This week we are talking about Breadboards. Is breadboarding a circuit or design still applicable in today's SMT component dominated world?
What lore have you discovered in component datasheets? On this episode, Parker talks about how he picks electrical components and risk management.
Ever have PCBs that solder just will not wet and solder to? You probably thought it was improper soldering technique but that was probably not it!
Rapid Fire Opinion (R.F.O.)
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Teensy 3.6. Its a super charged Arduino IDE compatible development platform! Stephen is using this for his new Synth.
Schematic of the PCM5122 Audio DAC for the pinball platform Parker is working on.
Parker is an Electrical Engineer with backgrounds in Embedded System Design and Digital Signal Processing. He got his start in 2005 by hacking Nintendo consoles into portable gaming units. The following year he designed and produced an Atari 2600 video mod to allow the Atari to display a crisp, RF fuzz free picture on newer TVs. Over a thousand Atari video mods where produced by Parker from 2006 to 2011 and the mod is still made by other enthusiasts in the Atari community.
In 2006, Parker enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin as a Petroleum Engineer. After realizing electronics was his passion he switched majors in 2007 to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Following his previous background in making the Atari 2600 video mod, Parker decided to take more board layout classes and circuit design classes. Other areas of study include robotics, microcontroller theory and design, FPGA development with VHDL and Verilog, and image and signal processing with DSPs. In 2010, Parker won a Ti sponsored Launchpad programming and design contest that was held by the IEEE CS chapter at the University. Parker graduated with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Spring of 2012.
In the Summer of 2012, Parker was hired on as an Electrical Engineer at Dynamic Perception to design and prototype new electronic products. Here, Parker learned about full product development cycles and honed his board layout skills. Seeing the difficulties in managing operations and FCC/CE compliance testing, Parker thought there had to be a better way for small electronic companies to get their product out in customer's hands.
Parker also runs the blog, longhornengineer.com, where he posts his personal projects, technical guides, and appnotes about board layout design and components.
Stephen Kraig began his electronics career by building musical oriented circuits in 2003. Stephen is an avid guitar player and, in his down time, manufactures audio electronics including guitar amplifiers, pedals, and pro audio gear. Stephen graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!
Welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast where your hosts Parker Domon. And Steven Craig, and this is Episode 104, which is the numerical second anniversary of the podcast. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Two plus
two. Nice. We're gonna celebrate this this like 102 years and like, we're gonna have a lot of anniversary. Oh, yeah, just because we
can because then the actual anniversary, which happens to fall on the date, which was like February 2, something like that. Ah, I cool. So we're, this is the second numerical anniversary, and we're gonna be talking a lot about, like, boards and PCs we've been designing. Yeah, yeah. So Steven fairway.
So I have a new design for a synthesizer. Oh, what? Yeah, you would never guess actually. It's it's, it's for a utility, not necessarily, since the synthesizer. I'm creating a device that converts MIDI codes to a voltage, okay, because all my sins are controlled, with a control voltage, a zero to 10 volt signal that can represent a pitch that can represent a modulation.
I got a question. Yeah, is an industrial, the most popular is like four to 25 milliamps or 2420. Okay, that's Yeah, yeah. And is there? It'd be really interesting to do a current controller, you could
I mean, there's nothing really stopping that. Yeah, it just eats more juice out of it. Yeah, the voltage side of things is, it's a lot easier,
it's easier to measure. Because you can do a not a, quote, non invasive unquote, measurements,
voltage, the thing about four to 20, that's really convenient is you can do it generally independent of voltage. So you can you know, if you have a sensor that's 1000 feet away, and you give it 24 volts, there's not actually going to be 24 volts there. But there's always going to be somewhere between four and 20 milliamps on that line. Yep. So it's convenient for that. It's also less noisy.
So what's gonna happen is you're gonna have so many cents, you will have to convert the for the 20 milliamp currents. So that way, you can run your long links a cable when you need to hook up that one special oscillator. That's like in the next house. Yeah. Next house over.
You know, at that point, you start getting real fancy, and you do four to 20. With Heart control. Oh, like, like the digital current? Yeah. Where it switches on current. And that's basically it. You're going voltage to current and then current to a digital signal. Yeah, we're gonna Inception this.
I've actually never heard that before.
Hartsville. Yeah, it's basically the so heart control is a really interesting one. Because it sort of doesn't make sense if you think about it. But since the industry is so slow to change technology, since four to 20, is so engrained in the knowledge or in in our industry, instead of converting it to a voltage signal, they made a digital current signal. And so you can the thing is, you can still do regular four to 20. And you can ride a digital signal on top of that.
Gotcha. So also, it's like you're pulsing the current Yep. guy makes a, WC? Or what else with current pulse with current? Yes, probably thing.
I guarantee you it is. So it's the thing about it also is like, there's like, I think, I think ti has a really good one, there's just chips that are just heart chips. And that's it. They control all your four to 20 and your heart control. And so you just power them up, and it makes everything super easy. Oh, I got to look that up. It's a cool way to do industrial control, which I don't know what you'd use it for. But again, industrial controls will but I mean, like saying you like you would use Oh, something in your Jeep has to be controlled. With digital currency. You need to do Joker, you don't have a heart controlled something. Something in there.
Oh, boy. Well, that's like we were talking with Al Williams after the podcast because we talked a little bit about the Jeep on that podcast. And I was talking about like, the communication and he wants me to do an optical link.
Like fiber
into a fiber between the the in Dash Switch Control Box, brain box in the engine. While it's not really engineering robots in the engine bay,
for what reason? No noise because Oh, and
you'd have 100 You'd have, you know, a million volt, you know, isolation between them?
Yeah, I mean, does it really matter? No,
but the thing is, you can use like a spliff spit if spit if How do you pronounce that? Is it I don't know. SP diff? Boys SP diff? I've heard it spit if spit of You can just use that stuff and just run, you know 11 520 bought on it. Yeah, be good.
I mean, couldn't you just do Rs? 45?
Yeah, but it's not optical. It's not. It's like lasers and laser.
It's also expensive. It's not
in one offs. It's not too bad if you're like doing this for like selling it. And to like other people. Yeah, you wouldn't do it. But if as you're building one off, it's like, okay, it costs an extra 10 bucks.
Well, I suppose you as the user would be isolated by a ton of optical isolation. So there's no chance of getting a bad shock,
except that you're like sitting inside the vehicle.
I just tried to look at the sunny side of this. Yeah, I guess so. Anyways, yeah. So back to it back to my project. Yeah, back to your
project. And I will get to those later. Yeah.
So I was looking at a lot of these devices exists the MIDI to CV devices where you put in a MIDI code, and based on the code, it just outputs some voltage. But one thing I noticed is, a lot of them have, what I feel is few outputs or too few outputs. Like, you know, you'll spend like 300 bucks on a MIDI to CV converter, and it'll have like two, maybe four outputs. And I thought about it was like middie has 16 channels, why not have an output per channel?
What are you gonna call this thing?
Well, so far, it's called MIDI to CV.
Well, 16 you can do like, what? 16? Because eight is Octo.
Oh, shoot. Is there a name for bass? 16?
Yes. Oh, that'd be cool. name for it. Base 16. CV?
That is kind of cool. Actually. Yeah. You know, I was thinking that's kind of cool. I'm a nerdy way. But well, you know, the whole synth world does like the space thing. I Oh, well. So you could you can name these modules, any space term, and it has nothing had nothing to do with, like, you could call it zero gravity. And people be like, Hey, do you have a zero graph? You know? These nerds would get it, you know, even though it has nothing to do with anything. And so
yeah, well, you can call it the like hexa is 16.
H e XA. It could just be flat out called the hexa.
Yeah. Or you can even go like nerdy or you can be like, the the duo Octo. Oh,
yeah. No, I'm not gonna do that one. I might do hexa.
Fine. So,
yeah, so it's a big name
salt. Yeah, sure. Yeah, that's the biggest problem with projects his name.
Actually I have I have the faceplate pulled up on my computer right now in my design software. I'll change it right now. Hex, he actually just changed. There we go. Let me let me align. Let me align the text. So it looks nice. hexa. There we go. So basically, this was an exercise in semi precision. So I've got 16 Different DAX, and a bunch of different op amps to signal condition,
there's got to be a word for semi precision, because it's not precision. It's some what's not an accurate, so somewhere in between?
What, what's it what's a good hex of precision? That's up? There we go.
It could be you could say it's like, it's a suggestion.
Okay, so the thing is, like, you have to be within like a specific range with each of your voltages, your pitch will be off. Yeah, but that range is fairly wide. It's, I mean, it's good, fairly close, like, You got to be within like eight millivolts form plus minus four of your target voltage.
That's pretty tight, because we're talking about like, you know, a cheap LTO is going to have like a ripple 10 milliamps.
Right, right. So so you have to have, you have to have quiet power, you have to have a really good voltage reference, you have to have a DAC that you you know, all the errors in it. And then my output has to be zero to 10 volts, but my DAC is only a five volt DAC with a five volt reference. So I had to put a gain of two. So I had to have an an op amp that's accurate and a gain on the op amp. That's accurate. And
your Yeah, I think the biggest thing with this, this, I guess, project is going to be the power. Yeah, is because you need because you have that, especially with that gain of two, you're going to be doubling whatever ripple your power rail is.
A sort of Yes. If that leads into the signal, I mean, yeah, so So an op amps gonna have a what's it what do they call it? power supply rejection ratio, psi. Yeah. So yeah, it's gonna have that but yeah, if it leaks in somewhere else, then yeah, you will. So you know, for millivolts is not like it's not like NASA grade, but it's not. It's also not necessarily the easiest thing. In other words, you're not going to get that from just like a breadboard and yeah, and a microchip.
Yeah, this is pretty much you have to lay it out on a PCB and make it work well.
Yeah, exactly. So I'm doing a four layer PCB on this idea. What's that?
I pro level breadboard.
What is it for breadboard? So
tell us a super No, it's liquid nitrogen chilled. Oh, and so the connections are our superconducting inductors. And so you have no loss in your connections.
You get right on that. That sounds
you know, actually,
it sounds affordable. This doesn't actually it's not it wouldn't be that hard to do just a whole bunch of liquid nitrogen pumped. Yeah, so you take a breadboard
and then put a dielectric underneath it so you couldn't shorted out anything. And if you if anyone's ever like actually peeled bread boards off of like, whatever substrate they're on, the backs of them are all exposed. So you can see all the the contacts the contacts, yeah. And so you can use a slather that was some dielectric grease and put it on a block of copper and then in the block copper run your liquid nitrogen through and just like super chill, it's
the you know, the the only thing that comes to mind that makes that uh, not work so well is that it would chill the chips that are plugged into it and change their characteristic by a little
bit. But then you do the opposite and you have like an oven on to ir royler above. And then you have your feedback loop so you make sure your chips stay at like 25 C which is like what everything SPECT to
superconducting copper, and your chips are like they're on the beach,
right? Yeah, right on the beach.
Alright, get on this. I expect to see a Kickstarter in a week or tomorrow. Tomorrow there we go.
We won't fulfill it.
Yet you bled the liquid night you guys yet
sweat liquidation? Yeah. So that might be the hardest thing,
the brain of this device. I actually decided to go with a teensy. So I bought a teensy
three mystics that's different from your previous synth. Well, yeah, I
did it. Right.
What did your previous synthesizer use? Well, you guess? No, I know. No, I'm asking you. Don't see what you say. It was a 320 AP. There you go. Good.
Yeah. What you thought I didn't know what No, no, no, I
thought you're gonna say Arduino. Oh, and I've been like,
No 20 AP, but I put Arduino on
it. Yeah, yeah. Or use Arduino Libraries. Have you? stickily about
Well, I actually uploaded the bootloader. So okay. They Yes, it has. I didn't buy it as an Arduino. Yes, we can. Yes. So it has a 328 P on it. Yes. So on this device, I'm using a teensy and not because I need to mainly because I want to. I wanted to buy one because I've never actually played with it. And they're fast. They are unbelievably fast for what you get. I mean, I paid 40 bucks for which I actually overpaid. Frankly, they're they they should be about 30 bucks, but I bought it with the headers pre soldered, and I just wanted to get up and go on. So I paid the extra 10 bucks. And the headers aren't straight. No, no. very, they're very clearly like hand done by somebody. Yeah,
it's just like one is like, yeah, it's five degrees listed over.
So have you played with any teensy since I know about them? No. Okay. They're actually really cool. They they they run teensyduino So basically, all of your standard commands in Arduino can run on this new wiring. You're right actually, yeah. All the wiring commands. Yeah, Parker's totally schooling me on my arm. We had a whole podcast we did. We did. We don't have you can use the IDE, the Arduino IDE, and all the wiring commands work on it. But it runs at a ripping 180 megahertz. So it's pretty damn fast or a little home gamer stick.
And so question about though, is can you use a Real ID? Course? Okay, yeah. Something that gives you like a debugger.
Yes. In fact, I think if I'm not mistaken, it actually has it have a full set of debug pins. I brought I brought a little postcard that has the pin out of the 3.6 on here. So it has a whole bunch of functions available. You can do an actual ID on this if you so want to but it but it comes with a bootloader that's Arduino compatible. Neat. Yeah. So it's what makes programming super easy. And the thing is the Arduino one of the big reasons why I got this is the arduino bootloader will allow you to upload this to act as a USB MIDI host. So instead of doing MIDI, the Traditional way where you have to serial pump everything into a pin. Yeah. And then like keep sniffing that pin. You literally just set this up as USB host, and your computer detects it as a USB device.
Well, you're the library you're using to do that is doing what you're saying.
Yeah, it's, well, it's sniffing the USB pins. It's just I don't have to write that code. Exactly. And someone somebody smarter than you. And I wrote that code. Oh, yeah, yeah. And the library is really nice, because they already wrote it, such that it detects any MIDI code. So like, if I send it a clock signal, you can look at it on the serial monitor, it says, I've received a clock, or if you send channel three, it thinks you pressed a high C on a keyboard with a velocity of 35, it will send you all that data, and it's already done. So in terms of writing the code for this, all I have to do is interpret the MIDI code into a DAC code and write it to SPI to my DAX. And there we go. It's done. So I have to do so simple. Oh, honestly, that is for writing firmware. That's all not a whole lot. So I have to write like, I have to write a very simple middie to serial conversion. And then I have to call the the Arduino SPI bus. And that's it. So it makes it super easy. And without ripping out 180 megahertz would you can overclock to like 250 megahertz if you want. It also, that's
the easy part, then what's the hard part?
What is when is the hard part?
The precision part?
I'm just playing with you. Yes. The precision part comes in with the whole, like getting the DAX right selecting the right deck, understanding all the errors that come around that and the op amps, how they all interplay and looking at it as a whole system, as opposed to like individual items that produce air, like how do they all like clump together into an air? And like, what's my budget? Because you always have air? What is my budget for? How much air Am I allowed to have? So I think we're actually going to have a podcast talking about this, like specifically, yeah, so we'll kind of dig into that in the future. And I'm going to use this as sort of an example. Throughout there, like the decisions I made, like which parts I chose, and how it all kind of links together and like what my total error was. That sounds like a lot of fun talk about Yeah, I think that'll be fun. Yeah. So
stay tuned next time on the episode of Macro fab engineering podcast, where Stephen goes super saying,
Ah,
like three people got that.
Yeah. Right. And it'll actually be like three episodes from now. Yeah, this is gonna be a lot of talking. Yeah. All right. So cool. Burger.
So going back that though, it'd be really cool if we, like,
built like, we
talked about all the air and stuff. And then we, you built it. And then we measured it and made sure the error was within spec. I think
I know a guy who will send us a really high precision. voltage meter. Yeah. And we can potentially look at that. I don't know. We might have to get in contact another seven digit. Yeah.
Yeah, we calibrated your your
voltage reference, that calibration should be good for about a year.
We put a sticker on it.
Yeah. calibrated by SK. Yes. Good.
Cool. So my projects, yeah, I'm been working with the audio, which is kind of outside my wheelhouse. But I'm actually it's actually in the digital realm. So it's on i two s which is like a it's a audio protocol that was developed by Philips I want to say, in the 80s thing is Phillips. Someone's gonna be like, Rob blah, blah, blah, Wikipedia link blah, blah, blah. But um, so I'm using the PCM 5122, which is a i to s audio codec. It does like up to like 32 bit 48 kilohertz audio over that interface. 32 bit? Yeah. Wow. I think the pi because we're using in conjunction with the Raspberry Pi. And I think it supports 24 bit, which is still crazy, because the current the current pin hack that runs on the parallax propeller, it has we do like four channels of audio at 22 kilohertz. And it's only like, maybe eight bits nine bit audio. So this is gonna be huge improvement. Like we'll get
24 bits on a five volt line
3.3 volt line. Wow.
So I'm just Curious what, what the bit resolution is? Yeah. Let me see here. Oops, I'm doing my maths wrong.
But yeah, the so I've been developing this board that will basically plug into our, our rev eight pin hack, because the pin hack has a the new rev eight has a header that you know breaks out the i two s and the I squared C and all the stuff. And so this will just basically be a daughterboard that plugs in. Because we just don't have the development time right now to like build it all into the board. We're kind of at a rush because like, we have to like show the new pinball machine at Texas pinball fest that's in mid March. You get you gotta get moving. Yeah. So I already ordered the boards for this, this the prototype, so but the good thing is we just have to make sure the game the machine runs. And with like, almost production level stuff. So we have some prototypes. It's got to make some noises. Yeah.
And got to play and stuff. So yeah, 24 bits on a 3.3 volt line is about 200 Nano volts per bit. No, it's digital. Oh, my bad. My bad. I thought you were I thought you were no, no 24 bit No, no,
it's no, no, no, it's a digital. So you split in 24 bits times 44 kilohertz, is what your sample rate is. So I
got you. I got you. I thought you were breaking a 3.3 volt down to No, no,
that'd be crazy. Yeah, that
would be crazy. That's why I was like, Oh my gosh, I gotta calculate this.
No, no, no. So yeah, it's that's digital signal. And so yeah, I built this little board and I started looking at example boards that uses chip as well. Like there's a board that's called the and I didn't write down it's the PI phi rev to something like that. And basically it's a daughterboard that plugs into the Raspberry Pi like model three and it's like half the board is like through hole and the through hole parts are film caps. And they'd like film kept everything like if you look up like their I can't remember what brand they were. I mentioned to you they're like that low cost brand there the are they the ones the little red Wilmots is Lima Lima. wy ma Yeah, so they have weima capsule over it. They have Nick con, find gold on gold caps. And they have precision audio resistors and shit all over the board and they subscribe to the wink. And it's all through hole. And I'm like, I'm not doing the roll. I'm like anti through hole. So I started designing the board for surface mount only because it's just assembly so much faster. The fact that if you do all through whole do all surface mount there's like zero post, you know, reflow oven processing, which is awesome. For terms of getting your, you know, production out the door. You basically cut like a week off your low volume run. Oh, there it is pi phi DAC plus V 2.0 is what's called. So I started looking at film caps, right? And s&t film caps are really hard to find and they're not cheap. They're okay price. I didn't think they were that expensive. But the main thing is, sir, you can go on Mouser and click film caps SMT and be like 1000s. But the trick is you have to go into their data sheets and look at the reflow temps. Because film is a polymer. Polymers don't like to get really hot. So that's why most of the film caps you see are through hole. Yep, because through hole ones are very inexpensive because they're very easy to make. Whereas the s&t ones have to handle the reflow temps. Even if you're doing lead free, it's still 1015 Celsius at peak temp. And if you're trying to lead free, it's like 255. So I found some Philips makes some caps EC h u one series. So I'm going to try those out. And I decided to make three different versions of this board, same layout. But I'm changing up some of the parts on each version. So there's a B, and C. So A is like the most expensive version. It has all audio grade everything on it. The blank version. Yeah. So I'll post the schematic with some circles on it. You'll pull your
Parker Yeah, give me handouts.
So if there's um, on that schematic, there's bypass caps and there's the audio caps. So the audio signal goes through the audio cast and the bike cap pass caps are the caps that are really close to the chip. And so in the A version, all the capacitors and all the resistors are audio grade stuff, and I'm using like thin film cific for audio resistors and using film caps for everything besides the bypass caps in the bypass caps, I'm using fine golds. Well, the s&t of COVID fine gold in the Yukon can't remember what to call Oh, they
have they have a surface mount fine gold version? No, unfortunately, not gold, okay, but
there's either audio or audio grade stuff. So then the B version was I swapped out all the bypass caps, basically anything that wasn't in the audio path, I switched out for like the cheapest stuff I can find. So like, I use the house parts for bypass caps and all that stuff. And then C version, I went cheapest on everything like ceramic caps, ceramic caps, I did choose n zero G's, for the for the audio caps that are in the audio path, because they don't have they have the least amount of micro phonic resonance. That's right. I think it's the right term. Yep.
We don't actually they don't make noise when you jiggle them
exactly in this the pinball machine so they get jiggled. And so those are the 22 nano for caps that are on the output there.
Those are actually fairly large.
The funny thing is those c zero, C zero and G's are actually the coming expensive
cog. Yeah, cog is the best temperature coefficient that you forget. Forget the pretty expensive. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like, why five, R and x five are those are like x seven R except I usually do use, those are two, like across the whole list. I can't remember the exact list. But those are, like cog is the best that you can get. And when it comes to like, stability over temperature and stability over like microphonics, and things like that cog. But you're always gonna pay more for those. Yeah.
So those are, those are actually almost as expensive as film caps. Okay. So I made these three versions. And so my idea is I want to get them in, and I'm going to test them and see if you can actually tell difference between those three, I'm gonna bet you they all sound the same. And so we'll just pick the cheapest one. Well, okay, so
I'm going to agree with that, with a slight caveat, just because I do believe that you could potentially hear the difference. But if you look at how few components are actually being changed on this, like, if you had like a multistage amplifier, with lots of gain stages that each had their own capacitors in it, you probably hear a difference, because you have more components affecting, but you literally only have a couple of caps, and most of them are power.
Yeah, there's four, four bypass caps. And then there's, there's two output resistors and two output gaps. Yeah, you're not going to hear a different, I bet you're actually changing the connector would be more beneficial to the overall performance. So we're going to give that a shot. And the reason why is I'm actually writing an article or a series of articles for our blog here at macro fab. And it's going to be the first one is like using the platform to influence your design decision. So I did is I first actually uploaded my design. And I'm like, Okay, we're gonna build like 100 of these. So I typed in 100, and just went through the bomb, and was like, Oh, this parts really expensive. Still, it's like five bucks. Now the whole bill material. I'm like, what if I just got rid of that and went with like a 10 cent part instead of $1. And so that's how what influenced this series of ABCs. So we'll give that a shot.
Shoot, you could do the old trick and, and knock off bypass caps and see if it still works.
Oh, that's that. What was that called? We were talking Oh, man. And child's talking about that. Can't remember what that there's a term for that, that I didn't know that had like its own kind of does have its own term. Really? Yeah. And it was a search on the M. It's a guy's name? Murphy. No, that's not Murphy's Law is an engineer. He was in the 70s 80s. And no, it wasn't before that he. He did two TVs. So this is gonna be in the 60s when you chop off cash. And he noticed that his engineers would over design circuits. And so he would pull parts out of the tube TVs until they stopped working and then put that part back in.
And just right at the edge of work. Yeah.
Because most TVs were sold in cities. And so they didn't have to function out in the, you know, no, no, we're gonna be at 7576. So we're gonna be really close to the towers. And so you didn't have to have a perfect game set up for your antenna.
Hmm. Yeah, the engineers are just being engineers. Yeah,
they're like, Okay, this TV will basically work anywhere in the planet instead just in the city.
Right, right. Yeah. Well, and you got to remember, your end user is beating the hell out of steel. ball as it bangs into a bunch of stuff. We're talking about pinball not TVs. No, you're Yeah, Pinball. So like, they're not gonna sit back and be like, Man, I can really tell that he used the film cap in there. Yeah. Sounds awesome. Yeah.
So that's why I didn't pick the I didn't want. I did pick n zero G's. Just to get rid of, you know, microphonic stuff, but so we'll give it a shot. See what happens. Um, but yeah, the big thing was over 100 units. The difference between A and C so A is like the most expensive and see was the cheapest? Yeah. Five bucks in quantity.
Five bucks per unit.
Yeah, that's a lot. So 25 bucks. 20 bucks. Yeah. And over 500 games. It makes a big difference. It Yes. It's worth I know which one you're going to go with? Yeah, it makes it makes um, you know, spending 40 bucks and a couple hours worth it. Oh, yeah. So cuz that's like, you know, another prototype run was 40 bucks. And then the pin that grab eight prototype is I was out on the floor earlier today. And I saw the prototypes this and T's all done. The color didn't turn out exactly how I thought it would because I went clear solder mask, and I put blue suit didn't look that good. What's it look like?
I need to go see it.
It's just hard to read the silkscreen. Oh, okay. I thought it'd be a little bit more clear. But the blue kind of muddies with the yellow the FR four bit. Yeah. Yeah. They look cool, though.
So it goes back to being green.
No, well, actually, we use four boards. We're using matte red. That's right. Yeah. With a white solder mask silkscreen. We're actually thinking of doing a matte purple out scooper.
Do that. Okay. No, I think you're saying macro fab was none of the art about to say like
our revenue mark. No, no, our rev eight pin so hard to like a matte purple color to go with the the Alice Cooper thing. Cool. I always like doing like when we did Jetsons. The Jetsons game? We did like a blue board. Yeah. So and then for everything else like Rob Zombie was when we did the like matte red because it looked like blood. It looked really awesome. That's actually my favorite. I wish I wish we McWrap we didn't do gloss red. We didn't matte red, because it just looks sick. But it costs a lot more than just the gloss red. Because all custom
rule of thumb that I learned the hard way. Don't do matte black and red. Sox. silkscreen. Yeah, cuz it just doesn't. You can't read it and know it. What it ends up is you get you get a muddy black like, like a matte black and brown. Yeah. And you cannot read it. Yeah.
And I would recommend not doing matte black. Or like a or white for prototypes, because prototypes. The good thing is you want to see the traces the figure out like oh, we need to like cut this trace or like splice something. You cannot see them on white or black solder mask. It's a pain in the ass just can't see them. That's actually where I went with clear, I think for all our spooky pinball prototypes on this couldn't be clearer from now on. Because just like, oh, that's trace right there.
Well, and it's like, incredibly easy to know. That's prototype. And
and then production switch to color out. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah. Cool. I can't wait to get that done. So that's
like, there's a lot of stuff spinning up now. Yeah. A lot of projects.
So yeah, then we'll go on to the RFO we're spin right into that.
Alright. Cheers. Cheers.
So we only have one RFO but we have kind of like a kickoff question after that. Okay, so this RFO is the PT eight a 2514 a.
Sounds exciting.
It is exciting because it's a toaster controller. This is you gave me the datasheet This is one of the coolest like single use parts I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, I think one of our friends in the Slack channel posted this
made by a company called parrot calm.
I think diodes Inc. Makes them okay. I think they bought pair comm or something like that,
because that toaster industry was just booming so nuts booming.
So I'm actually going to look up for next week I'm going to look up pair comm and see what else they make. They say they are like they just make kitchen appliance. icees icees Yeah, Blender.
Hey, you know.
So the thing about this is, I really want to figure out if this is like a rebadged IC or this is actually like an ASIC and looking at the pin out. I think it's an ASIC because it has on pin six. It has the awesome the awesome theater needs an external RC circuit that I guess oscillate correctly. But I don't know of any microcontrollers that have that.
Ah, so you think they just kind of like built in a little oscillator circuit in this?
Yeah. And if you go through, because one
of the pins is literally called bagel pin five or pin three, that's bagel, so it's
got a, it's got a D, a reheat, a defrost and bagel function.
Which, which is there just like a do they have an example?
Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, typical application circuit. Let
me look at this. Okay, so, uh, yep. Okay. Okay, from, from what looks like a filtered power line. There's just a momentary switch called the bagel switch. Bagels, bagels, which just applies power to the bagel pin. Yep. Which has an LED attached. Yeah.
So what happens is when you pull the pin up, I think that's how it works. You when you pull bagel up, okay, it turns the controller into the bagel function, right? But then it outputs power. So it changes it to an output. Right? So we can light up the LED with the same pin.
Oh, that's that's that. Isn't that just neat? Yeah,
exactly. Like one of the coolest like, chips I've seen in a long time. You know, we
should probably get this Yes. And turn it into something else. Yes. Right. But it still has to have a button that says wow, this is, you know, the thing is,
you can get these Mouser last
time I looked. Okay, I'm looking right now. I got my I got my computer. Yeah. See?
How much are they at? Mouser?
Let me find out.
When I read it off with you, buddy. Yeah, okay. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Pickle. Uh huh. Tengo tomato. Okay, tomato. Okay. Yeah, eight. Uh huh. Apple. Uh huh. 2514. Astronaut.
Whoo. Apples and astronauts. That's the name of this podcast. Look at that. Look at that. It's oil. It's non stocked with a factory lead time of nine weeks. Hmm. But it's only 97 cents in singles. You know, I should be a complete jerk to Mouser and order one of these nine weeks at 90 and pay their 799 shipping. Okay, well, look at that. Okay, wait, what? You know what's interesting, this is actually uh, yeah, okay, so it does say that it is. diodes incorporated slash para calm. So, but the thing is, the category that it's labeled under is timer and support products.
Yes. Have you clicked that there's a lot of like, one
off parts and a specialty stuff, especially
parts? Yeah. Yeah, this is like, I've I've looked at this. I've never been excited more about a part.
Hilarious, just because it's just chip with a bagel.
This is the thing that comes in debate. So you can prototype with it.
You could throw this on a breadboard. Maybe let's just make a toaster. Like make our own toaster.
Yeah. I wonder if we can make a toaster element out of Fr four.
Just make like a trace that goes like yes, you are crazy across the whole Yeah.
What if Oh, I got it. It's that you can just drop the files into macro fab. And you can order like a toaster
can order toast? Or
it's like you
will get the dev team working on that. No, no, no, right? No,
I got it up on the board. And it's this board right? And then you build a project that describes how to make toast and you ship the toast up to the customers.
Or wait, this is even better. We cut we somehow make it such that you can get any layer you want from your Gerber's toasted onto a piece of toast. If you want your top copper layer in toast. Oh God can do that. Gerber the toast Gerber Jeeva T
damn Gerber toast
this is great. We need to find more of these like wacky chairs. So there's that
next question. Okay. I think we've actually asked this question before but I always loved this question is if you could design a chip or you can look on why not design it if you can just like go on Mouser and order a chip that did something What would you pick?
Oh, like like an all in one kind of bag.
Yeah. So back in the day when like before I like knew about are getting stuff I'd like. I want like the one chip that would do what I wanted. Oh, right, right. Like you wanted that specific function thing. And then once you learn how to like, do a microcontroller, you're like, I can make any IC now.
Right? You mean the point?
Controller? Yes. So, yeah,
you know, wait, actually, so I wonder how hard it would be to emulate the toaster controller in an FPGA? Really easy, probably, like, ridiculously easy,
except it'd be like $12
instead of 90 cents in singles. Yeah. Okay, so wait, wait, let me look at that. So got the page up. If you were going to do like, I don't know, 25,000 toasters, which is probably a really low amount. Yeah, of toasters. They're a 30 cents.
So you're probably talking you contact pero comm directly, you probably get like 20 cents.
Yeah, but like, Paris. Yeah. But you pair comes also like, how many millions of toasters Do you want to
three units.
Okay, so if I had to pick a chip that did like, one did one thing one thing, but that one thing is like, like a toaster function? Yeah. Which is like multiple things, but still, like, be one thing. Let me think about it. Because there's a lot of,
huh, because remember, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the the IC that all it did was blinking LED? Yeah. It's a similar thing,
like a stock Arduino.
Yeah, that's Oh, great. Yeah.
Shoot, that's a hard question. Because like, there's just so many like, good options.
You'd be like, I want to sit I want to chip that's a synthesizer does actually exist. That's called a microcontroller.
Or a DSP. But like, that's, like more than that, like, yes. This is like, this is
something like, deeper. This is something that is it's a chip that you don't program. Right, right. It's
a hard code.
It's hard coded to do a function. We're just synthesizer, like you can do like, it has like 64 Matrix key input and blah, blah, blah. But then that's like, I think it's kind of cheating for that kind of answer.
Right, right. This has to be something that you don't think you would need it. But then once you have this chip, you'd be like, Oh, my gosh, that's so much easier. Yeah. Like a toaster. Toaster. Toaster chip. Yeah,
I like my blender thing.
Like, oh, like an all in one blender. Yeah. That has like what speed control? Yeah.
So you had speed control on all the buttons on the front and all that stuff? Yeah, maybe feedback for the motor.
Maybe like a temperature controller for a fridge? Or something like that. Yeah, that's not like super magical, though. Not like a bagel function.
No, not like a bagel thing is like, do you do a microwave? Oh, so this thing I had a microwave. This is really weird. I had a microwave before that had a dinner function.
Really? Yes. You said dinner.
You put your it was for reheating food. It's That's the hardest thing about free heating food is like getting it to the right temperature. Yeah. So you just toss your food didn't hit dinner, and they would reheat whatever it is perfectly every single time. Wow. But it had I think the magic was it had a routine, you know thing in it? Yeah. But it also went side to side. Oh, so it went like four inches to the left and four inches right and spun. That's fancy. It was really fancy.
Yeah, I remember I had a microwave in the past that had eight butter softening from Southern Yeah, no, but but the thing that was crazy is like you would put a fresh stick of butter in there and press butter soften and it would not melt the butter. It come out and you could just spread it on top. So like that's a good one. Yeah, microwave, a microwave controller that has the butter pin
the butter print or I think if he had all those functions Oh, I hate open
it you know just let that pin and it cooks a mashed potato or a baked potato perfectly perfectly. Yeah. Cheers.
Yeah. Potato pin in order to make my life a lot easier, and I see that just like control the pinball machine
you know here's the thing you've created that it's about 12 inches long by about six inches high.
Yeah, with like 300 parts. So one thing is you got to program you can't you Like, Oh, this is the pin. Oh, this is the the controller for a space shuttle pinball machine. So it's kind of doesn't work out. I'm thinking, like, yeah, a, it's a consumer device. So you have to build like millions of them. And then it does one thing like, yeah, it's kind of weird. thing think about, hmm. Like, what's an appliance you use all the time?
Mm hmm. Washing machine. Yeah. What but but if but if you look at the, well, maybe my washing machine cuz I don't have like a fancy spaceship washing machine. In fact, funny enough, I opened my washing machine in my drive the other day like, and what I mean by open is like, unscrewed it and took all the crap out of it. Because I was trying to fix them. There's not a lot of magic in there. It's like, no, it's just like, diverts to 20 here and there, you know. So there's not a lot of like smarts in a washing machine. Especially not a dryer. A dryer is like a motor and a heating element. And that's it. That's it. And maybe if you're lucky, a timer.
My parents is though, like the text the moisture. So you get like, just perfect.
So too fancy. And it's pretty fancy, though. It probably actually ends up saving you money throughout the year. Yeah, you know, and well,
the big thing missing is like, I never knew there could be four different levels of like dry.
Weight, like in what ways
it's like kind of dry, mostly dry. Dry, dry, dry, dry. It's not like four different levels of drying just like what's your level of dryness Do you want? It's like dry is I want dry?
Yeah. Okay, actually, I get a little bit of beef on there. And this this goes towards engineers. This is not just a washer and dryer special here. This is this goes towards engineers, when it comes to like labeling and like doing your front panel. And the things that people are going to interface with. Like have it makes sense. And here's a great example. My washer at home has four settings in terms of the size of the load, it goes small, large, extra large and super, super. Okay, small and large. sort of make sense. But those are the two smallest ones. And like what is a super load of laundry? I have no idea what is
McDonald's?
Yeah. Drop a super loaded McDonald's don't like just give me small medium large like that makes sense. To me large should be like I fill the entire tub with clothes. But know that that's like super load or what would be like
a weight setting or just like a graph that's like this is quarter half full? Well like
I mean, most people have a little bit of common sense like Don't be dumb and have it so low the lid doesn't close don't put that much clothes in there. That's like an ultimate load. Like small medium. Small would be like you're doing like three articles of clothing and Laura signs like the whole thing is full no small is like Oh, I found a shirt underneath my bed. I
didn't watch
that shirt. Smells kind of funky. Yes, that would be a small load, right? Yeah. So so
a washing machine controller. That's got an ultra setting.
Right right where you can just run it with the lid open. Keep throwing clothes
and socks get teleported off to another dimension.
Yes, that's right. Yeah, this is going downhill really?
Now we should end this Yeah, this
is problem. Science out all right. That was the Maghreb engineering podcast. We were your hosts, David Craig
and Parker daleman Take it easy later everyone don't get sucked into the sock wormhole. Thank you, yes, you our listener for downloading our show. If you have a cool idea, project or topic you want Steven and I discussed or really cool idea for a one off IC that does one thing. Tweet us at McWrap or email us at podcast at McAfee comm also check out our Slack channel. If you're not subscribed to the podcast yet, click that subscribe button that way you get to the latest episode right when it releases. And please review us on iTunes. It helps the show save visible and helps new listeners find us and Matt Crabb is hiring. Click that link
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