top of page

Listen on:

  • apple-podcast-logo
  • podbean-logo
  • youtube-logo
  • spotify-logo
  • amazon-music-logo
  • iheart-logo
  • tunein-logo
  • playerFM-logo
  • podchaser-logo
  • listennotes-logo
  • boomplay-logo

Evolved Engineering: Eli Hughes on the New Era of Embedded Development

Published:

May 12, 2025 at 7:44:25 PM

With Eli Hughes

In this conversation, Eli Hughes discusses his journey as a “full-stack hardware engineer” and his work with NXP as a technical content creator. He discusses how he’s leveraged the NXP FRDM (Freedom) development platform and the importance of hands-on learning in engineering education. He emphasizes the accessibility of modern development tools and their impact on both students and professionals in the field. The conversation also covers various applications and use cases for FRDM and other open-source tools. 👇 Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for more engineering conversations that educate, equip, and inspire! 🤝Join The EEcosystem Community for more free engineering resources and member-only benefits at https://theeecosystem.com

Episode Audio

Evolved Engineering: Eli Hughes on the New Era of Embedded DevelopmentThe EEcosystem
00:00 / 33:31

Sponsor Resources

📘 Join The EEcosystem Community  and receive a free 90-day subscription to all of Eric Bogatin's training at The Signal Integrity Academy. Also enjoy more technical downloads and community member-only benefits.


👨🏽‍💻For free Technical Resources and to Learn more about Keysight Pathwave EDA Software Solutions visit the homepage now.


💻 Visit Cofactr for AI-Powered real-time part data Intelligence and supply-chain connected workflow and logistics.


🔗For all of your high-speed and RF connectors visit the Samtec website and access excellent engineering resources while you are there. 


⛰️Visit Summit Interconnect for all your complex PCB manufacturing needs. 


🌎 Visit Isola Group global for High performance laminates and prepreg materials for PCB manufacturing, as well as new IC packaging interposer 


💽 For high complexity EDA solutions visit SIEMENS EDA Website 


💡For a free subscription Signal Integrity Journal and articles about SI/PI/EMI, news and technical resources follow the link above.


📡 For Custom RF and MW PCBs visit the Transline Technology Website to learn more. 


🔌 Picotest specializes in high-fidelity testing and measurement tools, primarily for power-related applications. Visit their website for more product information and excellent training materials from expert Steve Sandler 

Episode Transcript

Judy Warner (00:01.708) Hi, Eli. Thanks so much for joining us today. It's been a while since we've done a podcast, my friend, but you are always one of my favorites and you always teach me a lot. So thanks for joining and telling our engineers a little bit more about what you're doing these days. Eli (00:18.205) I'm happy to be back and talk anytime. I always talk for free. Judy Warner (00:23.084) Well, and you and I can talk, no problem talking between the two of us. And like I said, that's why I always learn so much from you. So why don't you take a moment and just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you're doing at wave number and also the work you're doing for NXP. Eli (00:41.205) Sure, so my name is Eli Hughes. I live in State College, Pennsylvania. It's the home of Penn State University. I actually moved here over 20 years ago for grad school to get a degree, graduate degree in the science of sound. I came from an electronics background, but kind of blended that to kind of branch into a more interdisciplinary type career. So. Yes, so Wave Number is just my company. We have a small cohort of highly capable people that our mission, it's not actually a technical one. I tell people it's like three things. We create, we communicate, and we serve other people in other businesses. And those are the three things. We just happen to do a lot of neat engineering along the way. Kind of along the way, part of the kind of service in all three of those, create, communicate, and serve for... NXP, I've been working, you know, directly with NXP before it was just NXP, before it was FreeScale and NXP, and even before that when it was Motorola and Philips Semiconductor. but just over the years, just starting with, I taught with Motorola products, FreeScale products, and NXP at Penn State University, and it kind of also grew into the engineering side of you know, the business side. So that's kind of a little bit about what I do. Judy Warner (02:11.822) So what kept, why was that brand and that company so sticky for you and how did you particularly use that as an instructor at Penn State and then take this into your professional engineering life? Eli (02:29.075) You know, there's always like an origin story and usually it starts, we always think about like a technical piece, but there's like a human piece that starts. And I had like a relationship with my undergraduate advisor. He worked for a digital equipment corp. He worked on some of the original, you know, deck alpha processors. he was an interesting fellow, very tough, but you know, I learned a ton, but that was... one of my first experiences with microcontrollers where he taught with a Motorola HC11. so, Motorola is what became Freescale, and kind of what became NXP. And so, it started for me just, you know, that's what I learned in college. But, you know, when I kind of moved on and was teaching, you know, was natural. I was using a lot of the products just in my engineering life, but... kind of bringing that to students, it made a lot of sense as well as just, you know, the tooling was there and it's, you know, it was different too that when I went to, so I was in a university in like the mid 90s, so like mid late 90s. So getting development tools for like professional tools was not inexpensive. The universities needed industry to donate. Like the boards we use for like $500, they were locked away like, The real change was the like students could now have like access. I I told I always told students this. said you have for fifteen dollars a chip that took the sum of human civilization in material science, engineering, business to create that. So you have it like wow. Like so. But it changed teaching a lot because Judy Warner (03:56.589) Right. Eli (04:24.721) Instead of going to the tool room and you borrow the thing, I made students buy the DevKits in lieu of a book. Because then they took care of it because they owned it. But then we could do a lot of neat things. So that's kind of where it started and where, for example, the Freedom Platform was a really big deal when it was first released because of the low cost nature and the availability. Judy Warner (04:50.306) So one of the things that I, you coined a phrase or a title, I would say, that I always think of when I think of you and I've quoted you and used it many times again, which is a full stack hardware engineer. We usually think of full stack engineers being in the software disciplines, but you really talked about thinking sort of across the systems and collaborating, having insight. And I imagine the way you were teaching your students at the time, you were also giving them tools that were affordable that could allow them to do not only university levels, but help sort of shape their thinking as they went into the working world. what were the, tell us a little bit, you mentioned the Freedom Development Boards. Tell us why that board and And I know you've carried into your professional life because I've heard you talk about it before. So tell us a little bit about that because that's going to be the core of our conversation today. And I'm interested to learning from you. Eli (05:58.913) Yeah, this once again, I go back to some of those like foundational experiences of like, there was definitely some like, I was a total. I was not useful in high school. Like, I nearly didn't graduate. just, I mean, I just lost interest in anything. But like, when I kind of discovered electronics that you could build things, but not only just, it wasn't electronics, it's that I could take a chip for one purpose. And one of those purpose I like were video games and say the Nintendo, but reconfigured a little bit and it could have a completely different purpose. And a lot of times, It wasn't about the chip, it was what it connected to in all those applications. Well, to play in that, you've got to know more than, you've got to be more than just the hardware person or the software person. And, you know, so for me, especially with my advisor, he was where I learned digital signal processing and like part of my love of like, you know, see like guitars and audio came from the technology development at the time and even through now of Judy Warner (06:51.232) Right. Judy Warner (07:01.474) Mm-hmm. Eli (07:07.029) How were they building all this hardware? So it tied in acoustic science of sound. And it just went down this big rabbit hole for me that I knew that I can't just be a hardware person. Like, you have to write code. You have to understand mechanical engineering. You have to know some business. You have to have some people skills to build things. And I don't know. When I look at it, actually, it was You know, it was a little depressing when I saw, and there was a transition probably right as I was graduating college that you're always conditioned to think, well, this is your career and you get a job with the company, you stay with 40 years and you sit in this corner. I said, like, well, that sounds terrible. And they said, well, I remember in high school, they said, these are the best years of your life. I'm like, my God, is that terrible advice? I'm like, the best ones are the ones you haven't lived yet. Judy Warner (07:53.24) Terrible. Eli (08:02.591) Don't say these are the best because you have nothing to look forward to. But no, in the classroom, so I really strawed it to, because at like a Penn State, I taught fundamental circuits, circuit theory with like transistors and diodes, but I also did FPGA course as well as microcontrollers. But in the hands-on course, in every one of them, we had tests and whatnot, but I focused more on projects where Judy Warner (08:06.69) Yeah. Eli (08:31.813) If like the microcontroller course, the midterm was a project proposal of what you're going to build for your final. And your final was this project. And there was some testing aspects, but we got to do some more interesting things. one year we did a special focus on like audio engineering. And so I recognized that there was a pretty big chasm. There are always students interested, but when they graduate, Judy Warner (08:32.461) Right. Eli (09:00.831) for those first few years, getting those five years experience that I'm working for, there's still a gap that I saw where students would learn things at university. And there's just a lot of these connecting pieces that were not connected, that were just at another level. And so I had actually worked with, it was Free Scale before NXP, to fund some projects where we... Judy Warner (09:05.282) Right. Eli (09:28.973) They were the, that's the origin of like, I use this monkey character in all my projects now. And that was the origin. Cause I had three projects. had Monkey Jam was for a guitar, Monkey Listen for a microphone. And I think it was called Monkey Do was like an IOT project. But the idea was to have some videos, courseware, projects that weren't targeting absolute beginners or me college, but this in between where you need to go from Judy Warner (09:34.242) yeah. Eli (09:56.404) I'm like the Jedi Padawan, but how do I get to Jedi? Like there's like enough, like that next level. And so like, one of the first things I did was like with the early freedom boards was monkey jam. It was to learn about audio digital audio interfacing, but also the digital signal processing, the math, but you could buy at the time this board was $10. And then we made the little open source shield that goes on top. The total cost was another 10 bucks. but you could then just take things to another level. that's what Freedom was originally great for. It just made it accessible because it wasn't like you're gonna invest thousands. It was a little bit of money to get started. So, and so I was like. Judy Warner (10:38.732) I heard this reminds me of one time I went to this. There's an organization called ACIDA. It's the ECE department head association. And they were trying to bridge industry with university to help start eliminating some of the gaps you've talked about. And one of the speakers there, I think was from Texas Instruments. He was talking about these are Goldilocks conditions. Because just like you said, this thing that's in your hand, it took all of Cuban civilization, you know, and the things, the conditions are just right for you to have the best tools at the best price and give you the most opportunity more so than any other time. So the conditions are kind of perfect to have this, this, you know, see sort of across the discipline, like you said, and put those connecting pieces together. And what I love about the way you're teaching is because there's always this conversation about universities coming out of university have a lot of theory, but they don't have enough hands on. haven't, you know, they get a, what's it called? Capstone project that is usually pretty simple. And the ones that I see do really well are an engineering teams. Why? Because they're touching and building things. And I think with you and your program, you help them connect the dots from all the theory and the classes that they take to actually making something work. I think that's really powerful learning that you served up. So as you're talking about this development platform, Freedom, like what's the difference between, you said NXP likes to provide some open source. development tools and that's what freedom is. What's the difference between that and say something like Arduino? Eli (12:41.653) That's actually a good question. I would actually get that through not only when I taught, but just interacting with other makers or pro makers of... So Arduino is a brand name. And it was a great thing where they were trying to do the same thing, just make it super simple to kind of light the spark. So it was a combination of a couple of things. It was like a software platform, the right code, but it was also a piece of heart, like a branded piece of hardware with a pinout that... Judy Warner (13:01.517) Yeah. Eli (13:10.837) you could plug, they call them shields. But at the end of the day, at the time, the first one was like an Atmel part. It's fundamentally, I tried it when I taught, said, okay, even if you use Arduino, that is a microcontroller with a part number. Once you unlock the tools to write code for this and understand how it works, you don't have to buy one brand, you can buy any brand because you know the tools. The Freedom Board is just fairly similar. It started as a hardware form factor. You can plug the same type of shields in. It was just NXP's kind of flavor on it for their chipsets. the... And actually, you could use... God, yeah. We're going to talk about that in a second. So, I'll say it's another interesting term. It's the same, but different. Judy Warner (13:53.974) Which are powerful chipsets, by the way. These are not. So, I mean. Okay. Eli (14:09.813) So it's kind of the same. Judy Warner (14:10.188) Okay, and of course now you've cued me up to say, so what's the difference? We just touched on powerful microcontrollers. What are the differences that you see? And again, Eli, you've been doing this for a long time across multiple hats you've worn as professor. You had a startup when we first met and you're engineering firm now and all the things you've done, it seems like this has been sticky for you. What is the difference? You're not an Arduino guy, you're a freedom guy. Why and why in, you know, share that with our listeners. Maybe it's something that they would like to learn more about and engage with. Eli (14:50.511) In some of it, it's like all right like to avoid like a coke versus Pepsi argument like but I kind of go back to the fundamentals I look at everything not necessarily in terms of the brand but the chips that are on it like when we debug like I say that you go to the schematic like that's the that's ground truth, right go to ground truth and It's stuck for me mostly because in some of its like nostalgia. I think back to my advisor and we had this Judy Warner (14:55.713) Right. Judy Warner (15:11.211) Right. Eli (15:18.623) kind of Jedi-Paduan relationship and I kind of was brought up on Motorola, so there's some kind of heartstrings pulling there. And, you know, for a lot of people that is what happens, right? And you get used to an architecture, but at the same time, you learn the skills, so you're kind of like multilingual. It doesn't really matter because you're still writing C code. You can even open the Arduino environment and program NXP chips in it. So it's like... Judy Warner (15:26.317) Right. Eli (15:48.403) Once you learn how to separate the pieces, you learn how to kind of like use all these different things. It just happened that the, I think with NXP, it was the broad selection of boards. So they made freedom boards for almost all their micro-troller platforms. So it's not just one. That, it, for a beginner is a little more challenging, it bridges in the professional space where maybe you want... to buy, and I've literally done this, right? A prototype, we needed 30 of something just to cobble together at 20 bucks a piece, you know, 600 bucks. You go to DigiKey, you get it. I mean, it's instant and it's a development board for that ship. And it's a full professional development board. And one difference that I think is key to point out, and it's big for me, is that NXP builds in, you know, a debugger on the board. So it's very, so for a student, Judy Warner (16:45.902) Mm. Eli (16:47.495) It's just like using a JLink they'd use in the professional space. And that's another level of people who learn how to do in-circuit debugging, because the debugging tools from people like Seger have gotten phenomenal. And NXP has been big about that board. It kind of covers both the professional use case, the hobby use case, the academic use case, and has all the stuff in it. And you get just a selection of different. And it's not incompatible. You can take boards from this other brand and plug them in and make it all work. So that's a big deal to Judy Warner (17:25.302) It sounds like there's one, lots of flexibility, lots of power under the hood and flexibility that you can tap into. And it still plays well with others, which is lovely. Eli (17:37.427) Yeah, and that's I think too, and like NXP has been, it's been interesting just watching different, you know, there's been a lot of consolidation in semiconductor industry over the last 10, 15 years of this chip company. Like it's hard to follow actually, but like, you know, one trajectory that, you know, there are certainly people who are leading on it. And I personally feel NXP is one is on the open source side of their SDKs. Judy Warner (17:50.912) Mm-hmm. Truly. Eli (18:04.501) almost everything is in GitHub. It's as open as you want it to be, not only for microcontrollers, all the way up to their chips that power. They just released the Freedom ItemX93, which is in a totally different space. It's in the applications processor space, kind like a Raspberry Pi, but it's truly open source the whole way. There are NXP engineers pushing code into the Git kernel. It's a big deal. Judy Warner (18:08.738) Mmm. Eli (18:33.917) Not a whole lot of people know about it, but probably should, that everything from Python tooling they have for their security systems to just the SDKs, it's all in GitHub. And they've really been, I think, a pioneer there, in which I think everybody benefits from that. Because you get a lot of choice in how you want to program. Judy Warner (18:51.616) Yeah. Yeah. And as we know, engineers love a lot of choice. They're very particular about the tools and things they want to use. what very particular y'all are pretty particular I've noticed. So I'm, can see why that kind of flexibility and open source would be huge, which just tells me they're listening to their customer and paying attention. And ultimately that, that goodwill and that availability is going to pay off. Eli (18:58.165) very particular. Yes. Judy Warner (19:20.398) ultimately with, you know, buy more of their chips and doing more with their tools. So think it's a smart strategy. So I know you've used this, like I said, across multiple experiences in your life as an engineer. So what, what kind of applications are well suited or give me some use cases, maybe stuff you've done, you showed a few things there, but like give us a feel for applications. Eli (19:47.721) Yeah, so a lot of what I do does lean towards like this acoustics vibration audio it's because it's a passion as well as other things but it's growing into a lot of other things and Well one before we leave the discuss like I wanted to into like a some more of the professional like in the academic I'd like a little story like this was there one of their latest boards the freedom MCX and 947 it's interesting because for $25 This thing, it's a dual core processor with a neural processing unit inside for AI for 25 bucks and has internet and connectivity. So we used it. I built this little motor control shield that we took to Guatemala last year for a university event to. Judy Warner (20:23.534) Wow, that's crazy. Judy Warner (20:33.006) That's fun. For listeners, it looks like a little rocket with heat fins on it. yeah, it totally looks like a rocket. And the other thing looks like a electric scooter. So that's fun. Eli (20:37.301) Oh, yeah, I call this the rocket board. Yeah, I have a little plane coming up the bottom. So we had a little racing competition, autonomous car competition. We have a camera, this little car, and you put the board on it. And you could kind of see the camera on the screen and basically writing algorithms to control the car. And we kind of kicked it off again and rebooted last year with the N947. Mostly because it had the digital camera interface and all this memory and the NPU for doing object detection. it was like the fact that the board was $25. We designed and built, Wave Number actually built the little shield that went on it to plug everything in. And the students had this fundamentally awesome experience. And they got to touch professional tools along the way. We went into the compilers, the debuggers, and vision systems and it was like a week boot camp and like it's it's nice just having some tools that what they learned there if I want to hire them like they're ready which I did which one of my employees lives in Guatemala Jerry he's he was a former student there and just holy crap is he smart and like the fact that he can have tools is awesome Judy Warner (21:45.719) Right? Judy Warner (21:56.482) I mean, that piece right there makes me a fan of Freedom right off the bat and what you're doing because again, the disconnect between when you graduate and engineering managers, I've heard talks about the ramp to productivity, you know, because they hire you, they pay you good money and they want the shortest ramp to productivity. Well, Eli, using the Freedom platform and doing these things like your boot camp, you shorten that ramp or you've made them be able to be more productive and have more professional like skills going in and companies are desperately looking for that. So I would think that engineers, even if they put that on a resume, that they've done that would possibly make them stand out as they, as they go into the pressure in the professional space. Eli (22:50.897) I always told students work on projects, like control the interview, right? If you can show up, like with your thing you built and be able to talk about it and control that conversation, like I know for me, when I look to hire people, that's what I want. Like, holy crap, when I wanna, I wanna find that next like high midi chlorine count Jedi paddle on who's ready. And like, they just need the opportunity to do it. And... Judy Warner (22:54.038) Yes, me too. Judy Warner (23:00.097) Yes. Judy Warner (23:07.15) Totally. Judy Warner (23:14.22) Right, yes. Right. I could not, I could talk to you about this for a long time, but I think you're helping me connect the power of using an inexpensive platform to make that transition between theory and real world and build stuff. Because when I was at Altium, when we first met and I was sponsoring engineering teams, I know I worked closely with a few engineering teams that were building for, SpaceX Hyperloop competition for quite a while, but there are two students I got really close to that were from University of Wisconsin at Madison, which is a very engineering rich school and both those particular students were building hardware for this Hyperloop and they designed and built and did the whole thing, but they both told me later because I gave them, we'd give these teams PCB design software. They both came back to me and they got a job straight out of college. But they, when they went for interviews, they had a portfolio and they had physical boards and said, I made this. And I ran it and the SpaceX Hyperloop pod is like, you're hired. Right. And. Eli (24:27.124) Yeah. Eli (24:30.651) Yeah, I mean, you're just, I don't need to look at anything else. Here's like, I'll give you another example. And like, this is probably like more on the professional side, like bridging into that of like, so I do a lot of like PCB design, like that's kind of like a passion of mine. So a lot of like end consumer industrial products, but it always starts with like, boy, on my bench, if I can get quick tools that you add to that Digi-Key order that I don't want to call it like I'm throwing it away, but it's throwaway in the sense of that it's not even a decision when you look at your value of an engineer's time per hour, dollar per hour, either thing. So, like here's an example. This was like a new Freedom Board for the MCXA156. It's a new NXP platform. So I actually have a client who is building a super high-end audio system in the medical space. And among all the other things, Judy Warner (25:07.244) Right. Eli (25:27.015) It has this really complicated microphone array that has to hook up. And I worked on a bunch of lot of the code. Well, it's now getting the production. Well, they have to test the thing that measures the microphones. We have to simulate those microphones in a test fixture to get through production. Such a thing does not even exist at any price. So Jerry, who I mentioned, works for me. We put this little project idea together called Judy Warner (25:48.844) Right. Eli (25:55.701) PDM monkey and PDM stands for pulse digital modulation. It's a scheme used for digital microphones like in your cell phone. Well, the idea was to take this low-cost NXP chip to simulate eight microphones as if they were real microphones. So you would almost like play a wave file in this thing and it would generate the signals like it was the real microphone. So we bought the board. We rigged it up. Judy Warner (26:03.691) Mm-hmm. Judy Warner (26:19.65) That's crazy. That's so cool. Eli (26:24.499) you know, made it work. Well, as I was working on the hardware, Jerry was actually helping with the software. We use the Zephyr RTOS and that's another open source initiative. NXP is huge behind and I'm kind of like a Zephyr fanboy. It's another one of those things that it's, boy, it's a big plus up for embedded tooling company, embedded companies. If you know it. it's a quick ramp to building software and teams. So Jeremy was working on some of that firmware, I was working on the hardware and we ended up, we made a real board for the actual production test fixture, but it started with the little $15 Freedom Board. I could ship them eight of these things, it doesn't even matter. But then he could be working ahead. And like I said, I'll use that term throwaway in the sense that we can get it. It removes a decision that... Judy Warner (27:08.523) Right. Eli (27:19.465) Before the decision, say 20 years ago, do we buy, how many of the $500 evaluation gets do we buy? Now it's how many are we limited to? Like how many are in stock? Let's buy them all. I want a shelf full of them. That should never be to keep developers working. Judy Warner (27:26.232) Right. Judy Warner (27:33.378) Right. Judy Warner (27:37.87) What an awesome tool to have in your toolbox just all the time, right? Eli (27:42.713) yeah, and you're looking at the nice side of the room, the other side where I piles of like dev boards. I have this thing that everyone should have. I call it the bone pile. Like it's the leftover experiments, maybe things that are half broken, but it's stuff you dig through. You're like, hey, we built that thing last year for that project. We need to like repurpose it and then add it to the stuff we just got from DigiKey. And it's like, you know, everyone needs that bone pile. It's easy to add to it because I think low cost dev tools and the open source, the software piece is huge because the other thing maybe younger engineers don't appreciate now is let's say you do get, you know, there's multiple paths to writing code for these boards, but NXP has like a VS code plugin. They have MCU Expresso. Did you just download for free? When I started, if you got the, whatever the latest and greatest whiz bang board, You spent 500 of the EVK, they said, oh, the software license is $5,000 for a developer. Because, all right, like in 1998, there were open source compilers, but for microcontrollers, it was all very custom tooling. wasn't like as ubiquitous that the fact you get this software stack, like, you know, with these tools that, holy crap, is it... Judy Warner (28:45.471) Wow. Judy Warner (29:07.84) It's good for us old people to tell these kids how good they have it. Eli (29:10.395) Yeah, speaks to like, like, I'm so happy to see when people come in come into it that like, wow, that they have this, these tools that they can go further than I can. Right. Because I had to spend, know, you know, a long time because cost was a barrier or just availability. And now it's so the barrier is so tiny. Right. Comparatively. Judy Warner (29:25.752) Right? Judy Warner (29:38.03) So do I hear you right then that you're saying, sure, it's good for students and hobbyists and all of that, but it has major applications in the professional space as well to do these inexpensive, you know, proof of concept or test boards or whatever it is, it sounds like it's equally applicable in both. That's interesting. Eli (30:03.237) yeah, because one thing I'm a big proponent of is when it used to take a long time to make custom circuit, everything took a long time. Now things are quick to like prototype is I don't need to know a complete answer, but how can I quickly get to knowing what questions to ask? Right. And how do I start in just being able to like almost any project, as soon as I have a general idea of what microprocessor we're going to select. Judy Warner (30:13.772) Yeah. Judy Warner (30:24.557) Right. Eli (30:33.193) bam, those boards are here, like in no time because, we start making little prototypes and I'm automatically thinking about the real circuit board while those things are flowing in that it's not like a six month decision. It's like today, like this is coming, you'll be starting tomorrow and like we're up and running. And there's just so much that you can, you know, you know, on these different platforms that you can move really quickly. Judy Warner (30:58.018) Yeah, they removed the barrier to entry, right? It's easy, affordable. can do it quick. of course, besides being very particular, you engineering people, you want things quick and you know, you need them quick actually to get stuff done. Eli (31:02.359) in I know. Eli (31:09.417) Well, I think for me. Eli (31:14.805) For me, and it was another professor I was in grad school, is that it was more about accepting the idea of failure as your biggest teacher and your biggest asset. Because when you're doing R &D, the idea is you want to get to your problems as quick as possible to know where your problems are at. And just being able to avoid. Judy Warner (31:35.064) Go fast, baby. Eli (31:38.517) Figure out what are your problems going to be so it's not a theoretical anymore as quickly as possible because it might not be anything that you've thought of yet. So if we can remove some of that time, you know, it's a big deal. Judy Warner (31:53.844) It's a big deal. Well, this has been a fascinating, I've learned more about the story behind your full stack engineering thing that we sort of riffed on for a while. Well, we worked together at Altium and this has really helped me understand. And I've seen you post not only about the freedom, I've seen you post about Zephyr. So thanks for this conversation. I think it'll be really interesting to people in our audience, right? Eli (32:18.259) Yeah, I'm. Judy Warner (32:22.722) that one of levers these tools and it's been helpful to see how that's come to bear across all the roles you've had in your career. Eli, thank you so much for doing this. Eli (32:34.675) You're welcome. It's always great to talk. Judy Warner (32:37.42) I don't know if you have it offhand. If you don't, I'll go find it. But, do you know where we can find more information about the freedom platform? I think I have some, that NXP sent me. If you don't, I'll put it in the show notes. Eli (32:50.343) Yeah, they have like a main like If you just actually just type because sometimes I just do this I just type in like frdm in google and then it comes to the main landing page it Judy Warner (33:02.648) yeah, by the way, freedom is a nickname. It is FRDM, but they call it freedom. So that's a good tip for our listeners, but I will. go, I think our friend Bridget sent me over lots of links and things. So I'll make sure I get that. If I'm missing anything, I'll give you a holler, but thanks for sharing. And it's always great to hear from you and learn how you think as an engineer. And I always know it's super helpful to other engineers to learn. Learn from your wisdom. Eli (33:34.581) Or my mistakes. Yeah, so but Yeah, there's a re-landing page I'm looking at right now that kind of has the array of all of them that are available and you kind of pick based upon You know capabilities feature costs, you know all the above Judy Warner (33:37.186) Same thing, right? So. Judy Warner (33:49.624) Right. Okay. Well, for our listeners, I promise I'll get that to you. Plus any other applicable links. If you have time and if you're listening to this on audio, go look on the YouTube channel because Eli's projects he shows are pretty cool. I think you'd get a kick out of them. And like I said, we'll put those resources for you in the show notes. Eli, thanks again. I look forward to talking again later this year, hopefully. To our audience, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Until then, remember to always stay connected to the ecosystem. Eli (34:22.357) See you later. Judy Warner (34:23.278) 34 minutes, buddy. Eli (34:26.271) There we go.

Most Recent Episodes

Donald Telian Signal Integrity Master Class | What it is and Why Attend?

Why Your RF/MW/MmWave PCB Simulations Don’t Match Your Performance Measurements

DDR5 Memory Standards, Simulation And Design

Steve Sandler On How To Measure Controlled Loop Stability And His New 12-Week Online Master Class

Our Champions

bottom of page