Podcasts about KiCad

This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up in a secret location with snacks to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week. First up in the news, and there's a lot of it: we announced the Hackaday Europe 2025 workshops and a few more speakers, though the big keynote announcement is still to come. In case you missed it, KiCad 9 moved up into the pro league, and finally, we're hiring, so come join us in the dungeon. On What's That Sound, Kristina didn't get close at all, but at least had a guess this time. That's okay, though, because nobody got it right! We're still giving a t-shirt away to [AlwaysTheWrongAnswer], though, probably because Elliot has a thing for using random number generators. Then it's on to the hacks and such beginning with a beautiful handheld compass CNC and cyanotype prints made with resin printer's UV light. After that, we take a look at open-source random numbers, a 3D-printed instant camera, and a couple of really cool cyberdecks. Finally, we discuss whether DOOM is doomed as the port of choice in this day and age, and kvetch about keyboards.  

This week Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off with updates on the rapidly approaching Hackaday Europe and the saga of everyone's favorite 3D printed boat. From there they'll cover an impressive method of seeing the world via WiFi, Amazon's latest changes to the Kindle ecosystem, and an alternate reality in which USB didn't take over the peripheral world. You'll also hear about a multi-level hack that brings the joys of Linux into the world of Animal Crossing, 3D printed circuit components, and the imminent release of KiCAD 9. Stick around until the end to learn about a unique hardened glass from East Germany and the disappointing reality of modern voice control systems.

In this conversation, Antonio Becerra Esteban of CELUS discusses the integration of AI in hardware design workflows, focusing on how the CELUS design platform is freeing up hours for design engineers. We talk honestly about the challenges and opportunities AI presents for designers, particularly for component search and schematic design. The CELUS free tool and platform integrate with Altium, Eagle, and KiCAD. It will soon announce integration with another leading CAD tool!  

Chris and Elecia talk about their current adventures in conference talks, play dates, and skunks.  Elecia's talks are available on YouTube: Creating Chaos and Hard Faults: An introduction to hard fault handlings, stack overflows, and debugging hard bugs Introduction to Embedded Systems (O'Reilly Expert Webinar): An introductions to… well, embedded systems These are both advertising for the 2nd edition of Elecia's book, Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software. You can also find it on O'Reilly's Learning System and probably read it with your 30 Day Trial (here).  Chris got a handheld game console, the Playdate (play.date), and has been writing a game for it. There is an interesting looking MicroPython port for it. We also mentioned Tiny Tapeout Demoscene which sounds pretty neat. And KiCanvas where you can see KiCAD schematics without loading KiCAD. Our newsletter has been off but will be back to normal next week. The RSS feed is probably not fun to look at but Elecia's Rebloginator shows some Python tools for parsing feeds.  Neither the dog nor the skunk seem contrite. Transcript

Petr Dvorak is a freelance PCB designer and a prolific sharer of knowledge on LInkedIn. He joins Chris to discuss electronic microscopes, traveling to Shenzhen, revision control, KiCad (of course), and much more!

GB2RS News Sunday the 12th of May 2024  The news headlines: New RSGB Trophy Manager announced Questionnaire launched to help shape the future of the Commonwealth Contest Learn about designing PCBs using KiCAD during the next Tonight@8 webinar We are pleased to announce that Mike Franklin, G3VYI will be the new RSGB Trophy Manager. He will focus on the Contest Trophy collection and HQ will now manage the AGM Trophies. Jacqui Goodey, G6XSY, the retiring RSGB Trophy Manager, will support Mike's transition into this role. She will also take responsibility for the historical aspect of our trophies. You can contact Mike via trophy.manager@rsgb.org.uk and Jacqui will have the new email address trophy.archivist@rsgb.org.uk  The RSGB thanks Mike and Jacqui for volunteering for this important work. Following the RSGB Commonwealth Contest in March, a small group of representatives have been reviewing possible changes that they hope will encourage more participation in future contests. The group includes representatives from countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The RSGB HF Contest Committee is now calling on both regular entrants and those who have never entered before but may do so in the future, to complete a questionnaire to help shape the next steps in the discussion. The questionnaire is open until Monday the 20th of May and can be found by visiting tinyurl.com/cwctest2024 The latest Tonight@8 webinar is tomorrow, Monday the 13th of May. Mike Willis, G0MJW will be giving an introduction to designing printed circuit boards using the popular open-source KiCAD package. The presentation covers the basics in real time, starting with a circuit sketch, going through the process of converting that into a schematic diagram, and then using that to create a printed circuit board design. It will then conclude with how to send this out for production. Watch this live presentation on the RSGB YouTube channel or special BATC channel and ask questions via the live chat. To find out more go to the RSGB website at rsgb.org/webinars The RSGB Board Chair Stewart Bryant, G3YSX has announced that, due to the pressure of work, Paul Nichols, M0PVN has resigned as an RSGB Board Director. Paul runs a busy and growing legal practice which, like many professional roles, requires long hours each day. Paul has offered to be a Legal Adviser to the Board. Stewart has welcomed him to that role and thanked him for his input to the RSGB during the last year. Today, the 12th, lots of amateur radio stations are on the air as part of Mills on the Air Weekend 2024. The event takes place across the UK every May with more than 300 windmills and watermills usually taking part. For more information, and to view a list of registered stations, visit ddars.net/mills.html The date has been confirmed for the 12th Scottish Microwave Round Table GMRT. It will go ahead on Saturday the 9th of November 2024 at the Museum of Communication, Burntisland, Fife. Lunch will be provided, and an optional dinner will be held in the evening at a local hotel. Online booking will open in July 2024. Updates, when available, will be published on the GMRT website at gmroundtable.org.uk  For more information, email Colin, GM4HWO via gm4hwo@gmail.com And now for details of rallies and events The RetrotechUK event is taking place today, the 12th. The venue is Sports Connexion, Leamington Road, Ryton-on-Dunsmore, Coventry, CV8 3FL. The doors open at 10.30 am with an entry fee of £10. A fee of £25 applies for early-doors entry at 9 am. This is an annual event organised by the British Vintage Wireless Society. There are almost 200 dealer stalls, clubs and private sellers. Everyone is welcome to come along and enjoy the wide range of retro equipment. For more information email info@retrotechuk.com and visit retrotechuk.com Barry Amateur Radio Society Rally is taking place on Saturday the 18th of May. The venue will be Sully Sports and Social Club, South Road, Sully, CF64 5SP. Doors open from 9.30 am and admission is £3. Access for traders is available from 7.30 am. For more information, traders and exhibitors can ring Nigel, GW1CUQ on 02920 892 580. For general enquiries ring Steve, 2W0VOG on 07900 560 080 or email s.cawsey@sky.com The Braehead Rally will be taking place next Sunday the 19th of May at the Braehead Arena from 10 am. There will be free on-site parking, bring and buy and refreshments available. For more information contact Paul via email at mm3ddq@gmail.com Also on Sunday the 19th of May, the Dartmoor Radio Club Rally will be held at Yelverton War Memorial Hall, PL20 6AL. The doors open at 10 am. For more information, please contact Roger Hann on 07854 088 882 or email 2e0rph@gmail.com Now the Special Event News Special event station GB1SCW is active today, the 12th, from the National Coast Watch Station at Shoreham by Sea. Operators are celebrating the work of the National Coast Watch and RNLI as part of SOS Radio Week. Listen out for the station on the 40m to 70cm bands using SSB, CW, FM, and digital modes. See QRZ.com for more information. The Humber Fortress DX Amateur Radio Club is once again supporting the International Men's Mental Health Month and helping to raise the profile of Men's Mental Health 2024 throughout the international amateur radio community. Club members will be operating from their headquarters at Patrington Haven, East Yorkshire using special callsign GB0MMH. The station will be active throughout the weekends of the 17th to 19th of May and the 14th to 16th of June across all the HF bands. Please listen out for the operators and give them a call. Your support will help raise the awareness of men's mental health. For more information see QRZ.com  Poole Amateur Radio Society, supported by the Royal Signals Amateur Radio Society, the British Amateur Television Club and the Flight Refuelling Amateur Radio Society, will be operating GB4PRS to support the RNLI Poole lifeboat festival over the weekend of the 18th and 19th of May. This is a celebration of the RNLI saving lives for 200 years and a full programme of events and visitor attractions has been organised by the RNLI, culminating with a historic ship sail-past on the evening of Sunday the 19th at 4 pm. The free-of-charge event will be open between 11 am and 4 pm and thousands of visitors are expected to visit. The station will be set up on Poole Quay, adjacent to the RNLI HQ. As well as demonstrating the use of radio in emergency situations, the station will also be participating in the SOS Radio Week activity. The station will be contacting other amateur radio stations at various RNLI lifeboat centres around the UK, as well as other lifesaving institutions nationally and internationally. A commemorative QSL card will be available. Anybody with permission to operate adjacent to, or from, a lifeboat station is invited to arrange a scheduled contact and participate in this major RNLI event. For more information, please contact secretary@g4prs.org.uk Also in support of RNLI SOS Radio Week, the Wirral Amateur Radio Society will be active as GB2HLS on Sunday the 19th of May. The station will be operating from the Hoylake Lifeboat Station, Wirral, CH47 3AL from 10 am to 4 pm. More information is available at tinyurl.com/SOSG3NWR or from Bill, G4YWD on 07804 884 245.  Now the DX news Ric, DL2VFR is active as SM2/DL2VFR from Holmon Island, EU-135, until the 14th of May using CW and some SSB. He may also be QRV as SM5/DL2VFR from IOTA group EU-084  on the 15th or 16th. QSL via Ric's home call. QSOs will be uploaded to the Logbook of the World and Club Log. Three amateurs from Stockport Radio Society are hoping, subject to appropriate weather for the crossing, to activate Great Saltee Island, EU-103, from Tuesday the 14th to Friday the 17th of May using the callsign EJ6KP/P. This will be a daylight activity only as the team is not permitted to stay overnight. Listen out for the operators on the 40, 20 and 15m bands using SSB. Harold, DF2WO is active as 9X2AW from Rwanda until the 17th of  May. He is operating CW, SSB and digital modes on the HF and 6m bands. QSL via M0OXO's OQRS. Now the contest news Today, the 12th, the 70MHz CW Contest runs from 0900 to 1200UTC. Using CW on the 4m band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. UK stations also send their postcode. Tomorrow, the 13th, the 80m Club Championship runs from 1900 to 2030UTC. Using SSB on the 80m band, the exchange is signal report and serial number. On Tuesday the 14th, the 432MHz FM Activity Contest runs from 1800 to 1855UTC. Using FM on the 70cm band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. Also on Tuesday the 14th, the 432MHz UK Activity Contest runs from 1900 to 2130UTC. Using all modes on the 70cm band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. On Thursday the 16th, the 70MHz UK Activity Contest runs from 1900 to 2130UTC. Using all modes on the 4m band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. The 144MHz May Contest starts at 1400UTC on Saturday the 18th and ends at 1400UTC on Sunday the 19th of May. Using all modes on the 2m band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. UK stations also send their postcode. On Sunday the 19th of May, the 1st 144MHz Backpackers Contest runs from 1100 to 1500UTC. Using all modes on the 2m band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. UK stations also send their postcode.  Now the radio propagation report, compiled by G0KYA, G3YLA, and G4BAO on Thursday the 9th of May 2024 Disrupted solar conditions continued this week with X-class solar flares aplenty. Four X-class events on the 8th and 9th of May prompted coronal mass ejections, which could join together to impact the Earth this weekend. We can expect a strong G3 event with the Kp index rising to 6 and the potential for visible aurora in the UK. It's hard to be positive about this as HF conditions this weekend, ending today the 12th, are likely to be very disrupted with reduced MUFs and noisy bands. But do look out for auroral signals, perhaps on the 10m band, and above, and a potential HF band enhancement just as the plasma cloud hits. The solar flux index hit 227 on Thursday the 9th, which is one of the highest we have had in this cycle. But don't get carried away as it is forecast to decline. Meanwhile, conditions have been typical for this time of year, with reduced F-layer propagation on the 10m band, offset by the start of the Sporadic-E season. The lower HF bands are staying open later in the evening, and may even increase to all night on the 20m band, as we head towards June and July. Next week, NOAA predicts that the solar flux index will drop below 200, but remain at or above 175 all week. After this weekend's chaotic geomagnetic conditions, we can expect the Kp index to fall to 2, but increase again on the 13th, to perhaps 4. In the meantime, solar maximum is still predicted to be later this year, although geomagnetic disturbances are likely to increase on the downward part of the cycle. So, buckle up for a rough ride! And now the VHF and up propagation news from G3YLA and G4BAO We end the current week with high pressure over the country and some occasional Tropo paths, especially over surrounding waters. The high will decline from the west as we progress through this weekend. At the time of reading on Sunday, the transition will be all but complete and low pressure will remain in control for much of the coming week. This means periods of rain, heavy showers or thunderstorms and quite windy weather at times. In terms of propagation, a shift to rain scatter is a good choice for those equipped for the GHz bands for the week ahead. Recent solar activity continues to offer chances of auroras so remember to monitor the Kp index and check for fluttery signals on the HF bands and raspy signals on VHF. The many clusters and band reports should be a good tool for these conditions. Lastly, the Sporadic-E season is having a few starting twitches. Earlier in the evening of Wednesday the 8th there was a short opening of about an hour to Scandinavia on 6m CW from a patch in the middle of the North Sea. The positions of the jet streams may not entirely suit further openings in the shorter term but, as the low-pressure moves in next week, things could improve for Sporadic-E paths to Iberia and central Mediterranean. With the Eta Aquariids peak now past, the next big meteor shower isn't until July with the Delta Aquariids. But before the Delta Aquariids, we can look forward to the Arietiids in late May. However, the Eta Aquariids will continue to produce the odd ping or burst. Last week there was plenty of evidence of meteors continuing to burn up after the peak. There may still be the odd one during the coming week together with the usual background sporadic meteor returns. As the Moon starts to decline this week, the distance between the Moon and Earth is also beginning to increase and with it the path loss increases to a maximum on Friday the 17th and Saturday the 18th. However, sky noise will remain low all week. The Moon is favourably placed for daytime operation this week. And that's all from the propagation team this week.

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they go over their favorite hacks and stories from the past week.  This episode starts off with an update on Hackaday Europe 2024, which is now less than a month away, and from there dives into wheelchairs with subscription plans, using classic woodworking techniques to improve your 3D printer's slicer, and a compendium of building systems. You'll hear about tools for finding patterns in hex dumps, a lusciously documented gadget for sniffing utility meters, a rare connector that works with both HDMI and DisplayPort, and a low-stress shortwave radio kit with an eye-watering price tag. Finally, they'll take a close look at a pair of articles that promise to up your KiCAD game. Check out the links on Hackaday if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

It's a leap year, so Elliot and Dan put the extra day to good use tracking down all the hottest hacks from the past week and dorking out about them. There's big news in the KiCad community, and we talked about all the new features along with some old woes. Great minds think alike, apparently, since two different e-ink weather stations made the cut this week, as did a floating oscilloscope, an automated film-developing tank, and some DIY solar panels. We talked about a hacker who figured out that water makes a pretty good solar storage medium, and it's cheaper than lithium, another who knows that a crappy lathe is better than no lathe, and what every hacker should know about Ethernet. Is there a future for room-temperature superconductors? Maybe it just depends on how cold the room is. Check out the links over on Hackaday.

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi link up through the magic of the Internet to go over some of their favorite stories from the last week. After revealing the bone-chilling winners of this year's Halloween contest, the discussion switches over to old-timey automatons, receiving deep space transmissions with a homebrew antenna that would make E.T. proud, and the treasures that can be found while poking around in a modern car's CAN bus. They'll also go over how NASA saved the taxpayers a bunch of money by hacking a remote controlled WWII tank, CNC controlled microscopes, and a cinema-quality camera you can probably build from what you've already got in the parts bin. Finally, they'll detail an ambitious effort to recreate an old computer's motherboard with a new feature in KiCad, and muse over all the interesting things that become possible once your test equipment can talk to your computer. Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Benjamin Redfield is the managing partner at bread, a product firm to help companies design and deploy software systems. Bread helps their clients take "ideas to market through strategy, brand, design, and engineering."Previously, Ben co-founded Density (Density.io) which was recently valued over $1B.This conversation covers why Ben left Density behind to create another agency, how he finds clients, running an agency like a venture studio, hobby electronics, the value of keeping your team small, tools for rapidly prototyping software, his favorite fiction books, and much more. Chapters:00:00:00 - The Business Model and Approach to Entrepreneurship00:05:09 - The Early Phases of Building a Company00:10:23 - Building the Pipeline and Leveraging Networks00:15:25 - The Benefits of Staying Small and Building a Company with Designers and Engineers00:20:43 - Shifting Identity and Maintaining Authenticity00:25:59 - The Importance of Being in the Same Room00:31:11 - The Benefits of a Retainer Model00:35:35 - Building Trust in a Company00:41:03 - Building a Door Counter and Prototype00:46:35 - The Rise of Digital Keys00:51:36 - Exploring the T3 stack and TRPC00:57:07 - Book Recommendations and Deep Dives01:02:05 - Spectrum Definitions and Good Outcomes  Check out Bread:→ Website: madebybread.com→ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/madebybread Connect with Ben:→ Website: benredfield.dev→ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/benjamin-redfield Resources Mentioned in The Episode:→ Density: density.io→ The Founders: amazon.com/Founders-Paypal-Entrepreneurs-Shaped-Silicon→ Eric Jorgeson: ejorgenson.com/newsletter→ Jason Calacanis: twitter.com/jason→ Colemak: colemak.com→ Mini Katanas: minikatana.com→ Store Leads: storeleads.app→ Typescript: typescriptlang.org→ T3: create.t3.gg→ Tailwind: tailwindcss.com→ tRPC: trpc.io→ Kicad: kicad.org→ George Mack (Thread): twitter.com/george__mack/status→ Lonesome Dove: amazon.com/Lonesome-Dove-Novel-Larry-McMurtry→ Empire of the Summer Moon: amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon Help The Louis and Kyle Show:→ If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or leave a review!→ Leave a review: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1504333834→ Drop us an email: LouisandKyleShow@gmail.com→ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb6qBiV1HAYcep87nKJmGhA Follow The Show on Social Media:→ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LouisKyleShow→ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/louiskyleshow/→ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/65567567/ Connect with Louis and Kyle:→ Read Louis' Newsletter: https://louisshulman.substack.com/→ Louis' Twitter: https://twitter.com/LouisShulman→ Kyle's Twitter: https://twitter.com/_kylebishop→ Louis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisshulman/→ Kyle's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-bishop-7b790050/

Guest Seth Hillbrand Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain Open Source Design! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source with design. Learn how we, as designers, interface with open source in a sustainable way, how we integrate into different communities, and how we as coders, work with other designers. Richard is very excited to have a guest with him since he's solo today. Joining him is Seth Hillbrand, who's a Lead Developer at KiCad, which is one of the leading electronic design and automation tools, and he's the Founder of KiCad Services Corporation. Today, Seth explains what KiCad does, the products they make, how the KiCad project works, and how donations, services, and feature implementations help to fund it. We'll also learn how KiCad has created ways to donate, interact, and be a part of their community. Download this episode now! [00:01:10] Seth tells us what he does at KiCad, what KiCad does, and what kind of physical products the designers are making, which are some amazing things. [00:05:59] How many people and how many developers are using KiCad? [00:07:42] We heard about the contributors, and now we'll learn about how the funding works for the open source project itself, and it may surprise you to hear that the bulk of their funding comes through donations, but not in the usual way that people do donations. [00:13:45] Richard brings up the donate banner at the top of the KiCad page and wonders how Seth is designing this button for donations, and if it's to make users feel different or to stick around. [00:20:11] Seth explains how KiCad is not immune to the idea of radical transparency when it comes to showing how their funds are being used, he tells us for the KiCad project how they have different ways of distributing funds, and he how they changed their release model. [00:33:59] Find out where you can follow Seth and KiCad online. Quotes [00:09:59] “Everyone says you can't build an open source project on donations, and I want to emphasize that is bunk. That is not a true statement unless you do the donation design wrong.” [00:18:25] “We have two groups within our larger community. One group is the designers and the engineers who use KiCad to build their boards and projects, and the other group is going to be all the other industries that surround us that benefit from KiCad's existence and want to have a greater say in how the community develops, because it's a part of their success for KiCad to be successful.” [00:21:53] “The hardest thing we have to do in KiCad is pay people to do work.” Spotlight [00:31:53] Richard's spotlight is the AudioMoth. [00:32:11] Seth's spotlight is wxWidgets. Links Open Source Design Twitter (https://twitter.com/opensrcdesign) Open Source Design (https://opensourcedesign.net/) Sustain Design & UX working group (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/design-ux-working-group/348) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) Sustain Open Source Twitter (https://twitter.com/sustainoss?lang=en) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Seth Hillbrand LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethhillbrand) Seth Hillbrand GitHub (https://github.com/sethhillbrand) Seth Hillbrand Twitter (https://twitter.com/sethhillbrand) KiCad (https://www.kicad.org/) KiPro (https://www.kipro-pcb.com/) Donation Page Design-Seth's talk at FOSDEM 2023 (video) (https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/donation_page_design/) AudioMoth (https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth) wxWidgets (https://www.wxwidgets.org/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Seth Hillbrand.

Under the weather though they both were, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney got together to take a look under the covers of this week's best and brightest hacks. It was a banner week, with a look at the changes that KiCad has in store, teaching a CNN how to play "Rock, Paper, Scissors," and going deep into the weeds on JPEG. We dipped a toe into history, too, with a look at one of the sexiest early hobbyist computers, seeing how citizen scientists are finding ancient burial mounds, and looking at the cryptography that cost a queen her head. Rather look to the future? We get it -- which is why we talked about a greener, cleaner way of making hydrogen from methane, as well as a generatively designed five-axis 3D printer. From laser-precise knife sharpening to circuit simulation with Python to clear plastic TVs of the 1930s, there's something for everyone!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 11th, 2022Integrating Hardware and Software TeamsWe've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for July 11th, 2022.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our esteemed guest was Jon Masters. Other speakers included Nathaneal Huffman, Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Rick Altherr, Matt Keeter, Peter Corless, Timon, Siddharth Joshi, Bob Mader, Aaron David Goldman, Simeon Miteff, Remy Goldschmidt, and MattSci. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them: @4:32 Fostering of mutual hatred between hardware and software peopleHuge difference in cost of errors in both time and money @9:38 Dealing with perishable pre-preg material Tachyon 100GTachyon 100G @15:06 The black magic that is DDRDIMM training demo @21:58 Open source tooling for EEs Open FPGA tooling Open RISC RISC V Zero to ASIC course Linux from scratch Ben Eater's 8bit computer Phil's lab, KiCad 6 PCB design walkthough Phil's lab, Altium Designer PCB design walkthough @33:18 Matt Keeter's take on ECAD tools Eagle CAD Smaller breakout boards made with KiCad for unit testing @36:55 Timon's take on EE curriculum Math-heavy electrical engineering curriculum Arts of Electronics Knowing at least basics of adjacent disciplines goes a long way @49:03 Software shouldn't pierce abstractions in order to work reliably, but people should to deepen their knowledge @1:04:54 Making microchips at home Sam Zeloof, maskless-photolithography Jeri Elseworth, making microchips at home @1:06:05 Oxide gets a Pick'n'Place machine?Open Hardware Pick'n'Place machine @1:09:40 Bob's take on silosSMM, System Management Mode @1:22:15 Vintage gaming as an intro into embedded softwareWiFi Game Boy Cartridge @1:26:14 Fabs at UNI @1:29:40 Intel Tofino (TM) Series Programmable Ethernet Switch ASICIntel Tofino @1:31:13 Google's open source high level synth. (HLS) tool XLS XLS Bluespec Chisel If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we gab about the most interesting hacks and stories of the previous week. This time, we start off by marveling over everything happening this weekend. Most urgently, it's your last chance to enter the 2022 Sci-Fi contest, which closes Monday, April 25th at 8:30 AM Pacific Time sharp. Already got your hat in the ring? If you're anywhere in the neighborhood of New Jersey, don't miss the VCF's Vintage Computer Festival East. Don't want to leave the house? Then check out all the talks that start approximately right now, assuming you get your Hackaday Podcasts hot off the server. In this episode, we'll fawn over a KiCAD plug-in that gives your PCBs that old-timey look, discuss ancient telephone exchanges and the finest in 70s-era custom telephones, and dream about building a wall of sound out of Raspberry Pis. Then we'll talk about awesome old printers and the elegance of RSS feeds, developing your own digital film, and a really cool line follower robot that works without a brain. Stay with us to find out where Kristina likes her taskbar, and we'll tell you the cool-kid name for the the Commodore key. Check out the links and more over at Hackaday!

Three episodes in, we figured it was about time that we talk over our own origins with open source software, and then ponder the present and (attempt to) predict the future of FOSS for everyday people. Listen on for some reminiscing about Sparcstations, Will's time in a penguin suit, and our earliest tries at using Linux on the desktop, an examination of some previously corporate tech that's now being democratized in open-source form, and more.Here's Will's old Maximum PC chronicle of using 2005-era Linux (in a penguin suit): https://books.google.com/books?id=rwIAAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA52#v=onepage&q&f=falseThe FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

Join Scott as he wraps up #CircuitPython2022 and then talks all about BLE on the ESP32-S3. Support Adafruit by purchasing hardware from https://adafruit.com Chat with folks on the Adafruit Discord at https://adafru.it/discord. All notes are available on GitHub with links into the videos. Thanks to @askpatrickw and @dcd for making and maintaining the notes. 0:00 Getting Started 3:30 Hello/welcome'/ housekeeping 6:00 python to navigate a bad router web interface (using the module "mechanize") to "auto-reboot it" via command line 6:30 AMD 5950X - compile code in the blink of an eye, 7:25 Cat Cam - Spook in the window 8:11 Where we left off - CP 2022 10:21 FoamyGuy 2022 blog 12:09 Android App mention - Glider for iOS - starting FileGlider for android! 12:51 Out during March - FoamyGuy taking the slot tentatively 13:55 KeithTheEE - Projects / home automation / time, datetime, and RTC, multicore JIT, scientific and ulab 16:35 ​when will the floppy disk support be finished for c.p? 17:14 Floppyio draft pull request pr 5852 18:30 https://numba.pydata.org/ 18:55 Is there a way to get the BLE datetime in Circuit Python / BLE current time services 20:40 deshipu -PWM SAMD bug 22:41 cool watch project 23:20 improvements to automated testing and regression is important 24:50 mdroberts1243 - background support for communication 27:13 Molecularist - wish for more audio in support / Teensy Audo Library ? 31:19 https://learn.adafruit.com/building-circuitpython 31:43 book recommendations? 32:31 learn guide - https://learn.adafruit.com/choose-your-circuitpython-board 33:02 Tammy's CP 2022 thoughts / Dependency Managment tools / Twitch https://twitch.tv/tammymakesthings 35:42 Design a CP board / KiCad 6 looks good 36:09 Show and Tell on Wednesday 36:58 Cortex microcontroller books - ARM Cortex M3 and M4 reference 38:00 USB complete 39:40 Monday next week ( last day of the month deadline for CP 2022 thoughts ) 40: 20 Phils Lab has a Kicad tutorial on udemy 41:10 Will ampy be supported for ESP32S3 workflow? 42:40 for nrf52840, with few exceptions (crystal, reset, SWD and ADC) any GPIO can do anything. 45:19 File transfer over I2C? 45:40 good book on ESP32C3 ? 45:51 audio code tour github 53:05 switch to github code search ( cs.github.com ) repo adafruit/circutpyton audio_dma_setup_playback 55:03 ESP32 by Erik Bartmann? 55:42 Feather Kicad parts 57:05 github pull requests is:pr author:tannewt pr 5927 58:42 BLE scanning working 59:33 Server support ( after connection ) 1:00:43 https://punchthrough.com/how-gap-and-gatt-work/ 1:02:40 Broadcastnet learn guide ( Bluetooth LE Sensor Nodes to Raspberry Pi WiFi Bridge ) 1:04:34 BLE keyboards Q: split keyboard 1:06:33 BTF-LIGHTING WS2812B 1:07:03 ESP32 can do BLE - 4.0 - not extended advertising 1:08:14 Apple AirTags 1:09:50 can do extended data advertising - 1:10:20 BroadcastNet 1:12:40 code.py (nimble) github Adafruit_CircuitPython_BLE_BroadcastNet 1:14:40 Deep Sleep wakeup - always on for 5 seconds ( issue filed ) 1:15:30 Download fresh bundle - extract *blinka_bridge.py copy to Circuitpy drive 1:18:00 iPhone model with Ultra Wideband 1:18:55 rename code.py, and install new code.py workflow 1:19:45 being careful with secrets file 1:20:34 requests vs adafruit_requests as requests 1:21:03 SQLite database on Circuit Python hardware directly? // look in micropython // not in CP yet 1:23:30 S3 mini - build appropriate binary for PS-RAM less version 1:30:57 install libraries on other CP 1:31:23 - “NotImplementedError” - cpu temperature 1:32:30 incrementing sequences numbers to detect missing data 1:32:50 found it - but it crashed… 1:35:49 look at CPU temperature code 1:36:17 maybe the S3 can't read the CPU temperature 1:37:20 visit esp32.com topics -looks like the IDF doesn't support cpu-temperature yet https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/blob/master/docs/en/api-reference/peripherals/temp_sensor.rst 1:40:28 turn on BLE debugging 1:41:12 unsupported scan event 1:43:05 timeout for the scan isn't defined? 1:43:31 look in shared bindings for timeout 1:44:44 if flashing doesn't work - check serial 1:45:25 Neopixel problem in discord 1:46:49 2 scans completed “Scan done” vs. “scan done” / scan timeout 0 1:48:18 Nimble API code 0 means use stack default timeout 1:49:25 duration_ms “forever” - int32max 1:54:35 wrap it with a while loop so in never exits 1:55:40 safe mode - what happened ? 1:56:22 How do I figure out what devices can listen for these advertisements? What version of bl do they need to have? 1:57:16 assertions has to do with printing out exception exception 1:57:59 check nimble error - recently added check_nimble_error / CHECK_NIMBLE_ERROR 1:59:05 see a lot of labs using 1:59:25 use nrfconnect on my phone 1:59:53 assertion may be a separate error - would be great to see a backtrace! 2:00:30 calling it / wrap up 2:01:30 join discord 2:02:45 Cat Cam 2:03:35 end of stream

Philip Salmony of the Phil's Lab YouTube channel joins Chris to talk about electronics education and Philip's new course on designing a mixed signal PCB using KiCad v6.

Dan Gilbert of Tall Dog joins us to talk about the Tiny Nostalgia Evocation Square (or TinyNES for short)! The TinyNES is an open hardware system compatible with the compatible with original Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom cartridges and controllers. Instead of being just an emulator or FPGA-based implementation, the TinyNES uses the original 6502-derived chips and a custom circuit board, preserving and carrying forward computing history! Oh yeah, and it's also running a crowdfunding campaign, so you can order your own and support open hardware in the best way possible: by playing video games!By the way, we mentioned that FOSS & Crafts Studios would be launching its first collaboration... we're helping to run the crowdfunding campaign on this one (and couldn't be more excited about it)!Links:TinyNES crowdfunding campaign (launch announcement, sources will be on tinynes.com when campaign succeeds)Tall Dog, Dan's company (they do some other cool open hardware stuff too, check 'em out!)Tall Dog's statement on supporting open sourceThe 6502 chip and its specially modified version for the Nintendo Enetertainment System, the Ricoh 2A03FreeCAD and KiCADVisual6502Nova the SquirrelEverdrive (proprietary hardware, but lets you run custom ROMs, including Nova)Robot Finds Kitten on the c64! Written in Racket!

KiCad is free, open-source, and an all-around excellent choice for PCB design #adafruit #collinslabnotes Shop dev boards @ Adafruit: https://www.adafruit.com/category/851 ----------------------------------------- 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/ -----------------------------------------

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

Thank you MarcB for streaming and hosting the show, despite bandwidth issues.  This is the local recording of the entire show, uncut and and stutter free.  Enjoy! 00:00:00 - Start 00:00:42 - Intro 00:03:00 - Upload the good one later? this is the good one?!? 00:03:34 - Start of the show! 00:04:00 - Having bandwidth issues, were soooorry 00:04:38 - Panel Introductions (top left corner, our host was stressed) 00:08:35 - Reminder! Glenside Virtual Meet Up/ CCCC SPringFEST, April 28th (NEXT WEEK!!!) 8p/7p Eastern/Central Time on the usual Glenside CoCo BlueJeans channel 00:09:45 - CoCo Thoughts, by Samuel Gimes 00:11:05 - Game On! Results, With Nick Marotta! 00:13:03 - Game On! discussion 00:24:32 - Game On! Game for next week, With Nick Marotta! 00:29:55 - CoCoTalk! New and improved with 2400baud! 00:30:25 - Game On! News, with L. Curtis Boyle 00:31:06 - Game On! News} Paul Shoemaker/FB- videos showing his back-porting his Poker Squares game from the CoCo3 to the CoCo1/2 00:58:12 - Game On! News} Sheldon MacDonald/FB- started rolling out his new Coco 3 and Coco 1/2 with CocoVGA game, Treasure Island Defence 01:06:45 - Game On! News} Richard Kelly/FB- posted a reference map guide for his version 2 "The Binary Adventure" 01:09:03 - Game On! News} Fabrizio Caruso- placed 2nd in the PUR-120 category of the 10 liner BASIC programming contest with Mines+ for the MC-10 01:10:58 - Game On! News} Trey Tomes- Screenshots of a PC to Coco 3 game conversion "Town of ZZT" 01:12:52 - Game On! News} Robert Sieg- animation cels with Mario for the MC-10 (Created on an MC-10 with the MCX-32) 01:14:00 - Game On! News} Ken of Canadian Retro Things/YT- Video on Coco (or generic 8 bit bit micro) books of type in BASIC games, and demonstrates several of them 01:17:30 - Game On! News} FrodoNL/TW- Videos of Manic Miner on 12 systems, 'The first year of' series for CoCo1 (late 1980) 1981 01:21:55 - Game On! News} Nick Marentes- posted Chapter 4 of his Zero Hour development blog 01:38:40 - Game On! News} Jim Gerrie/YT- poll for what MC-10 game of his is to be used for a high score challenge, the prize is one of his "Type-in Mania" coffee mugs 01:40:30 - Game On! News} Sixxie (Ciaran Anscomb, author of XRoar)/YT- video showing the Anniversary Edition of his Dunjunz port, smooth vertical scrolling demo 01:44:20 - Game On! News} The Coco Show/YT- New episode released featuring Rescue on Fractalus 01:45:30 - Game On! News} Cuthbert Dragon/YT- videos are back up again, and has over 25 games on it, including new videos 01:47:35 - End of Line for.. Game On! News, with L. Curtis Boyle 01:47:52 - Commercial Break! 01:51:12 - News, with L. Curtis Boyle **CoCo/General News** 01:51:35 - CoCo News} Simon Jonassen/FB- screen shots showing a teaser to a demo he is working on, showing 32 graphics mode splits per 2 scan lines 01:55:30 - CoCo News} Trey Tomes/GH- download on his github for the entire CGA character set, that you can use in your own programs 01:56:25 - CoCo News} Walter Zambotti- port of the V7/32V version of Unix AWK to NitrOS-9 02:00:21 - CoCo News} Robert Gault/FB- new version of his EDTASM6309, now supports up to 256 virtual drives on a CocoSDC 02:04:50 - CoCo News} Barry Nelson/FB- released a special copy of HDBDOS meant for the CocoSDC 02:06:38 - CoCo News} Tandy Assembly- looking for speakers for this October's show in Springfield, Ohio 02:07:35 - CoCo News} Rocky Hill/YT- showing his receiving of some clone boards of a Coco 2 on KiCAD for Bit-Preserve project 02:35:40 - CoCo News} Michael Pittsley- 30 minute video showing the Coco program (with audio on the cassette) for the Radio Shack Talk/Tutor educational program, "The Solar System: Featuring the Discovery of the Planet Pluto" **MC-10 News** 02:47:08 - MC-10 News} Robert Sieg/FB- update of his high res editor for the MC-10 MCX32 02:48:35 - MC-10 News} Jim McClellan/FB- Posted work on an MC-10 banner maker 02:49:15 - MC-10 News} retrolimber 2018/YT- video of the French Alice 90 computer (Italian language) **Dragon News** 02:59:08 - Dragon News} Matt Kaye/FB- made metal plate name badge replacements for Dragons 03:00:18 - Dragon News} ctrl-alt-rees/YT- released a 20 minute video on exploring the Dragon 32 03:03:58 - Dragon News} Ian Hopkin/FB- started a original cool photo post in the Dragon group 03:05:10 - Dragon News} John Whitworth/FB- uploaded the Dragon Service Manual spanish version 03:05:10 - Dragon News} Bonus You tube video on the details of the Alice 90 03:11:08 - End of Line for... News, with L. Curtis Boyle 03:11:30 - Project updates and acquisitions 03:11:58 - PUA} Rick Ulland 03:18:00 - PUA} Ron's (Delvaux) Garage 03:21:00 - More info on the Alice 90, by L. Curtis Boyle 03:25:05 - Closing Credits/Outtro 03:27:54 - Final Thoughts/CoCoTalk Caboose! 02:28:48 - Goodbye Everybody!

Thank you MarcB for streaming and hosting the show, despite bandwidth issues.  This is the local recording of the entire show, uncut and and stutter free.  Enjoy! 00:00:00 - Start 00:00:42 - Intro 00:03:00 - Upload the good one later? this is the good one?!? 00:03:34 - Start of the show! 00:04:00 - Having bandwidth issues, were soooorry 00:04:38 - Panel Introductions (top left corner, our host was stressed) 00:08:35 - Reminder! Glenside Virtual Meet Up/ CCCC SPringFEST, April 28th (NEXT WEEK!!!) 8p/7p Eastern/Central Time on the usual Glenside CoCo BlueJeans channel 00:09:45 - CoCo Thoughts, by Samuel Gimes 00:11:05 - Game On! Results, With Nick Marotta! 00:13:03 - Game On! discussion 00:24:32 - Game On! Game for next week, With Nick Marotta! 00:29:55 - CoCoTalk! New and improved with 2400baud! 00:30:25 - Game On! News, with L. Curtis Boyle 00:31:06 - Game On! News} Paul Shoemaker/FB- videos showing his back-porting his Poker Squares game from the CoCo3 to the CoCo1/2 00:58:12 - Game On! News} Sheldon MacDonald/FB- started rolling out his new Coco 3 and Coco 1/2 with CocoVGA game, Treasure Island Defence 01:06:45 - Game On! News} Richard Kelly/FB- posted a reference map guide for his version 2 "The Binary Adventure" 01:09:03 - Game On! News} Fabrizio Caruso- placed 2nd in the PUR-120 category of the 10 liner BASIC programming contest with Mines+ for the MC-10 01:10:58 - Game On! News} Trey Tomes- Screenshots of a PC to Coco 3 game conversion "Town of ZZT" 01:12:52 - Game On! News} Robert Sieg- animation cels with Mario for the MC-10 (Created on an MC-10 with the MCX-32) 01:14:00 - Game On! News} Ken of Canadian Retro Things/YT- Video on Coco (or generic 8 bit bit micro) books of type in BASIC games, and demonstrates several of them 01:17:30 - Game On! News} FrodoNL/TW- Videos of Manic Miner on 12 systems, 'The first year of' series for CoCo1 (late 1980) 1981 01:21:55 - Game On! News} Nick Marentes- posted Chapter 4 of his Zero Hour development blog 01:38:40 - Game On! News} Jim Gerrie/YT- poll for what MC-10 game of his is to be used for a high score challenge, the prize is one of his "Type-in Mania" coffee mugs 01:40:30 - Game On! News} Sixxie (Ciaran Anscomb, author of XRoar)/YT- video showing the Anniversary Edition of his Dunjunz port, smooth vertical scrolling demo 01:44:20 - Game On! News} The Coco Show/YT- New episode released featuring Rescue on Fractalus 01:45:30 - Game On! News} Cuthbert Dragon/YT- videos are back up again, and has over 25 games on it, including new videos 01:47:35 - End of Line for.. Game On! News, with L. Curtis Boyle 01:47:52 - Commercial Break! 01:51:12 - News, with L. Curtis Boyle **CoCo/General News** 01:51:35 - CoCo News} Simon Jonassen/FB- screen shots showing a teaser to a demo he is working on, showing 32 graphics mode splits per 2 scan lines 01:55:30 - CoCo News} Trey Tomes/GH- download on his github for the entire CGA character set, that you can use in your own programs 01:56:25 - CoCo News} Walter Zambotti- port of the V7/32V version of Unix AWK to NitrOS-9 02:00:21 - CoCo News} Robert Gault/FB- new version of his EDTASM6309, now supports up to 256 virtual drives on a CocoSDC 02:04:50 - CoCo News} Barry Nelson/FB- released a special copy of HDBDOS meant for the CocoSDC 02:06:38 - CoCo News} Tandy Assembly- looking for speakers for this October's show in Springfield, Ohio 02:07:35 - CoCo News} Rocky Hill/YT- showing his receiving of some clone boards of a Coco 2 on KiCAD for Bit-Preserve project 02:35:40 - CoCo News} Michael Pittsley- 30 minute video showing the Coco program (with audio on the cassette) for the Radio Shack Talk/Tutor educational program, "The Solar System: Featuring the Discovery of the Planet Pluto" **MC-10 News** 02:47:08 - MC-10 News} Robert Sieg/FB- update of his high res editor for the MC-10 MCX32 02:48:35 - MC-10 News} Jim McClellan/FB- Posted work on an MC-10 banner maker 02:49:15 - MC-10 News} retrolimber 2018/YT- video of the French Alice 90 computer (Italian language) **Dragon News** 02:59:08 - Dragon News} Matt Kaye/FB- made metal plate name badge replacements for Dragons 03:00:18 - Dragon News} ctrl-alt-rees/YT- released a 20 minute video on exploring the Dragon 32 03:03:58 - Dragon News} Ian Hopkin/FB- started a original cool photo post in the Dragon group 03:05:10 - Dragon News} John Whitworth/FB- uploaded the Dragon Service Manual spanish version 03:05:10 - Dragon News} Bonus You tube video on the details of the Alice 90 03:11:08 - End of Line for... News, with L. Curtis Boyle 03:11:30 - Project updates and acquisitions 03:11:58 - PUA} Rick Ulland 03:18:00 - PUA} Ron's (Delvaux) Garage 03:21:00 - More info on the Alice 90, by L. Curtis Boyle 03:25:05 - Closing Credits/Outtro 03:27:54 - Final Thoughts/CoCoTalk Caboose! 02:28:48 - Goodbye Everybody!

25 - Petr Dvořák: KiCAD profesionálně Petr je HW/FW embedded vývojář na volné noze a ke své práci používá KiCAD 5. Zjistili jsme jak se původně přes nástroje OrCAD, PADS a Eagle ke KiCADu na macOS dostal, že práce na volné noze obnáší i dobrý marketing. V části s KiCADem projdeme kompletní flow a jeho zkušenosti od tvorby součástek, návrh a používání opakujících se bloků až po generování výrobních dat a výroby/osazení ať už v číně (JLCPCB) tak v česku (GATEMA, Safiral, RACOM). Petr také pravidelně přispívá na vývoj KiCADu. Zjistíme jaké MCU od ST Microelectronics a Dialog Semiconductor používá. Pavel se poprvé přizná, že pro určité designy by preferoval KiCAD před EAGLE :) Odkazy: Homepage + Blog https://www.idvorak.info/ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/petr-dvorak-hw/ Plánování postování příspěvků https://postfity.com/ Generátor štítků na sáčky se součástkami Sticker BOM https://github.com/adamgreig/agg-kicad/wiki/StickerBOM Interaktivní BOM https://github.com/openscopeproject/InteractiveHtmlBom Zajímavý embedded blog https://mcuoneclipse.com/ Tinkercad pro rychlé modelování 3D pouzder v prohlížeči https://www.tinkercad.com/

I invited Jon Evans, member of the KiCad core development team, to answer our readers' questions about KiCad 6. Listen to his interview here.

How easy is it to take the open source Trezor Model T crypto hardware wallet files and manufacture your own? Or to modify or improve the design? The Trezor is open source hardware, so Dave checks out the Github and looks at the hardware files available and imports into Eagle and KiCAD. Where to from ...

Seth Hillbrand (@SethHillbrand), lead developer for KiCAD (@kicad_pcb), spoke with us about open source development, EDA tools, pronunciation, and inclusion. Check out KiCAD! Seth’s company provides support for KiCAD (kipro-pcb.com, @kiproeda).  

Welcome to The Electromaker Show episode 23! This week saw the release of open-source firmware to turn an STM32 “Blue Pill” into a multi-purpose test and measurement instrument. We also cover the two new Tinkerboards which will give the Raspberry Pi 4 a run for its money, crowdfunding campaigns, cool electronic projects and much more!   We publish a new show every week. Subscribe here. Don't have time to watch the show? Listen to the Electromaker Show in podcast format! DIY perks artificial sun  STM Blue Pill as a "nerdy swiss army knife" KiCad  Javid9x controlling a car with ASIO c++ async lib LoCoMoGo - a toy train that teaches kids to code Pi Z Supercap - a super capacitor-based hat for soft shutdown in power outs  MorphESP 240 - ESP32 S2 with built-in screen Hackboard - "the first powerful and affordable Windows 10 Pro SBC with optional 4G or 5G connectivity" BBC HiFive Doctor Who themes RISC V programming kit  Mini pcRock pi b / pi 4 with RISC os Two new Tinker boards!

The Great Search is a new series of videos focused on searching the Digi-Key catalog to narrow down to the parts you want to buy. This week: If you want to add an M.2 modules to your PCB, there's plenty in stock at Digi-Key to choose from. We'll show what to look for (it isn't obvious how to find 'em!) and some nifty new features of Digi-Key's site, like 3D PDFs and ready-to-use CAD file downloads for instant integration with KiCad, Eagle, OrCad, Altium, etc! Look for yourself on digikey.com at https://www.digikey.com/short/zn1q8z ------------------------------------------ Catch live airings of The Great Search in the live Desk of Ladyada! broadcasts https://youtu.be/46zAO_3-ozY ----------------------------------------- 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/ -----------------------------------------

We made a new STEMMA board this week, thanks to a special request we got online - this one is for Wii Nunchuks! We also spent more time with various E-Ink displays to add more support for grayscale mode in monochrome and tricolor (!) displays - we had to do a big refactor of our Arduino EPD library to allow so many new display configurations! Also, the community came together and did a lot of research into up-and-coming M.2 module specifications. The Great Search: M.2 "E Key" Connectors If you want to add an M.2 modules to your PCB, there's plenty in stock at Digi-Key to choose from. We'll show what to look for (it isn't obvious how to find em!) and some nifty new features of Digi-Key's site, like 3D PDFs and ready-to-use CAD file downloads for instant integration with KiCad, Eagle, OrCad, Altium, etc! https://www.digikey.com/short/zn1q8z 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/ -----------------------------------------

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

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams scoop up a basket of great hacks from the past week. Be amazed by the use of traditional Japanese joinery in a 3D-printed design -- you're going to want to print one of these Shoji lamps. We behold the beautiful sound of a noise generator, and the freaky sound from the Golden Gate. There's a hack for Android app development using Javascript on an IDE hosted from the phone as a webpage on your LAN. And you'll like the KiCAD trick that makes enclosure design for existing boards a lot easier. Show notes: https://hackaday.com/?p=421428

This week on EYE on NPI, folks who have wanted us to cover more motor controllers will see we're taking a STEP in the right DIRECTION with the TMC2226-SA Ultra-Silent Stepper Motor Driver with Step/Direction (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/t/trinamic/tmc2226-sa-ultra-silent-stepper-motor-driver). There's a lot of makers of stepper motor drivers these days - which means that companies are innovating a lot to stay ahead of the competition. Trinamic's stepper drivers have some interesting features we haven't seen in other drivers. And the price is good too! Only about $1.60 in quantity. For folks who have used Trinamics before, the new TMC2226 has a larger TSSOP package with heat dissipation thermal pad, much lower RdsOn LS 170mΩ & HS 170mΩ (compare to TMC2208's LS 280mΩ & HS 290mΩ) so that it can handle 2.8A current peak & 2A RMS (compare to TMC2208's 2A peak & 1.4A RMS) so this will be a very nice upgrade for CNC machines that need more drive! The big thing Trinamic promotes with their stepper technology is their "StealthChop2" silent motor operation. Those who have played with stepper motors know that once you start microstepping them to get more precision, you also can get some interesting squeaks. That's because the frequencies used to microstep cause the motor coils vibrate to vibrate in the audible 20-20KHz range. These drivers change around the chopping frequency to keep the motor silent - They even have a cool "No Loud Stepper" icon! The next big unique thing about this chip family is that there are three modes you can use with this driver. The first one is 'legacy step/dir mode'. Nearly all stepper drivers have the same compatible-ish interface. You have a few power pins, a few ground pins, two to four pins for setting the microsteps-per-step, maybe some current feedback pins, and a DIR pin for direction and STEP pin that is toggled to step the motor forward or backward. The same is available on this chip, each step can be a fullstep or a microstep, in which there are 8, 16, 32, 64 microsteps per toggle. If you have an existing CNC design that you don't want to rework, then this mode is the easiest - you simply control the gpio with any 3 or 5V logic microcontroller The second mode is an 'assisted step/dir mode' that uses internal one-time-programmable EEPROM to set up custom configurations such as turning on the internal sense resistors instead of using external ones in the OTP. The EEPROM is programmed over UART which we'll chat about next. The third mode is most interesting, there's a hardware simplex UART connection for register you can use to control up to 4 motor drivers. There's a 2-pin addressing scheme so you can use the same UART for all 4 chips. This way you can set and read all sorts of registers such as doubling up the step detection so you get a step on rising and falling edge instead of per pulse, detecting a stalled motor, or changing the over-temperature protection thresholds. You can even do things like trigger multiple steps in a row with a given velocity in a free-run mode so you don't need to trigger the step pin at all. With high-current capability, wide voltage range, 8/16/32/64 microstepping, and all these nice extras at the same price as the competition, this chip makes for a great driver for your mechatronic project or product! To help you get started, Trinamic has published ready-to-go KiCad dev board files. This is a rarity: usually you don't get an open source layout tool files. (https://www.trinamic.com/support/eval-kits/details/tmc2226-bob/) Digi-Key has a whole bunch of these fresh NEW products in stock right now - Go to https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/trinamic-motion-control-gmbh/TMC2226-SA-T/1460-TMC2226-SA-T-ND/12168610 or search on Digi-Key for 1460-TMC2226-SA-T-ND to purchase them today! ----------------------------------------- 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/

Adam Wolf (@adamwwolf) of Wayne and Layne (www.wayneandlayne.com) spoke with us about making kits, museum exhibit engineering, working on KiCad, and extraterrestrial art philosophy. Adam has a personal blog on www.feelslikeburning.com/blog/ as well as a website adamwolf.org. Adam co-wrote Make: Lego and Arduino Projects If you want to know how to contribute to KiCad libraries, check out their instruction page: kicad-pcb.org/libraries/contribute/ We also mentioned: Evil Mad Scientist’s Guide to Improving Open Source Hardware Visual Diffs KiCad Automation Tools: tools to autogenerate KiCad artifacts when committing to git Kivy: open source Python library for making displays Cedux: application framework OKGo Upside Down and Inside Out video and Art in Space project

Hello and welcome to the 328th episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this Episode, the hosts interview Barry Buelow, W0IY, about his experience in engineering, circuit design, PCB design, schematics and the benefits of using the Open Sourcea tool KiCad for drawing, modeling and manufacturing hardware projects. Thanks for listening. We hope [...]

In this episode, Peter Dalmaris talks with Jon Evans. The full video for this interview is available, please check it out. Jon is an electrical…

In this episode, Peter Dalmaris talks with Jon Evans. The full video for this interview is available, please check it out. Jon is an electrical…

MEP EP#199: High Voltage Gyrators and KiCad PluginsParker 50V power pack update Managed to safely remove the cells Protection circuit is functioning correctly One of the 4 banks is “bad” Scrapping all the 18650’s for future projects Helping Ben debug the Atari Junior 2600 Single Chip system Atari 2600's typically have 3 main ICs 6507 CPU RIOT (RAM and I/O) TIA (Graphics and Sound) Air Raid Siren all printed Needs final fitment and assembly to be completed! Stephen Rackmount case Designed a rackmount case for a 1u preamp New v-score bend method that works great on aluminum A mixture of chamfer and cut relief Can be bent by hand Back to Gyrators 300V 4 band EQ using high voltage Mosfets as gyrators Gyrators first mentioned on Episode 173 of the MEP Wanted to solve the issue of not having to make more power supply rails About +/- 12is db per band 80hz, 220hz, 750hz and 2k R.F.O. KiCad Action Plugins Run your KiCad Python scripts direct inside the UI now! RF tools - a very cool curved trace plugin Parker's major complaint about Zoom Centering in KiCad hasn't been an issue for atleast 2 years now Why did no one tell Parker :( EE Web - now with more TOOLS! All about Arrow More EDA tools then you can shake a stick at! Apple H1 Chip? Silly marketing wank Its just a custom MCU

Feedback Es gab in letzter Zeit nicht viel Feedback, wir sind auch viel beschäftigt. Wir hoffen das wird in nächster Zeit besser. Basti hat in den letzten Wochen wieder mehr Bilder aus dem Arbeitsalltag auf Twitter gepostet. Common-Sense-Tipps Basti spricht über die Pinbelegung von Applikationsprozessoren und wie er GPIOs auswählt. Chris spricht über eine MOSFET H-Brücken Schaltung und welche Effekte dabei zu beachten sind. Neuigkeiten zu den Projekten gibt es leider nicht. KiCad interactive BOM Plugin Basti stellt ein Plugin vor, mit dem eine HTML Seite aus einem KiCad Projekt extrahiert werden kann. Diese zeigt eine interaktive Stückliste mit Informationen zur Platzierung auf der Leiterplatte. Ihr findet eine Beispielseite hier. Chip der Woche Der STM32F042F6 ist diese Woche der vorgestellte Chip. Es ist ein kleiner TSSOP-20 Mikrocontroller, der mit 48MHz Systemtakt arbeitet. Der interne Takt ist ausreichend genau, für USB 2.0 oder CAN. So kommt der Chip ohne eine externe Taktquelle aus. Er kostet unter 1€ und wird von Basti in einem Projekt als Brücke zwischen einem Applikationsprozessor und einem CAN Bus verwendet. Wir haben immernoch das Happy Gecko Board zu verschenken. Schickt uns Vorschläge, welche physikalischen Schalter ihr mit kapazitiven Tasten ersetzen würdet an: feedback@kurzschlussjunkies.de oder auf Twitter.

Kevin Beller of Seymour DuncanKevin BellerHeads up the Engineering and New Product Development Departments at Seymour DuncanDoes the electronic and mechanical design, pickup design, tooling and fixture designHe has worn a lot of hats in his 40 years at Seymour Duncan by starting out as production supervisor and manufacturing engineer in 1979How does an engineer sell a creative idea?Idea generationTurning sound into a design. What drives the product?SpecificationsValidationAudience? Use Case?Rigid design vs Playful experimentationDesign iterationWho says go/no go to new designs?When or how do you say that you are complete?What happens if you just don’t like it?How much input is too much on a creative design?Trust – engineers/marketing/sales?Announcements!KiCon 2019 is a user conference for the popular open source CAD program KiCad. Happening April 26th and 27th 2019 in Chicago IL, this is the first and largest gathering of hardware developers using KiCad. Talks at the conference will span hardware design, revision control, scripting, manufacturing considerations, proper library management and getting started developing the underlying tools. All announced talks have been listed on the conference site.Visit our Public Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!

BenHeck and the PinoTaurBenjamin Heckendorn A console modder and famous computer engineerBetter known as Ben Heck on the InternetIndependent filmmaker and he was the star of element14’s The Ben Heck Show, a popular online series, until leaving the show in late 2018Previous guest on episodesEP#23: Interview with Ben Heck of The Ben Heck ShowEP#75: Does the Simulation Match the Reality?EP#153: Discrete Atomic Luffa ControlPinoTaur Pinball Platform Plans for PinoTaurEP#85: Space Engineers VS Caffeinated ChipmunksReducing the cost of the PinHeckEnabling easier programmingHigh Def GraphicsATSAMD21G18AReducing wiring complexitySerial SwitchesSerial LightsConnectorsUSB Text Adventure GameScope of the projectStory Ideas?Zork messes with youEpic Game StoreIs this bad for gamers and the industry?Announcements!KiCon 2019 is a user conference for the popular open source CAD program KiCad. Happening April 26th and 27th 2019 in Chicago IL, this is the first and largest gathering of hardware developers using KiCad. Talks at the conference will span hardware design, revision control, scripting, manufacturing considerations, proper library management and getting started developing the underlying tools. All announced talks have been listed on the conference site.Visit our Public Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!

Ken and Chip Gracey of Parallax IncKen GraceyLeader and CEO of ParallaxUC Davis alumni who lives and breathes Parallax products and has done so around the worldAll about family, working smart, having fun, mountaineering, and riding his unicycleChip Gracey Parallax founder. He had his first major introduction to programming and electronics when he was 13 years old with the Timex Sinclair computerAfter graduating high school, he and his techy friend from the 7th grade started Parallax at their homes in 1987Chip designed the first low-cost tools for the PIC microcontrollersLed to the development of the first BASIC Stamp module released in 1993The Parallax StoryStarting ProductsApple IIgs memory cardsEEPROM emulators for microcontroller developmentPIC ToolsBasic StampSX chipPropellerParallax Prop 2What makes it special compared to other microcontrollers?P2 VS P1?Feature SetProgramming Languages?What does it take to design semiconductors?Software packagesSimulationWhat document package do you send to the fabricator?Process Size?What is automated and what is done by hand?Testing and validationESD?FCC/CEWhen can people get there hands on one?Community around the companyParallax ForumBeta Testing?Best story of the Parallax Adventure so far?Announcements!KiCon 2019 is a user conference for the popular open source CAD program KiCad. Happening April 26th and 27th 2019 in Chicago IL, this is the first and largest gathering of hardware developers using KiCad. Talks at the conference will span hardware design, revision control, scripting, manufacturing considerations, proper library management and getting started developing the underlying tools. All announced talks have been listed on the conference site.Visit our Public Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!

Simplified Home AutomationDillon NicholsElectrical engineer specializing in embedded systemsSpends his free time designing circuits, writing code, and building physical objects by 3D printing, woodworking, and metal workingEnjoys trying out new processors and services to build up his engineering knowledge baseDillon was one of the Winners of the MacroFab Design Contest: Blink an LED Pragmatic Blinky CategoryDisintegrated LM3909 - 1.5V LED FlasherHome AutomationWhat do you enjoy about home automation?How did you get started automating your life?First project?Security?Favorite platform to design aroundConsolidating everything.One system to rule it all?Future ideas/projects?Hardware that didn’t work out?Announcements!KiCon 2019 is a user conference for the popular open source CAD program KiCad. Happening April 26th and 27th 2019 in Chicago IL, this is the first and largest gathering of hardware developers using KiCad. Talks at the conference will span hardware design, revision control, scripting, manufacturing considerations, proper library management and getting started developing the underlying tools. All announced talks have been listed on the conference site.Visit our Public Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!

Surfing for Science: Phil Bresnahan of SmartfinPhil Bresnahan Has made the water his playground and office for most of his lifeSenior Development Engineer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography a department of UC San Diego, and the Lead Engineer of the Smartfin ProjectSmartFinWhat is SmartFin?The Lost Bird ProjectWhy use a Surf Board for this platform?What kind of sensors does this fin have?How does it measure the ocean’s chemistry?Construction techniques?How is the fin charged and powered?Hardware challenges with the design?How does someone contribute to the project?BBC DocumentaryAnnouncements!KiCon 2019 is a user conference for the popular open source CAD program KiCad. Happening April 26th and 27th 2019 in Chicago IL, this is the first and largest gathering of hardware developers using KiCad. Talks at the conference will span hardware design, revision control, scripting, manufacturing considerations, proper library management and getting started developing the underlying tools. All announced talks have been listed on the conference site.Visit our Public Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!

Feedback zur letzten Folge war positiv. Ob wir YouTube Videos machen, werden wir sehen. Firma in der wir arbeiten ist unbekannt. Ob wir die irgendwann erwähnen werden wir sehen. 3000+ Downloads in diesem Jahr. Podcast wird auf jeden Fall fortgeführt. Wir machen weiter. Allgemeines:RIGOL1054Z das kleine Osziwunder für

The Golden Integrated CircuitParkerPropeller Development Stick Type-C Addition Found the BQ24165RGET to handle the lithium battery power management New battery management IC handles dual inputs thus replacing the TPS2113ADRBR power mux and p-channel mosfet Wagon Tach Project Signal is a 50V pulse from the distributor Arduinos do not like 50V Wagon Powered Mirror PCB Installed! 3D printed a bracket and installed into the door Tag Connect Probe Ends Will give a full report on how well they workStephenMacro Amp Milling the top panel Transformers mounted - check! PCB mounting needs fasteners ordered J-Fet buffer for the NuTubes Riaa filter with gain options for MM and MC type A series of filter specifications for recording If the record is cut with lower bass then the cut width can be smaller allowing for more info to be cut on to the record - More music playing time Two poles and one zero R.F.O.Gain ultra-high power density for 100-W USB Power Delivery adapters Texas Instruments application document for a very dense, high power AC to DC power supply Designed around providing the power for a 100W USB Type-C charger Complete 5-Watt Power Supply in IEC Main Filter Case Combines a IEC60320 (C13 coupler) connector with EMI filtering and a AC to DC power supply Greatly simplifies product design Due to cost Parker only sees this used in low volume / high margin products and one off art installations TI Claims Breakthrough BAW Technology Bulk Acoustic Wave (BAW) resonator technology though should it be BAWRT? Will reduce BoM cost and PCB size Discussion on how to store parts Part bins, boxes for projects, and proper tool storage Parker's fasteners drawer is getting out of hand How do you organize your parts?Announcements!KiCon 2019 is a user conference for the popular open source CAD program KiCad. Happening April 26th and 27th 2019 in Chicago IL, this is the first and largest gathering of hardware developers using KiCad. Talks at the conference will span hardware design, revision control, scripting, manufacturing considerations, proper library management and getting started developing the underlying tools. All announced talks have been listed on the conference site.Visit our Public Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!

Electric Vehicle Charging and Cat SafetyChristopher HowellOpenEVSE started in February 2011 with a simple experiment to try to generate the J1772 pilot signal on an ArduinoOne experiment lead to another to another until a prototype J1772 compatible controller was bornWith lots of feedback and interest a few boards were offered to other hardware hackersWhat started as 6 boards built in the first batch turned into many thousands...Today, OpenEVSE powers charging stations from many manufactures all over the world.OpenEVSEWhat is OpenEVSE? Does EVSE stand for something?What is the story behind you getting into Electric Vehicle Chargers? DesignGenerating the SAE J1772 pilot signal from an Arduino. Why Arduino?What kind of regulations do you have to deal with?What approvals or markings does your product have?Are the kits approved?KitsHave you seen much interest in these? I would think most people just want a working final product.Safety concerns?Compatibility with vehicles?Going the other way? Battery management?John Cutler from twitter asks:Allowing load sharing for multiple EVSEs sharing a circuit and/or supporting the Hydra style setup?Day based scheduling (i.e. weekdays vs weekends).Smaller, more portable and/or inexpensive models?RaspberryPi based versions?Guy Thomas grtyvr from our Slack Channel asks:What is the current state of vehicle charging grid? And what can we do to influence decision makers to move faster on adoption?Super-capacitors for buses/trains: is there progress in that area?Inductive charging for the bus/trains. Is that a thing?Which EV do you drive? Which do you recommend?Github RepoAnnouncements!KiCon 2019 is a user conference for the popular open source CAD program KiCad. Happening April 26th and 27th 2019 in Chicago IL, this is the first and largest gathering of hardware developers using KiCad. Talks at the conference will span hardware design, revision control, scripting, manufacturing considerations, proper library management and getting started developing the underlying tools. All announced talks have been listed on the conference site.MacroFab will be at SXSW. We are teaming up with Particle.io to put together a Hardware Happy Hour. It will take place this Friday March 8th from 4PM until 8PM at the Jester King Brewery. Join us for food and beer and network with fellow Hardware Engineers to kick off your SXSW weekend.Visit our Public Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!

Andrew Sowa talks about the persistence behind making, his work in KiCad and PCB art, and how he views the influence of community and culture on his work.

Espress-ify? Designing Products Around the ESP-32 Platform. Guests Zapp Chief Bling Officer (CBO) at AND!XOR During his limited free time he writes vulnerable C code, dabbles in Kicad, and trolls Arduino bot accounts on Twitter Never been seen at the same time and place as Batman...But then again, neither has Stephen Hyr0n A button pusher, easily replaced by a thousand monkeys with a thousand laptops, but manages to crank out firmware and hacker puzzles If you’re reading this statement, he already has root access to your computer We have had Zapp and Hyr0n on the podcast before. Check out MEP EP#69: Incognito Mode and MEP EP#109 Arduino, The Gateway Drug To #BadgeLife. Topics Hyr0n’s Theremin Arduino bot accounts? Quick Recap on DEF CON 26 and the Bender AND!XOR Badge Engineering Process behind badge design idea -> thing Come up with all the ideas and Venn Diagram the hardware needed to enable those ideas Espressif ESP32 Pushing it to the limit Spec sheet thots "oh shit, nice, lots of ram" Developer after math "oh shit, xtensa sdk blows, it needs all that RAM" Pros and Cons Hardware and software interactions are interesting and poorly documented Erratas? SD Card failures? Hackaday Badge and Hackaday Super Conference Zapp and Hyr0n are giving a talk about lulzcode and hardware puzzles Lulzcode docs Visit our Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes and please review us, wherever you listen (PodcastAddict, iTunes). It helps this show stay visible and helps new listeners find us.Tags: AND!XOR, Arduino Bot Accounts, Bender, DEF CON 26, electronics podcast, ESP-32, ESP32, Espressif, Hackaday, HyR0n, Lulzcode, MacroFab, macrofab engineering podcast, MEP, Super Con, Theremin, WROVER, Zapp

The Genesis of My Bill Of MaterialsParker RTL SDR functional setup? RTL-FM Seems to work fine for FM stuff AM works in direct sampling mode but I can’t seem to get that to work with RTL-FM Upconverter needed? Auto switching signals? RTL_FM also does not support stereo sound Might need a new option? R820T P7K5 Software Defined Radio? KiCad User improvements for MacroFab in the future KiCad Python API has awful documentation Particle Spectra Conference Workshops for IoT hardware and software MEP EP#122: Brandon Satrom and the LANoT Stephen Vox in a box tester layout is complete. Will order tonight May use this to also develop a preamp for a friends leslie rotary cabinet R.F.O. Parallax Propeller 2 Soon? Production samples work! Changes from First Prop 80Mhz -> 180Mhz 32 -> 64 I/O Hardware peripherals Built in Debugger Preliminary Specifications and Datasheet Ken Gracey and Chip Gracey on the Podcast? Luke Robertson from the Slack Channel How do you search for technical information? I am specifically thinking in regards to forums. I realize there is a niche forum for everything but I was wondering if there are a few standouts people prefer (presumably ones that aren't laced with kids looking for answers to their homework). Luke mentions Eevblog.com and diystompboxes.com Visit our Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes and please review us, wherever you listen (PodcastAddict, iTunes). It helps this show stay visible and helps new listeners find us.Tags: electronics podcast, KiCad, MacroFab, macrofab engineering podcast, MEP, Parallax Propeller 2, Particle Spectra, R820T P7K5, RTL_SDR, RTL-FM, Vox in a Box

Trebuchet VS OpampsParker Connectors for the Jeep PCM where a perfect match! P/Ns Black Connector: 4-1437290-5 White Connector: 4-1437290-6 Grey Connector: 4-1437290-7 Still waiting on the MAX6682 breakout board GitHub Repo Ordered some MEP Shitty Add-Ons Zapp and Hyron ordered a set MEP EP#69: Incognito Mode MEP EP#109: Arduino, The Gateway Drug To #BadgeLife Brandon Satrom ordered one MEP EP#122: Brandon Satrom and the LANoT A/C control module repair for the Wagon A/C compressor was bypassed 2N4403 was all exploded Reverse engineered the layout of the module Thanks to Tom Anderson who rewrote the schematic! Stephen Mesa-Boogie Mark IV schematic R.F.O. KiCad 5 has been released Molex Connector 1719821142 Nano-Pitch I/O 42 pins 0.5A per pin Only 50 mating cycles Decimis from Slack Channel How would you make a device that could shoot flies out of the air? When I hear a fly buzzing around, I find it highly annoying and they keep getting stuck in one room at work. Then they spend all day flying up and down the room. D&D Starwars 5e Visit our Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes and please review us, wherever you listen (PodcastAddict, iTunes). It helps this show stay visible and helps new listeners find us. Tags: 1719821142, 4-1437290-5, 4-1437290-6, 4-1437290-7, A/C control module repair, D&D SWD20, electronics podcast, MacroFab, macrofab engineering podcast, MAX6682, MEP, MEP Shitty Add-On, Mesa-Boogie, Molex, Podcast, sN4403, Trebuchet

Bil Herd shares stories and design wisdom from years of experience as a hardware engineer, most famously at Commodore. Starting out self-taught, Bil found his way to working around brilliance and some of it rubbed off a little. Learn about his interesting journey from TV repair to Commodore, Hackaday and beyond. Today, Bil is self-employed and focused on networks, high-level architecture consulting and hardware projects.     Show Highlights: I never forgot how to do hardware design. It’s fun to be able to do that. I’m working on an Altium project right now. You get to be imaginative for a couple days, and then you spend the next couple months paying for it looking at every single line item, every footprint and trying to catch where your brain was wrong. Commodore Hardware lab, splitting bus for video and hired to lead the team shortly after. Going after a swag bag offered by Adafruit from an MIT Open hardware conference resulted in a video series with Hackaday. Almost all the errors I’ve made in CAD systems were related to parts I’ve made. For parts and footprints - you need to have someone check your work. To start a new CAD system - make a trash board, force yourself through. Process to start learning a new CAD system: Open CAD > Get Overwhelmed > DRINK Making a board on a new CAD tool. First I make a trash board knowing I won’t use it. Then make a real board, using all the rules. Links and Resources: Bil Herd Wikipedia Hackaday Bil Herd’s Hackaday Videos   See all show notes and video here.    Hey everyone, this is Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack Podcast. Welcome back. Our audience continues to grow and we thank you for joining us again, and I want to give a shout out to Steven Newberry from LGS innovations who took away always marking his diodes with a K, and so many of you have chimed in and help driving actually who we have on the show and the topics we discuss. So thanks so much for joining. If you would please connect with me on LinkedIn or @AltiumJudy on Twitter and Altium is also on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and remember we're always on YouTube as well as on your favorite podcast apps. So thanks again for joining and hold onto your hats because we're gonna have a little bit of a history lesson tied in with today's best practices. So today our guest is Bill Herd, who is actually a figure of history and he has a Wikipedia page that you will have to take a look at. So for those of you that are probably, I don't know 40s and above, might remember the Commodore personal computer. It was one of the first, I'll let Bill fill you in all the details, but I remember vividly when I was in my early 20s, my dad coming home with a Commodore 64 and it was all the rage and he thought the world is forever changed and I'll never ever use all the 64k that I possibly have. So Bill, welcome and we're so glad to have you and can't wait. We're gonna tell some stories, you're gonna give us some design wisdom, so thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure. Actually I do describe myself as a recovering Commodore Engineer the active recovery never stops you've just gotta keep trying to get better. Well, I'm sorry but based on the background behind you I'm not sure about your recovery. Okay - I've relapsed a little [laughter] So, briefly tell us what you're - are you working now as a Consultant, you know like your own entity I forgot to clarify that with you? Yeah actually I'm self-employed so to speak, I owned an ISP for about 15 years and had 16 people and we did all that and then it ran its course as ISPs do, and so I do a lot of networking and high-level architecture consultation, but I never forgot how to do hardware design. So actually you caught me in the middle of doing an Altium project right now, where we're going to a limited quantity but I just went through all the steps - all the dirty little details getting a PC board out, so it was kind of fun to still be able to do that. I love the way you put it, 'the dirty little details' there's a lot of those right? You get to be imaginative for a couple days and then you spend the next couple months paying for it by looking at each and every line item and every footprint and trying to catch where your brain was wrong you know, way back in the beginning. Yeah well, so I also noticed you have - as I've gotten to get acquainted with you a little bit - back in the days of Commodore and the early days actually of the personal computer business the words nerds and hackers weren't really around but seeing you sit there in a Hackaday shirt with that lab behind you, I would say you are the quintessential original geek or nerd what do you have to say about that? Well, one - we did call it home computers, back then the PC hadn't been invented yet, and I also mention I've never been to school for any of this. I was a - basically a high school dropout - and ended up in the service, and went back and almost got my degree. I own like a library book for the money $3.42; for a library book, in English class where me and the teacher just couldn't make it work. So about three years later they sent home my diploma with my sister just going: here you'll need this someday. I used to say I was self-taught but what really happened, self-taught got me into a couple good places and then the education really started; working around really smart, really brilliant people, that's where I got the education that made it so I could do a product from beginning to end. So I was fixing TVs, got my TV Repairman License at the age of 17, in Indiana. You know and sometimes they'd answer the door and didn't want to let me in, because I got long hair and I'm carrying tube caddies and they're like: who are you? I'm like, van out front, TV repair, and people fed me cookies when they saw me fix their TV sets. Right well we will share Bill's Wikipedia page and there are some awesome pictures of this long haired hippie, with this cut off denims... Hey don't tease me about the shorts, it was 1980. Hey I'm sorry, but I wore shorts just like that so yeah, so we will share that because there's a lot of history and fun and great pictures that I think you'll enjoy hearing. So tell us a little bit about how you got into the whole Commodore thing and then we're gonna dig in and give our listeners some really practical advice on those nitty gritty details you talked about, and then we'll wrap up with some more fun stories. So just briefly give us an overview of Commodore and Hackaday? Okay if I back up just a little bit - I started at a digital scale company in Pennsylvania making instrumentation, so there I learned to do very accurate stuff with very good grounding. I understood analog and RF spectrum and all that, and it was all hand taped right. Well a guy named Terry Fisher who I just got through working with again, so after 35 years, we're still doing it and he was on Altium this time. So when I got to Commodore I had the background for how to make something expensive work. And then you just take that and you just shake it and it comes out of your head cuz now you've got to make it cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap. Yeah. And people are mad at me these days because they say: oh I have a 30 year old Commodore and it just failed! I'm like: it was designed to last five years. You should have put a switching supply... what? To put a dime more into it I'd have been fired if I did! So I got my job almost by accident at Commodore. I mean, there's a whole story here and I'm going to - let's just say I blew the interview like three times and still got hired. You know what, not even taking in my resume you know? But so I got there, and they didn't know what to do with me, and I read in a book that I was actually hired as a Technician. They just knew they could use people like me and then they sat me down, the guy was named Benny Prudent, and he said: well here, study all these software manuals. So now I was gonna be right for a programmer - I could do 6502 programming. But for a disk drive - I'm like: that sounds like the most boring thing in the world, but sure. And then I walked into the hardware lab and I saw what they were doing - they were splitting the BUS for the video - which back then I was doing it at home - and that's why I said: I just built something at home where I actually don't wait till the vertical retrace time to ramp and two weeks later I was in charge of the project. The guy was leaving, they didn't have anybody else, so now I'm a Project Leader at Commodore within a couple weeks. Oh my gosh, it was like the Wild West was it not? Oh absolutely and I loved it and I brought a certain 'animal house'  to that, because we had lost a lot of talent. I mean there was people like Chuck Peddle who designed the 6502, he's gone, but his cigar's burning in the ashtray. The chair's still warm right. So you knew that these people had been there, but they're gone - and there's these kind of older, stogier guys and me. And pretty soon it became an environment where shoes became optional, so we definitely made it into what we wanted to and you have to do that when you work 20 hour days. That's crazy so you're sleeping in the office or not sleeping? My record was 11 days without leaving. I had an air mattress, I would actually hot bunk with the technician so I would get something designed like 2:00 in the morning, check the air mattress out and they would build it for me and I'd go catch an hour to sleep and then they'd come back and kick the air mattress and say: it's built, and   just taking showers out of the sink - things like that. Well we'll talk more about some of your fun Commodore stories because I know we'll really want to dig into those a little bit more. But tell us also about your involvement with Hackaday? Yeah it's actually interesting, that I used to watch Adafruit's Little Saturday Night Show right and they would do this thing where they'd give something away and usually it was a product and I didn't go for that as much because I could just - their products are so cheap I could just buy one. But one time they had been to the Open Hardware Venue - a conference - and it was actually at MIT I think - and they asked a question and I went right to a web page, found the answer because they were giving away the swag bag, so I said, that I'll go for! So in the swag bag was some cool things but one of them was a - it was like an Octopart - only it was somebody else's version of it. Well they're owned by the people that owned Pacada. So I start talking with them, I ended up a Beta Tester, and the guy realized I just never shut up, that I'm always telling stories right? And so pretty soon he puts me in touch with Mike the head editor at Hackaday, and I'm doing the same to him only in emails, and finally he's like: all right that's it, write stuff or shut up, and so we came up with the video format because it just - it works for me - it works for my personality and I am a high school dropout which means my English ain't so good anyway, so the video works better for me. Yeah well we will also share those for listeners here - I've seen a few of them and he is perfectly suited for that. So I'll share that as well for you wannabe hackers. So let's dig into some immediate content that I hope will help engineers and PCB designers that are listening to us. You have told me -  how many EDA tools have you used over a year period? Yeah I made it all up, hardly any at all [laughter]. No it had to be like seven, eight, or nine, depending on how you count them and to what degree. But going back to the 1980s when a workstation cost fifty thousand or a hundred thousand dollars and you couldn't get them as a home user or even as a small business and so, we started it. We started with hand tape and the cool thing with that is, if you can do good hand tape, you can use a tool like a CAD and do more. But you still have to be good to begin with right? You have to understand the principles and nowadays it's more common for engineers to do their own PCB layout but I'm still of that school that: do what you do really well, and use somebody when possible that does what he does as good as you, that's why I use a guy like I said, Terry Fisher. He's as good and he knows when to ask me questions and I know when to shut up right so we have a good relationship for that kind of thing. And we started on Mentors, which actually we designed chips with, but he started on a system called a side card, and it was a card that plugged into the backs. Well when he'd start moving parts on the PC board everybody's computer slowed down right. These chip designers and stuff because it's on the VMBus, it's taking the cycles directly, so they give Terry his so - he actually he goes by Fish. They gave Fish his own VAX so now he's got a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar CAD system to lay out pc boards and so that's the 1980s, and in the Mentor, we - I hadn't really even seen a real mouse like we use until Sun's came out. It had a scratch pad so I actually grew my fingernail into a point so that I had a built-in stylus on my index finger - so yeah  just genetically modified kind of you know... [laughter]. That's funny - so with all of those changing of tools which most people that I know, that are designers, once they get proficient on a tool they'd rather die than change tools because it can be such a painful process. So tell us about changing tools. If you have to do it, what is the least painful path? Well management will always want you to do that right in the middle of a project right and that's - it's pretty key to not try and - we actually moved our hardware labs right in the middle of a project one time too. Just kind of in the same... But if you're going to change programs, realize that they're just tools, and after you've changed a couple times you start to go: okay I know how this play goes and and you do a couple of the same things and you sometimes learn and really appreciate your old tool and sometimes you learn that hey, the new tool's better. But they're no two the same, especially in CAD where there's so many complex things. So I think people picking up tools - I saw it a lot with EAGLE - what they did, and they did an amazing thing for the maker industry and the home users - even though I hate the program. if you're a professional, you just go: what, I have to drag the trace off the screen to hit the menu? this is like somebody put a GUI on a command line program. Well guess what? EAGLE's were GUI on the command line program back in the old days. So you know the false attractiveness of something like EAGLE was, it did have huge libraries right, and especially for boards because I mean these, Arduino boards - I can't deal with the mechanics of them, they're not on the center's, I'm used to all that - but what you really have to come down to when you do a CAD system is, realize you've got to make your own parts at one time or another, so you might as well get proficient at it. And if you're using libraries you might just be using somebody else's problems. So even if you do use somebody else's library - it's like you've gotta still vet the part. Right, so just realize that you're going to have to make your own parts. And then there's things like BSDL importing and stuff like, if you're doing a 250 pin FPGA, you don't want to hand-do that either, so there are tools to help you avoid the mistakes. But almost all the errors I've ever made in CAD systems are related to the parts I've made where - I actually have data books here not data sheets - a guy said: yeah you use the word book don't you? And while you're looking at the book, making the part, I've done simple things that I'll never catch myself - by having like D7 to D0, instead of D0 to D7. When I see what I think I want to see, and that's it, the mistake is in there until somebody else catches it. So we used to always have somebody else check our parts you know, in footprints or the same way I still think. So that's the first thing, is realize you’ve got to make your parts and then I recommend you just sit down and trash a board - try not to ruin your library in the process - because you could screw up libraries right. But then throw that board away and start again. This time trying to obey every rule you know how, and actually even if you don't produce the board actually obey all the rules, look up every command you don't know that you actually need, and that's kind of how I started a new CAD system. So for our audience, Bill sent me a few notes for the point of our conversation here, here is a note that he wrote: Starting a new CAD, do a couple of projects early on - sort of what he's talking about right now - his first line is, 'open CAD - get overwhelmed - drink' [laughter]. Yes, it can be overwhelming! It's like my drill sergeant said when I went through basics: 'we know it hurts gentlemen, you don't have to tell us' and we're like, oh I'll keep my pain to myself. It's the same thing: I'm supposed to be overwhelmed, okay let's you know. So you open it again, and you start looking for what you know. So there are some things you need to learn the quirks of upfront. Like how do you do a BUS? Everybody does it slightly different, that nomenclature, whether it's curly braces, brackets, whatever. And an 8 10 dot dot 8 zero -   it might be low to high, it might be either way, but you got to learn those things. And interconnects, how to make sure that a part's really hooked up. One CAD system I was on, was called Ulti Board by National Instruments, and the DRC wasn't catching the fact that parts looked like they were hooked up, and they weren't. Well, how do you catch that? Well yeah, how do you catch that? Yeah so you've got to - you go around jiggling your parts and it's stupid you know, so do a good DRC and you know, Ben, when he looked over my shoulder to check my router - from Hackaday, Ben Jordan. He gave me an - actually a compliment that I took, which was: oh it's nice to see you have all your DRC errors fixed. Well I'm old enough, I don't remember fixing them, but I'm old enough that I know I would have fixed them. Cause that's it, that's your last chance to catch that you have a net floating, even though you don't know it. Whether it's a misspelling, even capitalization change, something like that. So yeah, you got to learn all those dirty deeds and details. I was just talking to John Watson on this podcast about a week ago, we talked a lot about libraries and the same subject. It's like a theme that most headaches seem like they begin and end with the parts libraries   and even having a data sheet that's correct or hasn't changed in the last five minutes. How do you address that? I still have data books [laughter] - no, it's still like going over it, and over it, a couple of times and having somebody else look as well. I'll still take a highlighter to a schematic sometimes just if I feel I'm getting confused, out comes the highlighter to help me get more confused. [laughter] -at the end hopefully I get it. That's funny! Okay (I keep bumping things sorry about that) so okay. Let's talk about hidden nets... Okay go! I hate them [laughter] hidden nets are where somebody thought let's show up DIP package or something and we know we are hooking it up to +5 and grounds so there's no point in cluttering the schematic with it. Well my attitude is how do you know it hooked up to +5 and ground? Nowadays it's 9 +5 and ground is +3.3, 1.2, 1.0 - - so yeah whoever came up with that, they need to have something I don't want to say something bad happen... [laughter] They need to miss a CES deadline or something themself. So it's the invitation for failure is what you're saying? Yeah you can't check it, you make assumptions and that's where problems start so yeah. Would you say that making assumptions is one of those easy pitfalls for designers to fall into? Yeah, thinking SOIC is a size. It's not you know, there could be white body, skinny bodies, and it's like: oh but the picture looks like -  no. You better learn to have - one thing is you have to learn with new CAD packages, is how to measure things. And you need to do that, and then look to see oh it's .43 inches or  ... and I - one time I almost missed the fact that the the lead pitch was 0.5 instead of 0.75. That wouldn't have fit! That would have meant instant failure. You made a comment about assembly drawings being readable what did you mean by that? You know as parts got smaller the silkscreen no longer - it's not as important because of assembly techniques but if you still want to measure - you can't get that little silkscreen anywhere near the part sometimes, so you end up with an assembly drawing where you had to like put all these silk screens where you now want them inside the outlines and all that so it's like you can't use the silkscreen for an assembly drawing like the old days. You have to do a whole new one if you want to be able to find the part. But now these days what I do - but I'm working on a really dense... or troubleshooting, I actually keep the CAD open and I do the -   jump to component - and find it that way it really is faster to use technology sometimes... [laughter] sometimes. Sometimes, at least I don't hand etch my boards anymore. Yeah. Remember that, the seventies? I always say, because I was in the bare board industry for years, sales and marketing-wise and we would take people, walk through and do surveys, plus I actually worked on a shop floor for a short period of time like, I'm gonna die of heavy metal exposure man, the chemicals we had in there. I remember walking into a planing room at the first board shop I worked and my skin just burning, yes burning, just poor ventilation and there was sulphuric acid in there. I'm told you can't have plating or PC board manufacture in New Jersey, that they've just kind of made it so you can't do that. Well there's that - there's a little bit of toxicity going on in the chemicals. Right, and at Commodore we made the ultimate printed wiring board printed circuit board right which is a chip - it's just really, really small, and we polluted the groundwater and you can look this up, but we had to buy dedicated lines for like 11 neighbors, and then we had those golf course sprinklers in the back aerating the ground water. Well my first day there I mean they're just literally spraying it in the air hoping the VOCs evaporate right. Oh my gosh! I parked too close my first day there and I come out and my car's covered with this sticky stuff right and not only that, I had parked under a tree so now the leaves are stuck to my windshield with this and to try and peel them off - they just break - and they're like: oh yeah dude, don't park there man, that's in the water. Like I said, it was the Wild West days I mean. Still a Superfund site I'm told. I bet, like it's frightening - it's frightening and I'm glad we've gotten our act together a little bit environmentally oh my gosh because literally we could all die from those toxic... Yeah I remember the day my dad brought home mercury to play with you know. I remember my neighbor was an engineer - he brought home mercury to play with and we'd watch you know, roll it around on our hand or whatever, crazy! Forget about playing with it - you know putting it in your teeth we would like, oh here, pour it in my hand, let's roll it around, isn't that cool? Yeah and you put it back in the jar and it's never quite as full as you started right because you're leaving a certain amount on the floor... Good memories but we might die young, just saying... [laughter] So when you start a new CAD program, do you just jump in and start designing? How do you take that on if you're gonna take on a new CAD, what's the way you approach it? Well  as I said, I kind of I go in knowing I'm going to do a trash board, it's all about just hooking some stuff up knowing that you're making mistakes and then I try and do something more real and try and really obey the rules and that's where it starts - that's how you're learning from page to page cuz every CAD system's slightly different, but it's kind of like how you think. You drop a part, you try and put a wire on it and the kind of mistakes you'll make is not having a clear way knowing how you want to do all the resistor values in the world right. Do you make a part for each resistor value, or do you use a generic part and assign the values? And those are things you just have to figure out yourself on each CAD system I think. So I mean, I honestly don't know how it's done. I have lots of compassion for my engineering friends who are also laying out boards who really got no serious, formal training in PCB design, but alas they are laying out boards and then they get thrown a new tool like... So do you just hop on it and jump in and swim? Remember, it's a tool too and they have some really great tools like things that'll help you plot RF noise on the ground plane or thermal or something but you know, at the end of the day that's not necessarily real life. It's a tool you know, so it's an opinion, and it might be a faster, better, more colorful opinion than we used to get with an old thermal probe. But you just got to kind of try it and if you work around people who can look over your shoulder they'll save you a lot of time - especially hot keys and stuff like that. And that's probably one of my pet peeves is I don't like having to rely on hot keys and that was even before I lost a finger, so now some of the hot key combinations are literally beyond this old man's ability to do without using my nose and stuff it's... How did you lose a finger? I tore it off! Dare I ask? I just caught my ring on something and I stepped eight inches off something - it stripped it off the bone, we have pictures on the web of that also. But I used to work at a trauma department and I've flown with a 103rd combat medics, I've been captain of a rescue squad. So I look down and I just go: I know where I'm going today - I didn't even tell my wife right. I figured she's away at a quilting bee, having a good day, the next day I was: Hi, uh, lost a finger and she got mad at me for not telling her. I would get mad at you too... just saying like: oh Chee how's the quilt work? Good what did you do? I just lost my finger. Yeah, yeah well my son actually looked at it and we took pictures - by the way I had to wait half an hour for an ambulance and being a former ambulance guy that was just like -  that was an insult on top of injury literally. But I wanted him to think of it clinically and not be freaked out by it so we took pictures and stuff like that and then I told him, I said: well I'm going to - don't tell your mother - but I'm gonna leave with these ambulance people now and I'll be home probably tomorrow, because I know how things work, and he comes running to the door and he goes: dad, dad what's the key to unlock the Xbox? I'm like: okay you're gonna be fine by yourself. First time he was by himself, he's thinking about the Xbox so, all right! Oh my gosh you crack me up. What else do you want to talk about relative to CAD tools? I'm looking at my notes here - you were talking about something - you talked about the buses, nomenclature and index based even that you'd said you hate those. So what else did we not cover? I think the main thing is just how productive can you be? How well is it designed? And I was impressed by early CAD, which came out at like $4.99 in the 80s and we were like: whoa! I mean it's like that old monochrome purse, now there's PCs right -  late 80s and the things you can do where if you copy a bunch of address lines, you can tell it when to paste it, auto-increment all those address lines as if I was continuing to do them. So if I grab a 0 to 7 and I paste it, now 8 to 15 is done for me. Well you can fly, when somebody has thought of things like that to do, you can go rogue. And it has to be controllable - sometimes you go, no I really wanted a zero to seven and -  but there's tools like that, that can really make it. So, just the ability to double click and there's a new segment just like the one above it, tools like that are real important to me where I've just spent too many hours drawing in each line by hand. Right, yeah I love when - well since I've been here at Altium, one of my fun parts of my job has been to help connect our developers with hard-working designers where they can say: do it this way, we don't work that way you know, it's really nice when CAD tools will actually get together with the guys that are watching and just watch 'em work and go: oh   - because again it's easy for developers even if they've laid out boards - to make assumptions right. So I really love it when tool manufacturers actually take that into consideration and I love that we're doing that more and more these days. BOM distributor integration? Uh it's probably the one thing we didn't have in the old days BOM integration where, and even picking the footprints, we had a three-ring binder of IPC footprints   and that was always a step where errors could occur. I'm thinking this way, PCB designer's thinking that way, wrong footprint gets in there. But then even now, we can with Altium, for example, you see the part as it's a digi-key or arrow and you can make an attempt to select a part. Now; sounds great, but you end up getting into trouble when you go: oh wow, now I have to redo it for real, for the auto, for - I still call it auto insertion - for the pick and place. You know or, guess what? The stock status isn't quite what you thought it is, there's a delay in there and so now you're stalled, so you still have to, I think in my world, I still do a final BOM as a spreadsheet literally. But I get a lot closer in the tool. In the old days we were using microfiche if you didn't have the data book right? So nowadays it's integrated so it - again you have to be careful - it's a tool, it won't do your work for you and that's the thing. I was just going to say - I've worked with also like hiCAD and now KiCAD... however they pronounce it. I know, I never know how to say it either. Yeah and it was good in that you could add modules to it. It was bad in that you could add modules to it. I kind of wanted already the 3d viewer working - ready to play with it and stuff like that. I'm really impressed with Proteus instead of EAGLE for that low-end market, not up here where Altium is, but that's when I was shooting  little two inch by two inch boards for Hackaday and I'm doing a complete design every month and doing a video, and so I design it and it gets a minute of video time right. Then I throw it away to start on the next one. So it's called ARES and unfortunately the other one is ISIS, (nobody likes that name anymore), but that's the product name and they have an amazing auto router in there that'll get you a good completion, whereas if you've ever tried EAGLE it's like why do I even try the auto router you know? So that turns out to be in, and they singled out the maker market by including Arduino in issuing 80 mega parts in simulation and firmware simulation so now you can simulate it as if you've written the code. You don't even need to build the board to see if it works. And that's a cool feature. And we didn't talk about simulation - almost all CAD tools these days do include SPICE of some sort or a SPICE portal or something like that, and that's useful if you're down in the analog stuff especially. Again still just a tool. I've seen SPICE lie horribly to you,  and you think it's going to work and it's really an artifact of zero volts or something like that. Well there's a lot of talk these days about - because so many really capable designers like you, and like many people I know have learned this over a lifetime right - so if you're a new designer where are you gonna on board that outside of just one-on-one mentoring? Like any clues? There's some good YouTubes out there, but I haven't found where you can -  one, I don't have the attention span to watch somebody else work for five hours to pick up a couple tips right. So it's in the YouTubes showing you what they want to show you, but the best way is literally to be near somebody that's really good at it that's -  unfortunately that's the best way - it's almost always like people almost pair off in engineering where one guy's learning from another even if they swap roles later that day because he's better at something else. That's just kind of the way it ends up going. Yup, so I think what you're saying is find a mentor if you're not really good at it. Right yeah and vice versa and mentor others. So I was talking about the wire, on each and every C128 board. Okay, oh yeah actually Ben Jordan snuck that to me. So let's go into war stories a little bit and let's talk about 'the wire' also I'll get a screenshot of this I think Ben or do you have it? [Bill reaches over to show C128 board] That's so cool okay for - oh my gosh okay, so for those of you that are listening to this on the straight-up podcast you need to go to this portion and look at the YouTube just to see this giant board that he's pulling out of the Commodore 128 and look at the keyboard. This is what we call a 'barn door stop' it's too big to be a regular doorstop and that keyboard I designed by looking down at my BT 220 and I said, hey it works for me it'll work for future users too. I'll hold it up to the microphone for users at home right Okay. But there is a wire on each and every... we made 5.7 million of these. Oh okay. Wait before you go into the wire story, give us the stats on Commodore 64 going towards it and compare that to the Apple because I thought it was really interesting. Yeah the - and actually I narrated a video by a company called Junk Food about the - called the 8-Bit Generation, and I learned some things - our version of history wasn't quite as clean-cut as to who was the first and the best computer company out there so I'll give a little props there. But we often said, Apple's just using our parts, because we made the 6502. Well that's the processor they used, but we made the chip. So in our minds Apple did come out and they were first to get a floppy drive and some color early on, but then we come whooshing by them with the Commodore 64 whereas they sold 5 million of the Apple 2 that you're always seeing on every show about the 80s right. You see a show about Silicon Valley: 'we created the home computer' I don't agree, sorry I'm from Commodore I am a competitor and we made 27 million Commodore 64's we had all 64K, we had these cool color chips and sound chips that they didn't have and we could do animation because we have these things called Sprites, except Sprite was trademarked by Texas Instruments so we had to call 'em movable object blocks, but everybody called them Sprites, so you could write a game right and the blocks are moving themselves around, you're not having to rewrite that whole screen and everything so it was an amazing computer and we called it the 'Apple killer' because we actually stopped talking about Apple. Yeah then my boss wanted to kill Sinclair, remember the Timex Sinclairs? I don't. They're little tiny door stops now - I actually did use one of those for a doorstop and then the marketing department saw that and so suddenly every door in marketing has a Sinclair holding it open... That's so funny I don't even remember that one which I'm kind of surprised. I was kind of tuned in at that time but not that tuned in I guess. It was a $50 computer and actually, when the basic ran, the screen would go to crap because it couldn't share the BUS, remember I talked about that earlier, and then they came out with a color one and and it was cheap. I mean the Commodore 64 was $299 - by the way the Apple 2 was like $1500, $1700 and we're $299 - and then we did something like we lowered the price to $100 if you send us your old computer. So people were buying Sinclair's for $49, sending them to us to save $50 and that's of course 50 1980-dollars so this was - if you can see it through the microphone here - this was the one of the family that we called Ted and this was basically the Raspberry Pie of the day, it's all in there. The one chip does the video and the sound, and there's a processor. Oh and the video sound chip runs all the D-RAM and does all the crazy interfaces to the keyboard. So it's literally like very close to a single chip board even though there was nine in the original - nine chips - yeah you cracked open an IBM PC and there was 280 something like that. That's crazy and even the 128, as big as that was, had a couple couple tens of chips in there. So and then Jack Turmel unfortunately left Commodore and this product I was showing, this Ted thing. Without him there to drive the vision, that product kind of failed and we even had a talking version. We had snagged the guys from TI Speak and Spell, which was a big thing in the 80s and we had them working at Commodore, so we had a talking version of a computer with a desktop that Apple tell you later they invented the desktop. Well no. The guys at PARC invented it but we had one, it was just our founder left and it floundered without the founder. Crazy, okay show us the wire. Okay, so then the 128. What happened was I had gone to a CES show and by the way CES shows drove everything for us, Consumer Electronics Shows, mostly cuz if you ask them if they'll move it a day so you can hit your schedule they'll say no, so the CES show is - this is a scheduled date you cannot miss - you can't miss it by five minutes, you can't miss it by a day and so we decided - and by we I mean the engineers, we didn't even really tell management about the C128 till it was too late and then we would do things to it. Like I added a z80 processor so it became - it's Commodore 64 compatible - so suddenly nobody's going to complain at me because there's no software, can run all the old software, but then turns out the z80 cartridge didn't work very well on the Commodore 64, so I just put the z80 right in the board and after the PC board Rev was done I said: oh by the way I added the z80, they knew they couldn't tell me to take it out now or we'll miss CES. So then pretty soon the guy would be: I had a great idea to leave the z80 in there   you're like, cool go tell marketing, take a doorstop with you right. So one of the things we did is, even as we're getting ready for the CES show - it was January 6th that year I think - we're already getting ready for FCC, so we're working on the final production and that's all in five months. I started this near August and we had six -  five or six customized C's that needed to be done and so again that was our wheelhouse - this is custom, this is custom, this is custom, that - one of the other ones in here - and we're going like the wind right. Well right near the end, the z80 stopped working reliably. It wouldn't boot CPM 20% of the time, and me and my boss were fighting. It's bound to happen right, he'd already gotten his bonus I think to let me go around barefooted was like wearing thin right. But the - - oh, I lost my train of thought that almost never happens when you get old… [laughter] You fought? Oh I was fighting with the boss and he said: fine, I'll give it to somebody else to fix that problem! I said: fine, I'll take a shower and go home and get a nap! Right, so for a week, I mean I had a great week. I caught up on my hygiene,  (I won't tell you some of the other things you do when you're full of testosterone when you're young). But he comes to my office Friday, and in my mind he puffed on his cigar (you could still smoke in the office back then). I don't know if he had a cigar that day, but that's my memory and he goes: fix it or you're fired. I'm, oh sure I can do that, you're ready now for me to rejoin the workforce? Absolutely, I'm clean, I get along with people, and I just happen to luck out where I'm -   the oscilloscopes of the day weren't like the Tektronix MSO scopes - like I got back there, I had to turn it up real bright, and then I would stare at it and then turn and look at a wall and I would see the reverse image and I go: there's a glitch right there - I'm pointing at it so someone can see it because he hasn't burned his retinas staring into the light - and they think I'm nuts, and I was right. There was a glitch on this A10 line, when the z80 was the processor, but when the 6502 was the processor there's no glitch. I mean it's right around when the D Rams were doing something and so it comes down to understanding how a signal propagates down and this is part of PC board layout right. And I liken it to when the 6502 was driving the length of the line that drove it all the way to the end, like playing a flute correctly, but when the z80 drove it from an extension down the line it was like blowing into one of the holes on the flute and it's kind of not - and so I got a standing wave, where the wave’s going back and forth and bouncing into itself and it just happened to do it on A10 at the wrong time and I caught it on the scope in an hour. Of course nobody believes me right, so and the way I made it work, was I took that wire that I showed you that's redundant. There's already a trace on the PC board, I just soldered this again so now it's actually a loop right it can't bounce - - Ah it had a return path, okay. Yeah or propagates like this,  but either way it's not a standing wave anymore at a certain spot, and it just happened to be that spot was the multiplexer for the D-RAMs and they think I'm nuts right because not only do I fix it an hour, I fixed it with a wire! So we ran 10,000 units to prove that Herd's gone off the deep end and we got a hundred percent pass rate on it. It actually fixed the problem. So now the wire drives me nuts because there's 5.7 million wires out there and people said: why didn't you just change the PC board? It's like: because actually I found it this time, if there were no tools to do anything, if I change the PC board I might have moved a glitch to somewhere I can't find right. So the devil you know - and that's how it ended up going out. That's crazy  - and from by the way - having a background in EMS. For an EMS provider, to have to put a wire on five million boards, that's crazy nobody would do that today but it's cool! We called it post solder assembly and it's horribly expensive that's five point seven million dollars. It probably cost $1, the wire was a penny and 99 cents to put it on there, so we just did that. There was one other fun issue with the schedule of the 128. Okay. At one point - and see we didn't have real deep analyzers and stuff - so when the processor goes flying off the tracks because the memory is corrupted you'd go, well when in the last two minutes or two million cycles did the corruption occur? Because the analyzer's not going to catch it, unless you're so lucky right. So one of the things I noticed is, it would corrupt in the video memory and the video's memory is being scanned 15,000 times, 60 cycles a second and so I took a light pin and I put it on this spot on the screen right where the corruption would occur and I sent my analyzer, so soon as the spot on the screen occurred the light pen triggered my analyzer. And it's actually a commodore light pin - I still have it - was actually plugged into the joystick port of the system on troubleshooting and it turns out - it was called ground lift, and you're probably familiar with that. There was a stub of a little over an eighth of an inch on the ground pin of a DRAM multiplexer, and it's inductance mixed with the capacitance meant it would come off of ground when you went to switch a whole bunch of zeros to a one - except for one - that other one became a one also it just dragged everything with it. Oh, got it. Yeah and I also took - literally another little piece of wire - fixed it and then I yelled at Fish to fix. That one I made him fix but the only way we could catch it in that case, is I used a light pin to catch this little 1/8 inch piece of trace that was just playing with me. Well you know what I love about these stories Bill, is that I think it's lovely to tell them and show people what a Wild West it was and how we solved, but people like you solved things really simply because now we sit on all these really complex tools and really we stand on the shoulders of people like you right, who were innovating back in the day where we did not have the complexity of tools or things and it's easy to take those things for granted now because so much can just run in the background and you so I think it's fascinating to hear these really - like these MacGyver ways that you figured out how to fix it - you're like the original PCB design MacGyver dude. So one other quick story and it goes right to that - about the tools and the software simulations and things and it's the day I knew I was working in the right place. And this isn't my story - this actually is the chip designer stories for the Ted, for that thing I showed you. They had design roll checks when they laid out an ICs that told him if two things got too close to each other, but they didn't have an electrical rule check to tell 'em if it's supposed to be shorted together or not, so they turned a corner. They had like A7, A8 and A9 cut right across the other to address lines and it shorted 'em out, and they had no way to check that - unless they hand looked at every plot of every layer of what made up an integrated circuit. Well they - meanwhile cost a quarter million dollars to do another run. So what they did - I'm in the hardware lab, and the guy goes: okay turn on that - turn on the microscope light. Okay turn it off - good we're in NTSC mode. And I turn and I look and I'm like: did you just flip the status of a register with photons while looking at it under the microscope? And he goes: yeah uh huh, and I'm like: AH I'm in the right place, this is where I wanna be! Yeah and they didn't have the tools that told them if what was on the schematics, what made it onto the chip. So yeah and they would spend five months, with a ruler actually called a scale, checking the plot. That's the only way they could do it. That's amazing well thank you for sharing this - unfortunately we're running out of time. But thank you so much for sharing your history and your ingenuity and the stories of Commodore and giving our listeners really some practical ways of just jumping into a new tool, if they have to right, nobody likes change but I'm sure you would attest to that overall has probably helped you become a better designer to go ahead and jump in and you could probably jump into a new tool easily now it probably doesn't freak you out as much as it used to. If you know you're going to be overwhelmed, then you're right on schedule when you get overwhelmed - and then you just go back into it and you know, how do you eat an elephant? A bite at a time - same thing. Just acceptance that it's going to be frustrating and this is the cycle. Yeah that you'll screw it up and then fix it, just don't ruin your libraries in the process. Okay, well some good, good wisdom. So thank you again Bill for your time, it's been a delight to hear about everything and I just by the way - best background - those of you listening, you really need to go look at the YouTube version of this, because his lab looks like you'd all want to go live in it man it looks like there's everything in there it's awesome. What's up with the penguin by the way? There's a penguin, that looks like it's standing on your shoulders? On the telly, it used to be on top of the oscilloscope but now it's just with you so that's that's a Monty Python penguin, that's from our era right? Totally, that is so funny! Okay, well thank you again for joining myself and Bill Herd today on Altium's OnTrack podcast. I'll make sure to share all of his colorful links and Wikipedia and videos from Hackaday and thanks for joining us again. We'll see you next time - until then remember to always stay on track.  

Tell Me How People Hurt YouMashup episode with Embedded.FM Elecia White and Christopher White are the hosts of the Embedded.FM podcast It is a podcast dedicated to the many aspects of engineering Elecia and Christopher talk about the how, why, and what of engineering, usually devices The focus is bringing on guests and experts onto the podcast How to make Software and Hardware Engineers work better together Schematics for the Apollo Guidance Computer and their Kicad replica on github Announcements Twitter Chat Info May 11th Friday at 1PM CST MacroFab Monthly Electronics Meetup May 23rd 6PM at MacroFab HQ in Houston Brandon Satrom from Particle. Going to give a talk about IoT fundamentals. Houston Hardware Happy Hour June 7th at Slowpokes Bring hacks and hang out Visit our Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes and please review us, wherever you listen (PodcastAddict, iTunes). It helps this show stay visible and helps new listeners find us.Tags: Christopher, Elecia, electronics podcast, Embedded.FM, firmware, MacroFab, macrofab engineering podcast, MEP, Podcast, Software Engineers

Stephen Kraig (@Macro_Ninjaneer) and Parker Dillmann (@LnghrnEngineer), of Macrofab (@MacroFab) joined us to chat about getting hardware and software to work together. Stephen and Parker are also hosts of the Macrofab podcast. We compared out-the-ordinary podcast guests. For MacroFab episode 112 it was their conversation with a patent lawyer. For Embedded episode 150 it was our conversation with a tax accountant. Schematics for the Apollo Guidance Computer (and their Kicad replica on github).

Podcast Notes MacroFab is moving soon. Fun times! See Figure 1 to see all the stuff we need to move. Parker has finished the first version of the Selective Solder Fixture. It uses magnets to support the PCB to prevent sagging. Files here. To calibrate the machines MacroFab is designing, Parker is working on the O.A.T.B. or Optical Alignment Test Board. It is a 16"x16" PCB panel that has markings and footprints of all sizes to calibrate computer vision systems. As a side project, Parker is gathering parts for the Fantastic Air Realtime Tester. He is going to use a Adafruit Light Tower, the Macro Duino, and possibly the IAQ-CORE air quality sensor. The IAQ-CORE runs $35 however and Parker wants to try the CCS811 which is probably cheaper if he can get his hands on one. Stephen has been continuing work on the Synth Engine he was working on the past couple weeks. The AD9833 is up and running along with a 16bit A/D and D/A. He is able to produce a saw wave that ranges from 13.75Hz to 14080Hz. It is 0.5V/octave or 0.041666V/note. Tuning and tracking is excellent. It seems the Arduino libraries can not handle floating point calculations past 7 decimal places. Stephen has also jumped on the fixture train and has a cut tape strip feeder for placing cut tape and reduce wastage on our My200 Pick and Place. Scott Shawcroft, a previous guest on MEP, now writes for Adafruit! His first article is about the Arduino Zero and is a very technical walk through. Go check it out! Parker has found that datasheet pin names vary from manufacture to manufacture for the same chips. Example is the 74HC595 and pin 9 which is the serial output of the IC. KiCad uses inverse QH for the 74HC595 pin 9 marking. Wat. NXP: Q7S TI: QH’ ON Semi: SQh Diodes Inc. : Q7S STMicro: QH’ Philips: Q7’ National Semi: Q’h Motorola: SQh SGS-Thomson: QH’ Fairchild: Q’H Toshiba: QH’ Someone should decap different 74HC595's or other 7400 series chips to see how much different they are. IoT done right? Mark Rittman using a Amazon Echo to voice control his

Podcast Notes Stephen is currently working on DipTrace part libraries and templates for DRC and CAM file generation. Should have an article out next week about it. GitHub repository for DipTrace files are located here. The BGA Escape article is complete! Read it on our blog. See Figure 1. Parker finished up the USB Type-C test board. Download the files here. He is using a Molex 105450-0101 USB Type-C that is all SMD. See Figure 2. Progress on the KiCad footprints and part libraries. Check out what Dustin has done so far here. Stephen found out that KiCad uses ".pretty" as an extension format for the libraries. Parker thinks the developers thought it was good for KiCad's self esteem. Toilet seat has a scale that tells you how much your excrement weighs. Stephen's IoT toilet exists. Modular Moto Z Android phone supports DIY and RPi HAT add-ons. A modular cell phone you can buy right now as Project Ara hasn't seen any real hardware in customer hands yet. Has a SDK that allows talking to the interface. Parker asks "College is starting back up. As a Freshman Electrical Engineer what should you buy to get a leg up?". A good breadboard and jumper wires would help out in labs. Stephen and Parker will be putting together an Intro to Hardware article in the future. Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro theme!

Podcast Notes Stephen has been running tests on the Energon Cube for the SSPS. So far everything is working great. Check out Stephen's blog post update: Super Simple Power Supply "SSPS" Design (Part 3). The FX Dev board enclosure arrived and it looks great. See Figure 1 for some sweet powder coated goodness. Parker has been working on streamlining all the MacroFab Engineering Github Repositories. Most of them should look consistent in layout and information now. All the Eagle footprint libraries have been updated with MPN and Populate attributes. Check them out here. Should be adding these features to DipTrace and KiCad footprints by next week. Releasing MF-CON-2.54mm-01xXX pinheaders. Check out the house parts section on the MacroFab website. Parker had an article come out earlier this week about Eagle Part Attributes. This way designers and engineers can easily add the MPN and Populate field to their own parts. In Episode 26 of MEP, Parker had a hacked together USB Type C prototype. Now Parker has a full on development board he designed using a FTDI FT230X and a Parallax Propeller. See Figure 2. ‘Transient electronics’ research develops dissolving battery. Basically is a battery that has a polyvinyl alcohol-based polymer casing that swells causing it to dissolve, except for some nanoparticles, in around half an hour after contact with water. It supposedly can power a laptop for 15 minutes but Parker did some napkin math and found out it was a bunch of crap. PokeBall Wiggles when Pokemon are Nearby. Cool project that uses servos inside a 3D printed pokeball to wiggle when it finds pokemon nearby for the Pokemon Go App. Uses Particle IoT's "Photon" hardware and the Pokemon Go's API. Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro theme!

Podcast Notes Stephen has completed the SSPS Analog board. See Figure 1. Testing will begin early next week. The Macro Amp that Stephen has been working on is almost done. He just needs to solder the through hole onto the board. See Figure 2. Stephen has been working with Altium this past couple weeks while doing DFM work for customers. He would like the software if it didn't cost $15K. Parker finished programming the new revision of the MacroWatch V2. See Figure 3. Uses the EFM8SB10F2G in a QFN-20 package. EFM8 series has tons of built in peripherals. Reduced power consumption by 5 fold. KiCad will be adding built in SPICE simulation to the schematic portion. Stephen is now willing to try out the EDA tool. ARM was purchased by SoftBank for $32 Billion. Parker and Stephen talk about the implications of this purchase. The ARM founder isn't to happy about the deal. Microchip will be boosting the Atmel AVR8 product line later this summer. Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro theme!

Podcast Notes Scott Shawcroft of Chickadee Tech is our guest on this weeks podcast. He is working on a modular flight control system called polystack. It has 13 different boards that can be stacked together. Similar to shields for the Arduino platform. See Figure 1. Scott is down here in Houston visiting MacroFab to see his production run being built and working on his test fixture worked correctly.  See figure 2. Seattle Multi Rotors is the group Scott is a part of. The software stack is based of off Beta Flight which is a fork of Clean Flight which is a fork of BaseFlight. The very first flight controllers where based of the Wii Nunchuck. Scott uses custom pin mappings and uses a larger ST MCU which required another fork. Scott got into Quadcoptors after watching the video Crash Session!!! His first quad was a from Flite Test. The Tiny Whoop is a small FPV quad that is easy to build. Chickadee Tech is Scott's first step into the hardware world. His first build was a lap timer using the radio strength signal. Scott self taught himself KiCad. AutoDesk purchased CadSoft from Farnell. Autodesk EAGLE - The perfect tool to designing stuff for PIC16MEGA32u4. The FR4 Machine Shield we mentioned in a previous podcast has a kickstarter now. It is a Arduino “shield” CNC machine. It comes on a 18” x 22” PCB panel. Motor controllers are called “Swap Drives”. Driver chips are on PCB cards that go into edge connectors. The FAA released new rules for operating rules for unmanned aircraft (Quads). Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro theme!

Want to learn how to get from idea to schematic, through layout, all the way to physical boards? Elecia spoke with Chris Gammell about his Contextual Electronics course to teach the missing steps between what an EE learns in college and what an design engineer's job entails. Chris is co-host of the excellent electronics podcast The Amp Hour and author of Chris Gammell's Analog Life. On twitter, contact Chris via @Chris_Gammell or ask questions about the course @ContextualElec. We mentioned UT Austin's online embedded systems course which starts soon as well. Contextual Electronics includes some in-depth KiCad instruction. Some intro (and free) KiCad tutorials: Chris' Getting to Blinky Series teho Labs Wayne and Layne  Curious Inventor

Phil King of Weekend Engineering returned to give Elecia advice on how to fabricate a board, both in a professional capacity and for garage projects.  EaglePCB is a commercial package which is also available as a free, noncommercial version for small 2-layer boards. Other open source packages mentioned include Kicad and gEDA. Some board fabricators provide free tools that work only with their fab houses (such asExpressPCB).  Digikey's SchemeIt  provides a way to get a PDF schematic (and a BOM), but falls down by not providing a way to generate a net list, a critical part of board fabrication. PCB West is this week at the Santa Clara convention center. How Printed Circuit Boards are Designed (1960 Edition)   Hildy  Licht electronic assembly and manufacturing