Podcasts about ftdi

This week's EYE ON NPI should be on *your* radar - it's InnoSenT's 24 GHz IMD-2000 Radar Sensor (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/i/innosent/imd-2000-radar-sensor) This all-in-one sensor is easy to integrate into your next product and brings high-tech radar sensing to an affordable range. Radar is literally "Radio Detecting And Ranging" - a way of bouncing 'high frequency' electromagnetic waves off of objects to detect the reflection. We're familiar with radar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar) in a few contexts: originally developed for military use, it worked great for detecting metal things in the sky (airplanes) as they would approach a city to possibly bomb it. We still use it a lot in military contexts: detecting planes, bombs, boats and submarines. It's also super handy in domestic contexts like air traffic control, if you can detect planes you can verify their positions and make sure each one comes in or out of the airport without collision. Radar is also useful for weather pattern detection (although this sensor isn't good for that purpose, just a fun fact for you to know) Another common purpose for radar you're probably familiar with is the dreaded speeding radar gun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_speed_gun) a small-enough-to-be-handheld radar device that can be pointed at a car to determine its speed without requiring a difficult-to-calculate "time between two points" measurement. These reliable devices (which apparently now are replaced with LIDAR based ones!) Now, most folks who have used IR sensors, Time of Flight, or sonar sensors can understand how to detect an object by counting the delay between sending a signal vs when its received and dividing by the wavelength. How can you determine velocity - normally you'd need to detect location twice, then determine the time between the two locations whereas radar can do it one measurement. This is thanks to the 'Doppler effect' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_effect) the same scientific principle that causes ambulance sirens to be higher pitch as they approach and lower pitch as they drive away from you due to the 'bunching up' of the waves as the wave source moves. Likewise with Radar, the frequency will shift slightly depending on the speed of the object, which can be detected by calculating the minute variation in frequency. Radar sensors are often used in similar cases as IR, ToF, sonar or LIDAR sensors: for detecting objects or motion or distance. Compared to IR, Radar will give you a much longer range and will work with a wider range of objects without being affected by ambient light, object color or shininess. Compared to ToF you'll get velocity, long range. Sonar is longer range than IR or ToF but has a wide spread. LIDAR is very comparable but is new and more expensive - Radar is easy to implement and low cost by comparison. And this Radar module is particularly easy to use because unlike many cheap modules that only give you a pulse signal that has to be massaged and measured to determine object distance and/or speed, this one has an FTDI-cable (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/adafruit-industries-llc/70/9092299) compatible UART signal out. Simply provide 5V power and you'll get 250 kbps TTL signal out with a listing of objects, distances and velocities. This makes it trivial to integrate with any computer or microcontroller. The InnoSenT's 24 GHz IMD-2000 Radar Sensor (https://www.digikey.com/short/40wz7zdd) is the easiest to use Radar sensor we've seen and it's in stock now, for immediate shipment from Digi-Key! Book it today and you can be radaring, object counting, distance measuring, velocity-finding and more by tomorrow afternoon.

This week's EYE ON NPI is from long-time Maker-buddies FTDI Chip (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/f/ftdi/ft233hpq-usb-bridge): The FT233HP (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/ftdi-future-technology-devices-international-ltd/FT232HPQ-REEL/13981010) and FT232HP (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/ftdi-future-technology-devices-international-ltd/FT233HPQ-TRAY/13981013) builds on decades of work FTDI (https://www.digikey.com/en/supplier-centers/future-technology-devices-intl) have pioneered in making excellent quality USB controller ICs. This chip has taken the successful FT232H (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/ftdi-future-technology-devices-international-ltd/FT232HQ-REEL/2614626) that we're very fond of and added first-class USB Type C support with PD3.0 control. (https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd) Now in case you haven't tried them out yet, we make some nice FT232H breakouts here at Adafruit (https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264). This chip from FTDI is similar to their USB to serial converter chips (https://www.adafruit.com/product/284) but adds a 'multi-protocol synchronous serial engine' which allows it to speak many common protocols like SPI, I2C, serial UART, JTAG, and more! There's even a handful of digital GPIO pins that you can read and write to do things like flash LEDs, read switches or buttons, and more. The FT232H breakout is like adding a little swiss army knife for serial protocols to your computer! We recently even gave this chip a bit of a refresh by adding a Stemma QT port, an I2C mode switch, and a USB C port. However, that USB C port doesn't do anything fancy with USB C - it just has the bare-minimum resistors to let the upstream port know to give it 5V and use classic USB D+ and D- lines The FT232HP, on the other hand, is a full new version of the chip with individual CC1/CC2 pins that are used to communicate with the upstream port to tell it what voltage level and current level desired. With PD, we can request up to 20V on the power pins (https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd) - and it can do this fully automagically by configuring an external EEPROM chip that is wired up on a PCB. You can program the EEPROM as many times as you like, using the FTDI Prog tool or via a command line tool (https://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documents/AppNotes/AN_551_FT4232HP_FT2232HP_FT232HP_Configuration_Guide.pdf) Once configured you can also use GPIO pins to adjust the PD settings, or even use a built in I2C peripheral engine that can be configured by a separate microcontroller. Besides the fancy new USB C power delivery control - the FT232HP and FT233HP also of course have the GPIO-control goodies we love about this series. The MPSSE peripheral set can mimic a wide variety of popular and useful protocols such UART RS232, RS422, RS485, 8-bit parallel, JTAG, SPI and I2C controllers. We've got Adafruit Blinka support for MPSSE (https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-on-any-computer-with-ft232h) and while we haven't tested it with the FT232HP just yet, we're pretty sure it is going to be largely compatible (besides perhaps having a different USB PID). If you're making a product that needs USB C PD, and maybe some GPIO control over USB - this chip could really do a great job at saving you months of development time. Particularly if you can use the MPSSE control software on a computer to avoid any firmware writing at all! Or, if you do have a microcontroller, you could get rid of half your power supply by dropping a DC jack input and going with a smart USB adapter with PD source control. The FT233HP has more pins than the '232HP and adds a USB Sink PD port as well as 8 more GPIO pins. You can sign up to be notified when the FT233HP (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/ftdi-future-technology-devices-international-ltd/FT232HPQ-REEL/13981010) and FT232HP (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/ftdi-future-technology-devices-international-ltd/FT233HPQ-TRAY/13981013) arrive in stock at Digi-key today. Or, place on backorder now and it will ship in late June! See on Digi-Key at https://www.digikey.com/short/mp80vwdr

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams gab about all of the geeky things. We had a delightful time watching NASA bring Perseverance down to the Red planet. In Kristina's words, we pour one out for Fry's Electronics. And then we jump into a parade of excellent hacks with a magnetic bearing for crooked ball screws, a science-based poop-burning experiment, and the music hack only microcontroller enthusiasts could love as an FTDI cable is plugged directly into a speaker. Smart circuit design is used to hack a dimmer into non-dimmable LED fixtures, and an octet of living clams are the early warning sensors for water pollution.

The BNO080 all-in-one 9 DoF IMU board is pretty nice - it can output accel/mag/gyro data as well as fuse sensor data together to give you Euler or quaternion orientation vectors. This sensor also has I2C, SPI and UART interfacing. UART means you can plug it into an FTDI cable directly and then run our BNO08x library to read the sensor data directly from a computer running Python! #adafruit #BNO080 #9dof Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ -----------------------------------------

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams navigate the crowded streets of the hackersphere for the most interesting hardware projects seen in the past week. Forget flip-dot displays, you need to build yourself a sequin display that uses a robot finger and sequin-covered fabric to send a message. You can do a lot (and learn a lot) with a 1-bit computer called the WDR-1. It's never been easier to turn a USB port into an embedded systems dev kit by using these FTDI and Bluepill tricks. And there's a Soyuz hardware teardown you don't want to miss. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=398056

Feedback zur letzten FolgeWir hatten ca. 500 Downloads. Vielen Dank fürs Anhören. Julian hat nach weiteren Informationen insbesondere zum Druckkopf des Mini Druckers gefragt. Chris erzählt wie er vor hat das Hotend zu gestalten und zu erhitzen. Raphael sieht noch Verbesserungspotential was die Detailtiefe betrifft. Wir versuchen daran zu arbeiten. NeujahrsputzWie jedes Jahr haben wir wieder aussortiert. Diese mal rigoros. Es sind insgesamt 3m³ geworden. Projekt KnöpfchenspielWie bereits im Blog beschrieben, handelt es sich beim Knöpfchenspiel um ein Arcade-Hallen Spiel. Das ganze wird allerdings etwas anders aufgezogen. So haben die Spielen nicht nur 9 Knöpfe, wie im Video, sondern 16 in einem 4x4 Raster. Basti beschreibt weiter die einzelnen Module, die das Spiel ausmachen. Es sind zur Zeit nur der differenzielle I2C Treiber auf dem Raspberry Pi fertig. Darüber wird es demnächst auch mehr im Blog zu lesen geben. Basti erklärt, was ein Raspberry Pi HAT ist und was man dabei beachten muss. Er erzählt auch von der Erfahrung ein Datenblatt für eine selbstgebaute Hardware zu erstellen. Nach der Fertigstellung des Knöpfchenspiels, kann über weitere Anwendungsgebiete des differenziellen I2C Treibers nachgedacht werden. Die Kosten für das Projekt belaufen sich auf ca. 222€. Chip der WocheChris hat sich diese Woche den FT230x von FTDI herausgesucht. Der Chip hat neben der Plug&Play 3Megabaud-UART Schnittstelle noch einen 3,3V Regler, den man mit 22mA belasten kann. Dadurch kann eine komplette Schaltung aus den 5V des USB versorgt werden und benötigt für den Mikrocontroller nicht noch zusätzlich einen DC/DC oder Linear-Regler. Wir wollen die zwei Episoden pro Monat beibehalten, jedoch keinen alle 14 Tage Zyklus festlegen.

Power Hungry Venti-QParkerStar Wars Detonator is 95% completeIt is inside the enclosure and works!Stand needs to be printed and wrap up the paintOriginal STL files for the detonator by Roel VeldhuyzenFuture of this project?USB Type-C Article UpdateUSB Type-C -> FTDI FT230X -> Parallax Propeller is completedExample is on our githubsNext is going to be a direct to MCU style like an ATmega32u4 unless someone else has a better idea from the slack channel?StephenEQ is functioning!Grtyvr from our Slack Channel came up with a good name – The Venti-QPower HungryMost of the bands work1 band has an oscillation problem1 band is pulling too much current2 or 3 bands are weakBuilding a test harness to test each band individuallyThe Super Simple Ribbon Mic live designSaturday Feb 2 @ 6pm Central on the MacroFab Twitch ChannelPreamp design for the MicrophoneMechanical Design (design of the ribbon frame and the case)Audio Connection (USB? XLR?)R.F.O.One board dev kit has three snap off STM 8 microcontrollersOne development board with three break off boardsHas three different tiers of 8-bit STM microcontrollers: STM8L001J3, STM8L050J3, STM8S001J3STM8-SO8-DISCODon’t Toss That Bulb, It Knows Your PasswordSmart Bulbs contain your WiFi credentials in plain text. Surprise!Common Electrical Engineering Interview TopicsLuke Metro has been interviewing with Bay Area startups and big tech companies during his last year of collegeA good list to start becoming a better Electrical EngineerVisit our Public Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!Tags: electronics podcast, EQ Build, FT230X, FTDI, Interview topics, MacroFab, macrofab engineering podcast, Ribbon Mic, ST Microcontrollers, Star Wars Detonator, USB Type-C, Venti-Q

Trip reports from the Essen Hackathon and BSDCam, CfT: ZFS native encryption and UFS trim consolidation, ZFS performance benchmarks on a FreeBSD server, how to port your OS to EC2, Vint Cerf about traceability, Remote Access console to an RPi3 running FreeBSD, and more. ##Headlines Essen Hackathon & BSDCam 2018 trip report Allan and Benedict met at FRA airport and then headed to the Air Rail terminal for our train to Essen where the Hackathon would happen over the weekend of Aug 10 - 12, 2018. Once there, we did not have to wait long until other early-arrivals would show up and soon we had about 10 people gathered for lunch. After buying some take-out pizzas and bringing it back to the Linuxhotel (there was a training still going on there so we could not get into our rooms yet), we sat in the sunny park and talked. More and more people arrived and soon, people started hacking on their laptops. Some people would not arrive until a few hours before midnight, but we already had a record appearance of 20 people in total. On Saturday, we gathered everyone in one of the seminar rooms that had rooms and chairs for us. After some organizational infos, we did an introductory round and Benedict wrote down on the whiteboard what people were interested in. It was not long until groups formed to talk about SSL in base, weird ZFS scrubs that would go over 100% completion (fixed now). Other people started working on ports, fixing bugs, or wrote documentation. The day ended in a BBQ in the Linuxhotel park, which was well received by everyone. On Sunday, after attendees packed up their luggage and stored it in the seminar room, we continued hacking until lunchtime. After a quick group picture, we headed to a local restaurant for the social event (which was not open on Saturday, otherwise we would have had it then). In the afternoon, most people departed, a good half of them were heading for BSDCam. Commits from the hackathon (the ones from 2018) Overall, the hackathon was well received by attendees and a lot of them liked the fact that it was close to another BSD gathering so they could nicely combine the two. Also, people thought about doing their own hackathon in the future, which is an exciting prospect. Thanks to all who attended, helped out here and there when needed. Special Thanks to Netzkommune GmbH for sponsoring the social event and the Linuxhotel for having us. Benedict was having a regular work day on Monday after coming back from the hackathon, but flew out to Heathrow on Tuesday. Allan was in London a day earlier and arrived a couple of hours before Benedict in Cambridge. He headed for the Computer Lab even though the main event would not start until Wednesday. Most people gathered at the Maypole pub on Tuesday evening for welcomes, food and drinks. On Wednesday, a lot of people met in the breakfast room of Churchill College where most people were staying and went to the Computer Lab, which served as the main venue for BSDCam, together. The morning was spend with introductions and collecting what most people were interested in talking. This unconference style has worked well in the past and soon we had 10 main sessions together for the rest of this and the following two days (full schedule). Most sessions took notes, which you can find on the FreeBSD wiki. On Thursday evening, we had a nice formal dinner at Trinity Hall. BSDCam 2018 was a great success with a lot of fruitful discussions and planning sessions. We thank the organizers for BSDCam for making it happen. A special mentions goes out to Robert Watson and his family. Even though he was not there, he had a good reason to miss it: they had their first child born at the beginning of the week. Congratulations and best wishes to all three of them! ###Call for Testing: ZFS Native Encryption for FreeBSD A port of the ZoL (ZFS-on-Linux) feature that provides native crypto support for ZFS is ready for testing on FreeBSD Most of the porting was done by sef@freebsd.org (Sean Eric Fagan) The original ZoL commit is here: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/5769/commits/5aef9bedc801830264428c64cd2242d1b786fd49 For an overview, see Tom Caputi’s presentation from the OpenZFS Developers Summit in 2016 Video: https://youtu.be/frnLiXclAMo Slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5hUzsxe4cdmU3ZTRXNxa2JIaDQ/view?usp=sharing WARNING: test in VMs or with spare disks etc, pools created with this code, or upgraded to this version, will no longer be importable on systems that do not support this feature. The on-disk format or other things may change before the final version, so you will likely have to ‘zfs send | zfs recv’ the data on to a new pool Thanks for testing to help this feature land in FreeBSD iXsystems ###Call for Testing: UFS TRIM Consolidation Kirk Mckusick posts to the FreeBSD mailing list looking for testers for the new UFS TRIM Consolidation code When deleting files on filesystems that are stored on flash-memory (solid-state) disk drives, the filesystem notifies the underlying disk of the blocks that it is no longer using. The notification allows the drive to avoid saving these blocks when it needs to flash (zero out) one of its flash pages. These notifications of no-longer-being-used blocks are referred to as TRIM notifications. In FreeBSD these TRIM notifications are sent from the filesystem to the drive using the BIODELETE command. Until now, the filesystem would send a separate message to the drive for each block of the file that was deleted. Each Gigabyte of file size resulted in over 3000 TRIM messages being sent to the drive. This burst of messages can overwhelm the drive’s task queue causing multiple second delays for read and write requests. This implementation collects runs of contiguous blocks in the file and then consolodates them into a single BIODELETE command to the drive. The BIODELETE command describes the run of blocks as a single large block being deleted. Each Gigabyte of file size can result in as few as two BIODELETE commands and is typically less than ten. Though these larger BIODELETE commands take longer to run, they do not clog the drive task queue, so read and write commands can intersperse effectively with them. Though this new feature has been throughly reviewed and tested, it is being added disabled by default so as to minimize the possibility of disrupting the upcoming 12.0 release. It can be enabled by running `sysctl vfs.ffs.dotrimcons=1’’. Users are encouraged to test it. If no problems arise, we will consider requesting that it be enabled by default for 12.0. This support is off by default, but I am hoping that I can get enough testing to ensure that it (a) works, and (b) is helpful that it will be reasonable to have it turned on by default in 12.0. The cutoff for turning it on by default in 12.0 is September 19th. So I am requesting your testing feedback in the near-term. Please let me know if you have managed to use it successfully (or not) and also if it provided any performance difference (good or bad). To enable TRIM consolidation usesysctl vfs.ffs.dotrimcons=1’ There is also a diff that adds additional statistics: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2018-August/070798.html You can also watch the volume and latency of BIODELETE commands by running gstat with the -d flag ##News Roundup ZFS performance Aravindh Sampathkumar, a Performance Engineer and Sysadmin posts some simple benchmarks he did on a new ZFS server This is NOT an all-in post about ZFS performance. I built a FreeBSD+ZFS file server recently at work to serve as an offsite backup server. I wanted to run a few synthetic workloads on it and look at how it fares from performance perspective. Mostly for curiosity and learning purposes. As stated in the notes about building this server, performance was not one of the priorities, as this server will never face our active workload. What I care about from this server is its ability to work with rsync and keep the data synchronised with our primary storage server. With that context, I ran a few write tests to see how good our solution is and what to expect from it in terms of performance. The article then uses FIO to do some benchmarks. As the author did, make sure you match the FIO block size to the ZFS record size to avoid write amplification. Either tune FIO or adjust the recordsize property in ZFS You also want to consider compression and cache effects Write Performance: Incompressible: 1600-2600 MB/s, Compressible: 2500-6600 MB/s Another over 1200 MB/s is enough to keep your 10 gigabit network saturated The increased latency that is seen with higher number of writers working, may be the result of the ZFS backpressure system (the write throttle). There is some tuning that can be done there. Specifically, since this machine has 768 GB of ram, you might allow more than 4GB of dirty data, which would mean you’d be able to write larger batches and not have to push back while you wait for a transaction group to flush when dealing with gigabytes/sec of writes ###How to port your OS to EC2 Colin Percival reflects on his FreeBSD on EC2 maintainership efforts in his blog: I’ve been the maintainer of the FreeBSD/EC2 platform for about 7.5 years now, and as far as “running things in virtual machines” goes, that remains the only operating system and the only cloud which I work on. That said, from time to time I get questions from people who want to port other operating systems into EC2, and being a member of the open source community, I do my best to help them. I realized a few days ago that rather than replying to emails one by one it would be more efficient to post something publicly; so — for the benefit of the dozen or so people who want to port operating systems to run in EC2, and the curiosity of maybe a thousand more people who use EC2 but will never build AMIs themselves — here’s a rough guide to building EC2 images. Before we can talk about building images, there are some things you need: Your OS needs to run on x86 hardware. 64-bit (“amd64”, “x86-64”) is ideal, but I’ve managed to run 32-bit FreeBSD on “64-bit” EC2 instances so at least in some cases that’s not strictly necessary. You almost certainly want to have drivers for Xen block devices (for all of the pre-Nitro EC2 instances) or for NVMe disks (for the most recent EC2 instances). Theoretically you could make do without these since there’s some ATA emulation available for bootstrapping, but if you want to do any disk I/O after the kernel finishes booting you’ll want to have a disk driver. Similarly, you need support for the Xen network interface (older instances), Intel 10 GbE SR-IOV networking (some newer but pre-Nitro instances), or Amazon’s “ENA” network adapters (on Nitro instances), unless you plan on having instances which don’t communicate over the network. The ENA driver is probably the hardest thing to port, since as far as I know there’s no way to get your hands on the hardware directly, and it’s very difficult to do any debugging in EC2 without having a working network. Finally, the obvious: You need to have an AWS account, and appropriate API access keys. Building a disk image Building an AMI I wrote a simple tool for converting disk images into EC2 instances: bsdec2-image-upload. It uploads a disk image to Amazon S3; makes an API call to import that disk image into an EBS volume; creates a snapshot of that volume; then registers an EC2 AMI using that snapshot. To use bsdec2-image-upload, you’ll first need to create an S3 bucket for it to use as a staging area. You can call it anything you like, but I recommend that you Create it in a “nearby” region (for performance reasons), and Set an S3 “lifecycle policy” which deletes objects automatically after 1 day (since bsdec2-image-upload doesn’t clean up the S3 bucket, and those objects are useless once you’ve finished creating an AMI). Boot configuration Odds are that your instance started booting and got as far as the boot loader launching the kernel, but at some point after that things went sideways. Now we start the iterative process of building disk images, turning them into AMIs, launching said AMIs, and seeing where they break. Some things you’ll probably run into here: EC2 instances have two types of console available to them: A serial console and an VGA console. (Or rather, emulated serial and emulated VGA.) If you can have your kernel output go to both consoles, I recommend doing that. If you have to pick one, the serial console (which shows up as the “System Log” in EC2) is probably more useful than the VGA console (which shows up as “instance screenshot”) since it lets you see more than one screen of logs at once; but there’s a catch: Due to some bizarre breakage in EC2 — which I’ve been complaining about for ten years — the serial console is very “laggy”. If you find that you’re not getting any output, wait five minutes and try again. You may need to tell your kernel where to find the root filesystem. On FreeBSD we build our disk images using GPT labels, so we simply need to specify in /etc/fstab that the root filesystem is on /dev/gpt/rootfs; but if you can’t do this, you’ll probably need to have different AMIs for Nitro instances vs. non-Nitro instances since Xen block devices will typically show up with different device names from NVMe disks. On FreeBSD, I also needed to set the vfs.root.mountfrom kernel environment variable for a while; this also is no longer needed on FreeBSD but something similar may be needed on other systems. You’ll need to enable networking, using DHCP. On FreeBSD, this means placing ifconfigDEFAULT=“SYNCDHCP” into /etc/rc.conf; other systems will have other ways of specifying network parameters, and it may be necessary to specify a setting for the Xen network device, Intel SR-IOV network, and the Amazon ENA interface so that you’ll have the necessary configuration across all EC2 instance types. (On FreeBSD, ifconfigDEFAULT takes care of specifying the network settings which should apply for whatever network interface the kernel finds at boot time.) You’ll almost certainly want to turn on SSH, so that you can connect into newly launched instances and make use of them. Don’t worry about setting a password or creating a user to SSH into yet — we’ll take care of that later. EC2 configuration Now it’s time to make the AMI behave like an EC2 instance. To this end, I prepared a set of rc.d scripts for FreeBSD. Most importantly, they Print the SSH host keys to the console, so that you can veriy that they are correct when you first SSH in. (Remember, Verifying SSH host keys is more important than flossing every day.) Download the SSH public key you want to use for logging in, and create an account (by default, “ec2-user”) with that key set up for you. Fetch EC2 user-data and process it via configinit to allow you to configure the system as part of the process of launching it. If your OS has an rc system derived from NetBSD’s rc.d, you may be able to use these scripts without any changes by simply installing them and enabling them in /etc/rc.conf; otherwise you may need to write your own scripts using mine as a model. Firstboot scripts A feature I added to FreeBSD a few years ago is the concept of “firstboot” scripts: These startup scripts are only run the first time a system boots. The aforementioned configinit and SSH key fetching scripts are flagged this way — so if your OS doesn’t support the “firstboot” keyword on rc.d scripts you’ll need to hack around that — but EC2 instances also ship with other scripts set to run on the first boot: FreeBSD Update will fetch and install security and critical errata updates, and then reboot the system if necessary. The UFS filesystem on the “boot disk” will be automatically expanded to the full size of the disk — this makes it possible to specify a larger size of disk at EC2 instance launch time. Third-party packages will be automatically fetched and installed, according to a list in /etc/rc.conf. This is most useful if configinit is used to edit /etc/rc.conf, since it allows you to specify packages to install via the EC2 user-data. While none of these are strictly necessary, I find them to be extremely useful and highly recommend implementing similar functionality in your systems. Support my work! I hope you find this useful, or at very least interesting. Please consider supporting my work in this area; while I’m happy to contribute my time to supporting open source software, it would be nice if I had money coming in which I could use to cover incidental expenses (e.g., conference travel) so that I didn’t end up paying to contribute to FreeBSD. Digital Ocean https://do.co/bsdnow ###Traceability, by Vint Cerf A recent article from the August issue of the Communications of the ACM, for your contemplation: At a recent workshop on cybersecurity in the U.K., a primary topic of consideration was how to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet while protecting against the harmful behaviors that have emerged in this global medium. That this is a significant challenge cannot be overstated. The bad behaviors range from social network bullying and misinformation to email spam, distributed denial of service attacks, direct cyberattacks against infrastructure, malware propagation, identity theft, and a host of other ills requiring a wide range of technical and legal considerations. That these harmful behaviors can and do cross international boundaries only makes it more difficult to fashion effective responses. In other columns, I have argued for better software development tools to reduce the common mistakes that lead to vulnerabilities that are exploited. Here, I want to focus on another aspect of response related to law enforcement and tracking down perpetrators. Of course, not all harms are (or perhaps are not yet) illegal, but discovering those who cause them may still be warranted. The recent adoption and implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union creates an interesting tension because it highlights the importance and value of privacy while those who do direct or indirect harm must be tracked down and their identities discovered. In passing, I mention that cryptography has sometimes been blamed for protecting the identity or actions of criminals but it is also a tool for protecting privacy. Arguments have been made for “back doors” to cryptographic systems but I am of the opinion that such proposals carry extremely high risk to privacy and safety. It is not my intent to argue this question in this column. What is of interest to me is a concept to which I was introduced at the Ditchley workshop, specifically, differential traceability. The ability to trace bad actors to bring them to justice seems to me an important goal in a civilized society. The tension with privacy protection leads to the idea that only under appropriate conditions can privacy be violated. By way of example, consider license plates on cars. They are usually arbitrary identifiers and special authority is needed to match them with the car owners (unless, of course, they are vanity plates like mine: “Cerfsup”). This is an example of differential traceability; the police department has the authority to demand ownership information from the Department of Motor Vehicles that issues the license plates. Ordinary citizens do not have this authority. In the Internet environment there are a variety of identifiers associated with users (including corporate users). Domain names, IP addresses, email addresses, and public cryptography keys are examples among many others. Some of these identifiers are dynamic and thus ambiguous. For example, IP addresses are not always permanent and may change (for example, temporary IP addresses assigned at Wi-Fi hotspots) or may be ambiguous in the case of Network Address Translation. Information about the time of assignment and the party to whom an IP address was assigned may be needed to identify an individual user. There has been considerable debate and even a recent court case regarding requirements to register users in domain name WHOIS databases in the context of the adoption of GDPR. If we are to accomplish the simultaneous objectives of protecting privacy while apprehending those engaged in harmful or criminal behavior on the Internet, we must find some balance between conflicting but desirable outcomes. This suggests to me that the notion of traceability under (internationally?) agreed circumstances (that is, differential traceability) might be a fruitful concept to explore. In most societies today, it is accepted that we must be identifiable to appropriate authorities under certain conditions (consider border crossings, traffic violation stops as examples). While there are conditions under which apparent anonymity is desirable and even justifiable (whistle-blowing, for example) absolute anonymity is actually quite difficult to achieve (another point made at the Ditchley workshop) and might not be absolutely desirable given the misbehaviors apparent anonymity invites. I expect this is a controversial conclusion and I look forward to subsequent discussion. ###Remote Access Console using FreeBSD on an RPi3 Our friend, and FOSDEM Booth Neighbour, Jorge, has posted a tutorial on how he created a remote access console for his SmartOS server and other machines in his homelab Parts: Raspberry Pi 3 B+ NavoLabs micro POE Hat FT4232H based USB-to-RS232 (4x) adapter Official Raspberry Pi case (optional) Heat-sink kit (optional) USB-to-TTL adaptor (optional) Sandisk 16Gb microSD For the software I ended up using conserver. Below is a very brief tutorial on how to set everything up. I assume you have basic unix skills. Get an RPi3 image, make some minor modifications for RPi3+, and write it to the USB stick Configure FreeBSD on the RPi3 Load the ‘muge’ Ethernet Driver Load USB serial support Load the FTDI driver Enable SSHd and Conserver Configure Conserver Setup log rotation Start Conserver And you’re good to go A small bonus script I wrote to turn on the 2nd LED on the rPI once the system is booted, it will then blink the LED if someone is connected to any of the consoles. There is also a followup post with some additional tips: https://blackdot.be/2018/08/freebsd-uart-and-raspberry-pi-3-b/ ##Beastie Bits Annual Penguin Races Mscgen - Message Sequence Chart generator This patch makes FreeBSD boot 500 - 800ms faster, please test on your hardware FreeBSD’s arc4random() replaced with OpenBSD ChaCha20 implementation MeetBSD Devsummit open for registrations New Podcast interview with Michael W. Lucas Tarsnap ##Feedback/Questions We need more feedback emails. Please write to feedback@bsdnow.tv Additionally, we are considering a new segment to be added to the end of the show (to make it skippable), where we have a ~15 minute deep dive on a topic. Some initial ideas are on the Virtual Memory subsystem, the Scheduler, Capsicum, and GEOM. What topics would you like to get very detailed explanations of? Many of the explanations may have accompanying graphics, and not be very suitable for audio only listeners, that is why we are planning to put it at the very end of the episode. Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

It’s Christmas Season once again and George and Jeremy are back to discuss gift ideas for your workbench!  This week, we’re joined by previous guests Nick KN6NK, Rod VA3ON, and Smitty KR6ZY.  This discussion will give inspire you with plenty of tools, test equipment, supplies, and stocking stuffers to add to your holiday workbench wishlist! Twitter Workbench Picture Thread - https://twitter.com/smittyhalibut/status/931740952690958336 Double Cross Antenna - http://w7dbo.net/MARTES_Double_Cross_Antenna.pdf Mount Panavise Jr. to an Arm!  - https://twitter.com/CyberQueenMara/status/931560219125063680 Hand Tools Weller ML100 Magna-Lite Micro Torch $10 https://www.amazon.com/Weller-ML100-Magna-Lite-Micro-Refillable/dp/B000KL2CGO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510007582&sr=8-1&keywords=weller+torch Hakko CHP 170 Diagonal Micro Cutters $6 - https://smile.amazon.com/Hakko-CHP-170-Stand-off-Construction-21-Degree/dp/B076M3ZHBV/ref=sr_1_1?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1510971882&sr=1-1&keywords=chp170 Stainless tweezers (curved, straight) $25 each, or super cheap set ($9) Slotted head ceramic driver/adjustment set ($14) - for tweaking trimpots without shorting stuff out iFixit 64-bit screwdriver kit ($30) Hakko flush cutters ($5) PowerPole crimper ($50) Wiha System 4 Precision Modular screwdrivers https://www.wihatools.com/tech-tools/system-4-precision Knipex mini Pliers set Of two  with Parallel jaws Knipex Tools 00 20 72 V01 Mini Pliers in Belt Pouch, Red, 2-Piece Soldering Tools and Accessories Aoyue soldering iron and  hot air rework station $150 http://www.aoyue.eu/aoyue-int899a-smd-rework-hot-air-soldering-station-with-turbine-engine.html Entry Level Hot Air Rework $75 - http://www.newark.com/tenma/21-11424/temperature-controlled-hot-air/dp/25AC4940 Aven Circuit Board Holder $12 - https://www.amazon.com/Aven-17010-Adjustable-Circuit-Holder/dp/B00Q2TTQEE/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1510976355&sr=8-3&keywords=board+holder PanaVise Jr $27 -  https://www.amazon.com/PanaVise-Model-201-Junior-Miniature/dp/B000B61D22 MetCal Soldering PS2E $175 USED - https://www.ebay.com/itm/222692052462 MetCal Soldering MX500 $250 - https://www.ebay.com/itm/272921431841 How the MetCal works - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9Wmqc9O24w WES-51 or FX-888 soldering iron ($100) TS100 portable iron (requires external DC power) ($50-$80) Hackaday review  Video review Hot-air reflow station ($60) Controleo toaster reflow controller ($109) Tiny desk fan ($20) and solder fume extractor ($25-$50) Solder reel stand ($10-$20) Ceramic floor tile (12”x12” or larger), $1-$2 Workbench Accessories Pluggable USB Microscope $35 - https://www.amazon.com/Plugable-Microscope-Flexible-Observation-Magnification/dp/B00XNYXQHE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510971418&sr=8-1&keywords=plugable+microscope Stereo microscope ($190) with 5x/10x, 10x/15x, or 10x/20x Prusa i3 MK3 3D Printer $999 Assembled - https://shop.prusa3d.com/en/17-3d-printers CNC router ($400+) MillRight CNC Router Kits - https://www.millrightcnc.com/ Laser cutter ($500ish) Storage and Organization Organization/storage tool rack  $11 Global Industrial storage boxes (~$30-$70 per 100 boxes, mine are 4”W x 12”D x 4.5”H) Lift-N-Lok tool box (seem to not be available anymore) Veto Pro Pac Tool bag https://www.vetopropac.com/product/tech-mct Mechanics tool drawers (with organizers and Ptouch labels for the OCD crowd) DYMO LabelManager 160 Label Maker $15 - https://www.amazon.com/DYMO-LabelManager-Handheld-Label-1790415/dp/B005X9VZ70/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1511114832&sr=8-3&keywords=label+maker AKRO MILS - https://akro-mils.com/ AKRO-MILS Small Parts Bins $30 - https://www.amazon.com/Akro-Mils-10164-Plastic-Storage-Hardware/dp/B000LDH3JC/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1511115094&sr=8-3&keywords=akro+mils AKRO-MILS Mixed Parts Bins $30 - https://www.amazon.com/Akro-Mils-10144-20-Inch-16-Inch-Hardware/dp/B003P2UOCO/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1511115094&sr=8-4&keywords=akro+mils AKRO-MILS Large Parts Bins $30 - https://www.amazon.com/Akro-Mils-10124-Plastic-Hardware-6-5-Inch/dp/B003TV3NL0/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1511115094&sr=8-5&keywords=akro+mils Consumables and Supplies Bag of powerpole connectors - 10 pairs for $9.99 free shipping https://www.ebay.com/itm/ANDERSON-POWERPOLE-Sermos-AC-DC-Connectors-30-Amp-10-Pair/192363652204?hash=item2cc9c4646c:g:ZvAAAOSwTM5YxtBX Hatchbox 3D Printing Filament - https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=hatchbox Box o’ Resistors!  $7 - https://www.amazon.com/Cutequeen-750-Values-Resistor-25pcs/dp/B016NXK6QK/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1510972481&sr=8-3&keywords=resistors USB Cables!  Especially Anker Powerline for anything that is doing power RF Adapters (You use one for a project, and it lives with that project forever.) Snap-on RF Chokes Wire for signals hookup, power transmission RF Coax Cable - LMR400, LMR240, LMR195, etc Lifetime supply of 63/37 solder ($33) (get a smaller spool of thicker solder if doing power connectors Solder braid - https://www.amazon.com/NTE-Electronics-SW02-10-No-Clean-Solder/dp/B0195UVWJ8/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1511115385&sr=8-3&keywords=solder+braid Heatshrink tubing Glue-lined heatshrink ($12) SMD practice board ($1) Test and Measurement Equipment Elecraft XG3 Signal Generator( Sweep Gen, Beacon CW and RTTY, Foxhunt Tx) - http://www.elecraft.com/XG3/xg3.htm Digilent Analog Discovery II  $279 (www.digilent.com / www.digikey.com ) http://store.digilentinc.com/digital-discovery-portable-logic-analyzer-and-digital-pattern-generator/ Airspy HF+/Airspy R2/Airspy Mini $99-$199 - https://v3.airspy.us/ Siglent SDS-1202X-E Oscilloscope - http://www.saelig.com/product/sds1202x-e.htm Non-contact thermometer ($19) Non-contact voltage probe ($19) Socket tester ($9) Component tester ($15) LC meter ($25) Frequency counter ($17) Bus Pirate ($28) 8ch 24MHz logic analyzer, works with Sigrok ($14) Saleae mixed-signal analyzers, ($110-$600) Rigol DS1054Z Oscilloscope ($400) Bench Power Supply - Generic unit, many options, $50-$100, may need to swap pots out for 10-turn Bench Power Supply eez-h24005, $400, but unknown when next manufacturing run Bench Power Supply Rigol (1-channel $300, 3-channel $475) Bench Power Supply Siglent (basic 3ch $270, or fancy 3ch $370) Spectrum analyzer - SSA3021X, ($1600) SDR dongle ($21), noise source ($12), directional coupler Fluke Mulitmeters - 87V $370 - https://www.amazon.com/Fluke-FLUKE-87-V-Digital-Multimeter/dp/B00T3LZLFG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511115922&sr=8-1&keywords=fluke+87v EEVBlog Bryman 235 Digital Multimeter $125 - https://www.amazon.com/EEVblog-BM235-Brymen-Multimeter/dp/B01JZ1ADCO/ref=sr_1_1?s=industrial&ie=UTF8&qid=1511115964&sr=1-1&keywords=eevblog Siglent SDM3000 Series Benchtop Multimeters - http://www.saelig.com/category/siglent-dmm.htm?Screen=CTGY&Category_code=siglent-sdm-multimeters Stocking Stuffers Wago 221 Lever-Nut Assortment Pocket Pack $19.95 https://www.amazon.com/Wago-Lever-Nut-Assortment-Pocket-Pack/dp/B01N0LRTXZ/ref=sr_1_1?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1510008024&sr=1-1&keywords=WAGO+WIRE+NUTS&dpID=41fWIAdO%252BDL&preST=_SY300_QL70_&dpSrc=src Airspy Mini $99 - https://v3.airspy.us/product/a-airspy-mini/ QRP Labs CW QCX Transceiver - https://www.qrp-labs.com/qcx.html BITX40 40M QRP SSB Transceiver - http://www.hfsigs.com/ Assorted jumper wires ($8) Breadboard + jumper wire kit ($12) Breadboard power supply ($6, 3-pack $8, 6-pack $11) FTDI USB/TTL adapter: 3.3v, 5v ($15) (avoid eBay, lots of FTDI counterfeits) Lady ada toolkit $100 https://www.adafruit.com/product/136 Leatherman Squirt electricians edition (ES4)  $32 Allen wrench handles (Lee Valley Tools) http://www.leevalley.com/us/wood/page.aspx?p=75480&cat=1,70373,70375. $15 Membership for a Makerspace https://spaces.makerspace.com/directory/  

Stephen and Parker have been testing the main opamp for the OPA541. Stephen wrote a blog post detailing the opamp tests with simulation and real world testing. GitHub link to the repository for the SSPS. Giant 200W 8Ohm resistor. Liquid Cold Plate Heat Sinks for cooling the opamps in the SSPS. Isolators for the opamps made out of Aluminum Oxide. Part no. 4180. They make Beryllium Oxide Ceramic isolators but not in the right size. Antek transformers is the company that makes the Doughnut (Toroidal) Transformers Parker and Stephen are looking at. Really neat Super Capacitor Flashflight. A 30F 3V cap would weigh 5.685x10^-12 kg more fully charged vs discharged. It would take roughly 176 billion of these super caps to have a charge weight gain of 1 kg. Carbon film capacitors sounds almost as cool as carbon nano tubes. If they can replace bypass caps it would make compact board layouts easier. President Obama going to sign bill to combat chip piracy. FTDI rejoices? Microchip releases the MPLAB Xpress which is cloud-based. Stephen is excited about a GUI interface that auto generates setup and register code. Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro theme!

Stephen talks about the Stupid Simple Power Supply (SSPS). He designed a OPA541 breakout board for testing. See figure 1. OPA541 Datasheet : Street price of $21.88. Parker brings up that blinky LEDs are the most important part of a project. He is designing the control panel and chassis for the SSPS. FTDI is again at war with counterfeit parts. Microchip buys out Atmel for $3.8 Billion. The consolidation of semiconductors continues. France building a huge solar roadway. This again? Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro theme!

On this episode of Antic, the Atari 8-bit PODCAST: We look at the Atari 850 interface, the SIO2SD device, and the right cartridge slot --- we strike out with Alan Alda --- and our friend Gray Chang sends us a care package of amazing previously-unreleased books and software. Also with a great segment by our good friend Bill Kendrick about games converted from the Atari 2600 to the computers.  And, a special segment by Chris Olson about Atari 8-bit emulation on IOS.  It’s an information-packed episode you won’t want to miss!   Links mentioned in this episode:   Recurring Links Floppy Days Podcast AtariArchives.org AtariMagazines.com Kevins Book “Terrible Nerd” New Atari books scans at archive.org ANTIC feedback at AtariAge the Atlanta Historical Computing Society   What We’ve Been Up To Atari ITalk II Owners Manual Commodore MOS FBI FOIA Response Halftime Battlin’ Bands record, audio-instructions for CBS Software carts AtariAge Forum - found pre-release versions of Atari documentation Atari Operating System Users Manual November 1980 Atari 400/800 Hardware Manual November 1980 De Re Atari early version Atari Company Store Price List Gray Chang Source code! AtariAge Discussion of Gray Chang source code and printed matter Gray Chang ephemera collection Blue Yeti Microphone Mercenary: Escape from Targ Best Electronics   News New Video Game History Museum Being Built Near Dallas MidiJOY Atari 2600-PC-Interface Digitized music demos Digitized Music Demos Discussion on AtariAge SIO2PC/10502PC AtariAge discussion on FTDI chip brickingTHE!CART Website AtariAge Discussion of The!Cart "Classic Atari" book by Jason Morris at iTunes Software Library at archive.org   Review Segment - SIO2SD SIO2SD at Lotharek’s Web Site   Bill’s Modern Segment "Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System" by Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost "Midnight Magic (Atari 2600)" at Wikipedia "Midnight Magic for Atari 800" thread at AtariAge forums Original Atari 2600 Midnight Magic manual at AtariAge Seaquest AtariMania entry "Seaquest for the 800" thread at AtariAge forums Original Atari 2600 Seaquest manual at AtariAge "Stampede new 2600 conversion" thread at AtariAge forums Original Atari 2600 Stampede manual at AtariAge "The Atari 2600 Game By Game Podcast", epsiode 52: Stampede & Ice Hockey   Atari 8-bit Emulation on IOS by Chris Olson Guide to Atari 8-bit Emulation on IOS   Hardware/Software/Website of the Month Atari 8-bit at Reddit   Listener Feedback tutorial series on Programming the Atari XL/XE Jay Kint blog post on rediscovering the Atari 8-bits AtariAge link with joystick port pinouts and discussion about controllers   Feature Topic - Atari 850 Interface Module Atari 8-bit FAQ 850 Information at Atari Museum "Atari Meets the Real World" by Richard Kushner from Compute!s First Book of Atari 850 Interface Operator’s Manual 850 Interface Technical Manual   Closing NEW music from RaphelGoulart using the TriTone GTIA beeper engine