EDA program. Then we moved on to doing smaller boards for more rapid feedback on designs. Then we did a larger project to pull in firmware and build up a system. Then we developed a shortcourse that highlights swappable design. Then we started a public forum to complement the coursework. Most recently, we have been designing an advanced course that shows how to design a board that has bluetooth and cellular capabilities. We hope that the podcast is the next iteration. A free weekly podcast, highlighting guests who pair electronics theory and practice every day. We hope this will help more people discover the world of electronics. What will the show be like? The Contextual Electronics Podcast (CEP) will invite guests on from all parts of the industry. We are looking to feature people at different points in their careers, and with very different backgrounds. Ultimately we want to add context to the world of electronics. Hearing or watching people with different backgrounds than your own, and those who are struggling or have struggled with electronics concepts, should help you realize you're not alone in your learning. This podcast will include video, which is new for me on podcasts (The Amp Hour is audio only). Electronics and the education surrounding it is visual by nature; that's why Contextual Electronics is primarily a video course. We hope that a video podcast will help to give a better view into our guests' experiences. We will always try to make sure we describe what is on screen so that it's possible to listen to the podcast, if that's your preferred way of tuning in. How can you tune in? The best away to make sure you don't miss any episodes is to subscribe! Here are some places you can find the podcast, either video or audio: YouTube (video) iTunes (audio) Spotify (audio) Stitcher (audio) Overcast (audio) RSS Email (sign up in the form below) Most of the podcast aggregators pull from the marketplaces above. If you can't find CEP in your favorite one, please let us know in the forum post, linked below. On with the show! We are releasing 3 episodes right off the bat, and they turned out great! Here are links to the show notes and the video and audio versions of the podcast. The videos will be released on YouTube publicly over the next few days (to save peoples' notifications), but you can access all of the content right now using the links below. CEP001 - Design Methodologies with Sophy Wong CEP002 - A DIY Pick and Place with Stephen Hawes CEP003 - A Hardware Design Review with Erik Larson If you are so inclined, please consider giving us a review on iTunes and/or giving us a thumbs up on the YouTube versions of the podcast.