Ben

@craigjb@fosstodon.org I wish the industry would allow finer screenprint line widths. When you have 0201's there's not enough room to cram them all in. I started deleting all of the ref designators off my boards - it was way too cluttered and I never used them. I always have kicad on a giant monitor for a map if needed. This frees up space for important labels.

@mntmn@mastodon.social I think there might be incentive Apple and/or SpaceX/Tesla to start fabbing memory - not only for price, but mainly for reliable supply. For speed they could license from Micron. Even LP/DDR4 or something - think about all the processors in all the phones, cars, switches, ground terminals, and Starlink satellites - they all need 'basic' DDR (or LPDDR) - not cutting edge DDR or HBM.

Backside:

KiCad 9 crashed, so I'm taking this opportunity to install KiCad 10, which will be timely since it has upgraded differential pair tools that I will need later today.

@aleksorsist@mastodon.social Good enough, until they release x128.

@aleksorsist@mastodon.social Will it run on Windows 10? Asking for a 'friend'...

@dlharmon@chaos.social I know that I3C can coexist with I2C because I2C is supposed to have 50ns glitch filters and won't see the extra fast 10-20mbps traffic on the bus.

@23n27@dgc.social I remember using a Mac back in the early 90's and wondering why PC users would ever need more than one mouse button. Then I switched to PC in 95 and wondered how could anyone use a PC with no right click context button.

Yay!!!!!!

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange @craigjb@fosstodon.org these would be pretty cool for architectural lighting. They come in different color temps, these are 5k with a CRI of 90. There is a whole ecosystem of solderless mounting and reflectors and such (see pics below) but at 50mm they wouldn’t work for the small size I needed. They also come in different sizes and wattages. These are 12w at a Vf of about 33volts, used with a TI buck/boost IC.

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange that’s a TI humidity sensor, with a 4 Bar pressure sensor right next to it. I put those on there so I can monitor for leaks when I do pressure testing.

@craigjb@fosstodon.org you need some mini bleachers with lego men looking up at the scope like a cinema.

@tom_verbeure@mastodon.social @craigjb@fosstodon.org Good catch. I was reading that section again just now, and one could read that as saying it won't support eDP that doesn't support that while leaving the question of standard DP unaddressed. I did see a section that says you can turn of ASSR for "standard DP" mode. In my searches I 've seen many posts about how to get it working, but not one yet that it will or won't work. IDK...

@craigjb@fosstodon.org You're right, I should embrace a 'growth' mindset. Go big or go home. lol

I also used PVC wire instead of high temp PTFE insulated wire for the LED. Ooops. The reels looked almost identical.

This is what I'm thinking. Dividing up assembly into 3 circular rigid flex regions (magnetics/POE power/phy; processing; and image sensor). These would fold up together, and this would be the outside one with all the tall components on the backside. The PHY and the 60v to 3.3v SMPS module would be noisy in proximity to the Ethernet magnetics. The SMPS does have spread spectrum. Cat5 would solder directly to the board. The rectangle represents the transition to flex and it's bend radius.

Baby FPGA! Lattice Crosslink NX, 72 ball WLCSP 3.7x4.1mm, 17kLUT, 4 lane hard MIPI.

I heard/felt a loud thud earlier and wondered what it was. I went outside and saw a SUV had missed the curve in the road and hit our light pole and the neighbors fence. 3rd time in last 12 months.

I'm finally looking at flashing the FPGA from the MCU, and the 40k Lattice NX parts have a ~155k sized bitstream. So, when using I3C they can take it all in one chunk, or if breaking into multiple chunks, you cannot have a I3C stop condition until the very end. Well, my Alif MCU has a max I3C transaction size of 65k. The vendor driver does not expose a way to not end with a stop - and the methods I need are all declared static. So, I have to copy and paste their static methods into my own c file, and strip them all down to the very basics to do this. Sigh.

@craigjb@fosstodon.org A little bit of silicone grease would give it a nice smooth feel. Need a boot or small o-ring or something to prevent dust and dirt from getting in there and gritting it up though. Check out Mcmaster Carr for o-rings. I use Dow Molykote for submerged o-ring lube, and you can get a tiny 'single' use pouch for cheap: https://www.freshwatersystems.com/products/dow-molykote-111-o-ring-lubricant-6-gram-pillow-pack?variant=13249218609195

It was *really* hot in Houston today where the higher humidity usually moderates the temps a bit. The overnight *low* is going to be 85F!!! The state grid set a new all time record at over 90 GW. Not much wind, but solar was putting in 33 GW, and at dusk batteries peaked at 11.6 GW. That’s a lot of battery power! Wholesale prices were a low of $26/MWH when the batteries where charging and peaked at $349 right at 10PM.

After the storm. Bye bye Bertha, the plants thank you for the rain.

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange Any reason you aren't using SVG or similar for icons to scale at any resolution?

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange "Is this Swamp Intrinsically Safe?"

@mntmn@mastodon.social Yeah, I do that sometimes, I like eating cake, but then I don't like the waistline later. Maybe your chip is doing an OS context switch or something during that pause? Maybe you could put a scope probe on that interrupt handler and see when it fires in relation to when it's handled later in the code.

My office neighbor is throwing out an ancient PC. Compaq, circa 1999. Should I grab it and stick it in storage for an antique collection?

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange What if you removed a Intel southbridge from a dead board and made your own card... lol I wonder how many man hours it would take, I mean the coding alone. I'm guessing the register info is unpublished? Maybe there is a VM fix to use a different card?

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange 100% uptime!!! I'm curious how much power (mW/Sec?) it takes to update the display.

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange You should write a book, "Using GPUs to massively speed up your C/C++ code" - targeted for C/C++ programmers. I'd pre-order it for sure. Chapter 1 - GPUs for idiots and/or programmers too busy and/or lazy - minimal code to speed up your hello world app by calculating PI to 100 digits. Before/after comparison. I wonder if you could use a GPU to speed up a database, like for searching or joining tables, creating/comparing search hashes and the like...

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems It seems like someone should have solved this problem already. Is there a lib out there to do this? I saw some cool stuff using d3.js in Chrome. Maybe the ideas can be ported over to C++. What does MS Visio do? https://ialab.it.monash.edu/webcola/examples/unix.html

@poleguy@mastodon.social "If you ain't rubbing, you ain't racing"

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange I wonder about the Raspberry Pi RP1 southbridge - it has 2 XHCI ports. I wonder if they sell it standalone? https://pip-assets.raspberrypi.com/categories/892-raspberry-pi-5/documents/RP-008370-DS-1-rp1-peripherals.pdf

@dlharmon@chaos.social I've noticed it with Grainger when doing a google search for something they obviously paid for placement, and clicking gives me a issue. I've seen it with other sites but can't remember specifics.

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange You could use an IR sensor with a IR transparent 'glass'. Melexis make a low cost 24x24 IR sensor, and FLIR makes a 80x120 low-ish cost sensor. https://www.edmundoptics.com/knowledge-center/application-notes/optics/the-correct-material-for-infrared-applications/

@MrDOS@hachyderm.io Well, on this board I have a Alif E8 MCU that has 20Mbs DDR I3C, a Lattice Crosslink FPGA, a ST pressure sensor, and Bosch IMU and a Bosh magnetometer. I'm still in bring up mode, but I have gotten them all dynamically addressed and read back whatever vendor code register they have. I don't have any legacy I2C parts on this bus. For me the big draws with I3C are dynamic addressing, speed, and in-band interrupts. I also liked the fact that I3C was fast enough to both program the FPGA, but also serve as peripheral register access to the FPGA after it was programmed. I'll post an update after I get the FPGA flashed from the MCU. Hopefully later today. Ask me my thoughts again in a few weeks, lol.

@craigjb@fosstodon.org I gotta get better at applying the thermal paste, I shouldn't have that much squeezing out.

@poleguy@mastodon.social The last Mac I owned was a 33MHz Duo color laptop in the mid 90's. I switched to Windows 95 while working on EE degree because when in Rome... I've been looking at a Mac desktop for building Apple phone/mobile apps, but I'd hate to get a Studio on a budget and not get enough RAM/HDD. All I really need is just a Mini M6 with a SSD upgrade, maybe a RAM upgrade.

I think I made these holes too big…

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange You would think there would be some USB 3.0 add on cards for older PCs. Now if it's Intel or not... I'm guessing Asmedia is in the after-market cards like Siig, etc?

I just saw my first Stalink ad, and it was on Reuters.com (news site). It's also the first time I've seen them offer financing the hardware - $16/mo for 12 mos for the Mini. I think they want to juice the numbers for the upcoming quarterly results. I bet the next Starship launch will carry a load of the V3 satellites to a full orbit as well. This will be good timing to prop up share price since a bunch of lockups will be expiring at the same time.

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange That's a lot of work to do at ~60Hz!

I was designing this 3 piece 27.5mm diameter camera board to be a rigid-flex PCB, but most PCB houses have trace/space limits of 4 mil on the rigid portion and limit blind vias to one layer deep, which causes challenges with BGAs. Also the 6L rigid flex stackups cause issues with 100 ohm differential traces being too wide. I think I'm going to look at just using very small board to board connectors. The Hirose DF40 20 pin looks promising. Any other recommendations? I'm looking for a board to board gap of about 3-5mm, and the fastest signals will be 2.5gbps MIPI. I'm going to check out Mill Max's website for tiny standoffs, but I can always 3d print something for prototyping.

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange I'm curious, how do you handle the storage and display of waveforms? Are they just collections of dots and rendered as such? Or do you draw lines connecting the points?