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What is Physical AI?
Most of the recent excitement around artificial intelligence (AI) has focused on systems that live entirely in the digital world: large language models (LLMs) generate text, image classifiers label photos, and commendation algorithms suggest movies or products. A growing area of research and industry development is pushing AI out of the cloud and into machines…
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Before I Speak to ECE Department Heads About Edge AI, I Want Your Input
At the end of March, I’ll be attending the annual ECEDHA conference, where I’ll be on a panel with ECE department heads and other industry leaders discussing the future of edge AI curriculum. Before I walk into a room full of department chairs, I’d like to hear from the people actually building products: I would…
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Is Embedded Rust Ready for Primetime?
My Introduction to Embedded Rust series is being released and last November, I taught an Intro to Embedded Rust workshop at Hackaday Supercon. The goal wasn’t to convince anyone that Rust was the future of embedded systems. I simply wanted participants to get hands-on experience running Rust on real hardware so they could decide for…
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The Hidden Costs of Using Zephyr (and How to Mitigate Them)
Over the past few years, I’ve been excited to watch Zephyr grow and evolve. It’s modern, actively maintained, vendor-neutral, and backed by a large community. It offers a consistent architecture across platforms, a robust RTOS kernel, a growing driver ecosystem, and tooling that feels far more structured than what many of us grew up with.…
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The Difference Between a Hobbyist and a Hirable Embedded Systems Engineer
If you spend enough time around makerspaces, hackathons, or online embedded communities (including my own courses), you’ll see a lot of impressive projects: custom keyboards, home automation systems, robot cars, sensor networks, and beautiful PCBs. That being said, when it comes time to hire for an embedded engineering role, companies still struggle to find candidates…
