Welcome back everyone! This week on the MacroFab Roundup: Multimeter shootout, talking bananas, and picking the right pull up resistor.
Interesting Links and Articles
- Pocket Multimeter Shootout
- EEVblog #1083 – Pocket Multimeter Shootout
- Dave Jones tears down 14 multimeters of various price points to compare the build quality and feature sets
- Doesn’t include the Multimeter you can sometimes get from Harbor Freight for free with a coupon, link to previous tear down
- Appnote: Core Independent Nightlight Using Configurable Custom Logic on ATtiny1617
- Driving WS2812b LEDs without using the core MCU on a PIC
- Save CPU cycles by configuring the Configurable Custom Logic to drive external sensors and serial LEDs
- Drives down part count on your circuit
- TLE984x Infineon® Embedded Power IC
- ARM Cortex-M0 MCU with built in relay drivers, high side switchers, and power supply for 12V operation
- Reduce part count for automotive environments that require “smart” components
- I wonder how you develop for this platform; I am not well versed in the ARM core MCU field
- Evaluation board is a bit pricey for hobbyist
- Drone Stringing Transmission Lines
- Sock line pulling some of the largest transmission lines in the United States with a drone
- I made a talking banana – Useless Duck Company
- An animatronic dancing banana that reads out twitch live stream chat
- Ended up catching fire at one point
- What’s So Difficult About Diodes?
- Quick article with examples of good and bad silkscreen markings for diodes on PCB boards
- Check out the article I wrote about diode silkscreen markings!
- Neural Networks Using Doom Level Creator Like It’s 1993
- Using neural networks and previously designed levels to create new levels that are AI generated
- Interesting it seems the tiny details that humans tended to include in good levels are omitted from the AI generated
- This probably stems from what defines a “good” level to be subjective
- Maybe implement a gamer feedback system, vote good or not and further expand the training set of the AI?
- Picking a Pull-Up Resistor
- Bald Engineer goes into the math and reasoning when choosing pull up resistors for your circuit
- Open Source Calculator Teaches us about Quality Documentation
- Numworks has great documentation for the software and hardware of this graphing calculator
- Possible build for the podcast, see how good the documentation is and how far an individual can really get when building something like this
- Github repository
- Not seeing where the board/pcb files are at
MacroFab Engineering Podcast
This week on the MEP EP#120: Mastery of Skills and Wonder, Parker and Stephen chat about the recent Nintendo Switch hack and Stephen moving to Colorado.
MacroFab IRL Events
- Twitter Chat Info
- Join Parker on Twitter every Friday with #MacroFab to talk about PCB design, assembly, and the latest hashtags
- May 25th Friday at 1PM CST
- Hardware & Electronics Engineering Meetup by MacroFab & Mouser Electronics
- Brandon Satrom from Particle
- IoT fundamentals
- May 23rd at 6PM
- Houston Hardware Happy Hour
- 6PM CST on June 7th at Slowpokes
- First Thursday of each month
- Bring hacks and hang out