Podcast Notes
- This week Stephen and Parker have a guest: Greg Sheridan of Octavo Systems.
- Greg is the Marketing and Sales Manager for Octavo Systems.
- Octavo Systems builds “System-in-Package” or SiP style chips to reduce the complexity of board layout and offset the costs of more PCB layers. Their first product is a Beagle Bone on Chip IC called the OSD3358.
- Greg can rattle off the part number no problem as he was the one that came up with the naming convention. OSD3358-512M-BAS.
- Octavo Systems takes the die of the IC they want to integrate and combine it with the DRAM, decoupling, and power regulation needed and put them on a custom substrate. The IC die is then bond wired to the substrate. See Figure 1.
- Octavo Systems gets their dies direct from the manufactures like Texas Instruments.
- The OSD3358-512M-BAS can be purchased at Digi-key in singles for almost $50.
- The BGA is a large pitch of 1.27mm. Octavo hopes it will help out the maker group. Uses normal IC packaging technology so it should be fairly robust. Thermal performance is very good.
- FCC/CE certification will be coming soon. Greg does not expect any problems given how short the traces are.
- Octavo is looking at integrating more devices for the future. They are not limited to the semiconductor process when selecting sub systems.
- The Ello 2M on CrowdSupply is a really “neat” stackable PCB portable computer for learning to program and hack hardware. Runs a PIC32MX MCU and Basic OS. All open source on github.
- Greg saw the PocketCNC at MakerFaire. They have a version made completely our of FR4 called the Machine Shield.
- Industrial enclosures for the the Raspberry Pi actually exist.
- Video explaining how the Raspberry Pi 2 reset when a Xenon Flash his the PCB.
- Nest releases an open source version of its networking protocol called OpenThread. Will make all IoT devices talk to each other.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro theme!