Parker modifies car parts and assembles the Thermal Detonator and Stephen starts working with STM32 microcontrollers.
Stephen and Parker rant (again) on bad datasheets, ARM being bought out by SoftBank, and general project updates.
Figure 1: Michael Lyons showing off his EDI+ ghost detector.
Figure 2: STM32 with two markings on the molding but only one marked in the datasheet.
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!
Hello, welcome to macro fab engineering podcast. I'm your guest Michael Lyons was syntex paranormal out of Austin, Texas.
And we're your hosts, Steven Craig and Parker Dohmen. Welcome to the Mac web engineering podcast. Yeah.
So this is one of our long term customers syntex paranormal out of Austin, Texas. And this is a Mr. Lyons. So, Michael, what do you do over at syntex? Not a lot. You're the only person I talked to over there.
Yeah, I'm the one man engineering team. So I design ghost hunting equipment. We've got two products out right now the second one's coming out next month. The EDI and the EDI plus that's the new one. So they're multimeters pretty much and they they, they measured several different things at once, like the PDI plus the new one. It's got to be the Bosch BME 280 sensor on it, which measures all sorts of atmospheric stuff, temperature, pressure, humidity, and then I've got electromagnetic field sensor on there, and an accelerometer. And all these are read out over LEDs and a display on the front of the case. And it's got an SD card for recording all the data.
Cool. Awesome. Yeah, it's a it's a pretty spiffy little case. Yeah, kind of all in one and in a in a nice little compact package.
You know, I really liked about it too, is it's a portable device that runs off double A batteries. It doesn't have any fancy like lithium ion battery or
Yeah, you don't have to charge it up. Yeah, no, no, yeah. The batteries in it and go go hunting. I
love double A's.
It's about the size of a old Gameboy to have a little thicker but a little thicker.
Yeah, it's pretty thick. But it's it's you know, like a large smartphone.
But it's nice because like when a smartphone, a large smartphone,
like four of them stacked on top of each other.
But it's got its it has a little bit of heft to it. Like when you feel it and hold it like this is this is a product, you know?
Oh, yeah, you we've thrown them all over the place and still haven't broken one. I'm dead serious. We can't break them off.
So you're the only engineer at Sun Tech Center? Yeah, there's only two of us. Me, me and my brother. Yeah. So you do I guess the layout? Do you do the firmware as well? Yeah.
Yeah. So I start with a, you know, design idea. And then I find the best way to implement it in hardware, then I do layout and you know, we all argue about what it's supposed to look like. But once we hammer that down, did layouts in the board see you guys to make them and then I just sit there for a couple months trying to program it as possible. Now this time, I put off the firmware until an hour before Brandon needed.
We actually got earlier this week, we're you know, trying to push them the boards out and we got a not complete firmware just to make sure that our proof of concept or first off the line actually worked before you ran the rest of the run.
Is there a different way to do this? I feel like I'm doing it right.
No, that that happens. We get that we get that a lot actually. Yep. So So okay, we got a roll back again. And you make ghost hunting detectors and yeah, and products. How did you get started with that?
Um, so my brother, he's always been huge into ghosts and ghost hunting. And he had some really crazy experiences when he was in high school. He had this girlfriend and she was being followed is the story, right? Wherever she went, there was like, ghost activity. And it was just one dude. And it was super creepy. He's got a lot of weird stories. I was never really into it much right? But in college, we were living together. And he was like, man, if you can make a product for ghost hunting that does this, this this and this, right? We put it all together, make it cheaper. anybody else's. We can sell them. And so
So you were actually in electronics before this then?
Yeah, I got a W degree. Okay. I know it seems like I'm winging it, but I did get some training.
I think it's like every electrical engineer that builds a small product like this, right?
Yeah. Oh, of course. Yeah.
I mean, why not? Especially the macro fab. It's so cheap to build a prototype. So you know, it wasn't risking a whole lot by you know, making some crappy designs. That didn't work, you know, but so I finally nailed down the first one that that took about a year because I was working full time at a I was working at Flextronics. I've been nor does and then Freescale, down in South Austin, also, you know all about building stuff, then. Oh, yeah. Even in college, I was working, electronics manufacturing. So that's just something I've been doing for a long time. So
what do you actually think about our setup?
It's good I get you know, I want to see the new place to Yeah, I heard it's gonna be
nice at the new place is gonna be pretty much nice in our current current place.
I mean your current place it looks like every other one I've been in. Yeah.
That's actually saying good thing about it. Yeah,
yeah and it's you're doing something right super laid back. The guys that were helping put it together today we're super chill. The random really accommodates for when I tell them Yeah, I need 100 today. Yeah.
He told me that this morning I'm like looking at him like that was me motioning my head back and forth now this morning I was like, Yeah, you
want to take like, what three units home with you? I was like no. Like 100 And yeah,
so Alright, so I actually um, so you got doubly right. Yeah. So how did you get into electronics?
Um, I didn't know what to do my freshman year of college, and I just signed up for engineering. Wow.
That's the first Yeah, that doesn't happen very often. Especially electrical engineering.
Yeah, that worked out. Because I fell in love with it. And I can do it all day, you know. But I guess I just got lucky.
Yeah, yeah. Because I switched majors into logical engineering. Really? Yeah, me too, actually. Yeah.
Yeah. Most of the people I was with this was, you know, not their first pick, you know, they had graduated or gone off to the military come back. Most people don't go straight into it. I was definitely one of the younger ones in there. Yeah. No.
So. So that's actually your when you got into electronics, and you got into it by going to school? Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah.
That yeah, that's, that's usually not the story that you hear. Yeah.
I mean, I've always been a tinkerer since I was a kid, especially with computer parts, you know, children PCs and stuff. But actually getting into the nitty gritty of laying out a, you know, a circuit board and stuff like that. Now, they don't even teach you that in college. No, no, no, they don't teach you. They just teach you the theory of crap and you just gotta figure it out on your own.
Yeah, cuz I got into electronics when I was around 15 years old, actually messing with all the Tories really, I'm actually not that old because I'm only 28. So a Tories were really old when I was messing with them. So basically, it was like someone like basically just said, Hey, can you fix this? And I'm like, maybe yeah, no soldering iron works. And the rest is history after that. Yeah.
No, ever picked up a solder soldering iron till college. I know.
Oh, at least you were actually ahead of most people in college because most people still don't pick up a soldering iron at all. It's so true.
I know. So many people graduate had no idea what they were doing.
Oh, man, some of the lead on your own. What's a breadboard?
There's not time for that in college.
There was there was some some kids that that in lab I was just shocked at how little they knew. I mean, it's like how do you get this far? Like, what Professor got you this far?
I remember our first lab it was soldering lab and we put together a crystal radio. Yeah, just soldered it all by hand. Yeah. And that's how they taught us, you know, to put together crap in the lab.
Well, we never had to solder at at a&m.
Yeah, we didn't have to solder at all, either. That was all auxilary learning. And
what's cool is you go to Michael take
state Bob Katz. Oh, yeah. They teach you solder in a Texas day by day and they solder. Good.
That was the first the first so that was the first circuit. You made a crystal radio. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. That was my one of my first ones when I was a kid. Except mine didn't work. Oh, I definitely
built one when I was a little kid too. With my mom. She was a science teacher. So ah.
And that was the funny thing is I My dad's a chemical engineering. So I brought it to my dad. My dad like looked at me like sun. I have no idea how electronics work. I actually, it's the zeros and ones go down the copper. Right.
Oh, geez.
solder mask is designed to keep them from floating away.
Oh, yeah, that's exactly. Don't make 90 degree turn for the fallout. Yeah. bounce it off. Yeah. So I actually started, my folks told me, they used to go to like flea markets and things like that throughout the year and buy Christmas presents for us. And my mother would say things like, in March, she'd get home to the house and be like, I got your next Christmas present. Like it's March. It's giving you but there was one year she actually it was like seriously, like six months ahead of Christmas. And she was like, I got you the best Christmas present ever. And I was like, Okay, great. I forgot about it. And then on Christmas day, she hands me this box that inside is called the Gakken x 150. Which is like, remember the old radio shack like 150 and one kids were like piece of cardboard with springs out of it and you put resistors in the springs and stuff this was similar to that but they were like Lego blocks and each block had like a resistor or a cap or whatever in it and a little book that just you plug all those little pieces in we need to we need to post a link to one of these things because they're going for like 300 bucks on ebay right now these Gakken they're Japanese
so did you like go digging through your attic once you realize how expensive they are now
you know I still have it oh I still have it it's it is up in my attic which putting things in an attic in Houston Texas means they they get destroyed died so yeah, that was that was my start I built like little radio buzzers and things like that blinking LEDs. This This was did not have any LEDs it had incandescent bulbs in these little Lego blocks,
voltage sources thing running that
it had a couple details in the back. So I think I think it ran up 612 I think it ran up to 12 Provolone incandescent Yes.
Oh cool. Um Michael um, so whatever like hobbies and stuff do you have you like to do I think you have a band
yeah musician. So I play in a band called La by the gun based in Austin Texas where for peace we do Southern rock Americana stuff. I also do acoustic gigs with the singer that takes up a lot of time you know, we're out there two three nights a week more quit my day job a year ago so I could do this. So I've been like driving rideshare I've been you know doing the band thing I've been doing this doing whatever I can do for money. Those are my hobbies right now is making money side jobs.
It's a good hobby to have Yeah.
Is there anything else you want to add about syntax or
if you want to check out the the product is that syntax paranormal calm that's si and Te X paranormal comm we got pre orders for the EDI plus right now. There go stop calm. It's definitely worth checking out even if it was just stop, go stop calm is our is our retailer right now for the release of it. They're like one of the biggest online retailers for ghost hunting equipment.
You know, always surprises me of all these niche. product markets.
Oh, yeah. I'm always surprised by the paranormal community. It's way bigger than you probably think. Yep. They're full of surprises. There's people just come out like, oh, yeah, I do that too. It's like really no idea.
It's like a before McAfee, I worked with church at Chris church over at direct perception. And they made cameras sliders for like, Stop Motion stuff. And for time lapse. And like, not being in that new font, you realize, like, we saw like 10 to 15 of these a day? Who's buying this stuff? Yeah, it's it's probably the same thing.
The world's a lot bigger than you think. Well, yeah, we
sell internationally. So we got, you know, UK distributors, Australian distributors, stuff like that. Wow. There's people all over the place. So can you explain
the I think the most interesting thing about Mt is the the electromagnetic this detection? Yeah, it's on it. Can you explain how that works? So I
got a big ole air core inductor on there that I use as an antenna. And two stages. Again, little filtering. Bam, you got it, you got an analog six, and it'll pick up just about anything if you get too close to it.
And it has a row of blue LEDs that show the
bar graph. Yeah. And actually, you can switch the display to read out the milligauss. Right, right readings on it. That's probably one of the most important tools in their bag. So that one's got to be working well.
Well, yeah. And you have that tied to a little buzzer speaker. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's audible without the visual. Yeah, thing is pretty cool. It has a bunch of environmental. I mean, it basically is a big environmental sensor.
I mean, you could use it for whatever you want, really don't even have to be for ghosts on and he's got the data logger on there, too. So yeah. And we've got graphing software on our website, that you can hook it up to let you load up the dot CSV file into it and you can take snapshots, time lapse graphs and stuff. It looks cool. It's real great. Yeah.
How much are you selling me for? That is 190
for the Eddie plus and I think 110 For the Eddie. Awesome. Yeah, it's it's definitely half the price of any other competitor that's doing the same thing. And there's nobody really else doing the same thing right now. We kind of got that market corner.
That's pretty cool. Little little circuit.
Yeah, that's actually it's the one product that we make it my credit. I tell everyone we make because it's so interesting and Like it's like the ideal, like niche thing that you know what MACRA is for? Yeah, exactly.
And, I mean, it's like when you have to explain macro fab to people. It's like, what does what do you do at macro fab? We make ghosts detectors and things of the sort
to answer that question almost every day Oh, you know many questions I get when I tell them I make ghosts on equipment. If I'm not in the mood, I just tell them online retail. Kind of dodged the question.
Well, cool. I guess we'll just go right in if you have anything else now not cool. Our first section rapid fire opinion. So this week, Medic robot came out with they're releasing their six gen 3d printer. So they have their replicators are basically being upgraded to sixth Gen, whatever that means. They're still really really expensive. As all maker bots are, but they're good. I mean, I guess
tell me how you really feel Parker? They're good lunches. Leave
it at that good printers. I think they're overpriced. Sure,
sure. Okay, I'm probably the
only one here that's never used 3d printing.
I don't have one myself. I've used it. We have a what is it? called? The one we have a microfiber?
Oh, you mean mine? That's like my fabric. Yeah, yeah. fabricator
minis like the little tiny guys. Printer ever. Yeah, what? 200 bucks.
$140. Something like that. Does it work?
I thought it was doing Yeah, it works.
Okay. Yeah. It seems like a good deal.
It's not bad. We've printed a couple little things here and there for customer stuff, little tiny enclosures, jigging and things like that.
It's not big enough to print one for the MFI.
Well, you could make it and puzzle pieces, man put it together. Yeah, I
think the print size is what two inches by
two inches by two inches. Yeah, yeah. So it'd be a lot of puzzle pieces. Yeah.
18 hours of print for one box.
So I guess I don't care about mega block releasing a sixth Gen. I think there's way better printers out there for your money.
I agree. I like it. I say thumbs up. And the reason why I say that is because maker bots been around for a while they sort of kick started all this stuff. The 3d printing rage in terms of being like the only one name. Yeah, exactly. They are like a 3d printing name. People know that. And it's cool to see that they're getting far enough to have a sixth generation. Now. I guess. So yeah. So I say thumbs up. That's cool.
All right. Second on the list is when chip manufacturers have two markings on their on their IC packaging, but only have one of them in the datasheet. And so this is actually applicable to the EDI that we're building because it uses an STM 32 chip. And they have two markings on the dye in the corners. So one means it's pin one indicator. The other one is something else. And so we spent I probably spent about half a day trying to figure out which one is the actual pin one indicator.
I think I know what you're talking about on this. The the pin one indicator is the dot that smaller. Yes. Which doesn't make sense though. Well, okay, the larger.is the injection di dot, correct. Yeah. Which by the way, that's a freaking garbage way of marking chips.
I'll put it this way. It would have been fine. If they actually drew that in the diagram. And so you're like, oh, okay, the biggest one is the the injection port. No, they just they just don't draw that. So for future reference, basically the difference is the pin one indicators are usually dish so they have a con concave. Oh, you gotta be kidding. Yeah. And then the injection is flat.
The average Joe who's playing around with this doesn't have a microscope to go see. Oh, I can I can tell addition a point one millimeter circle. Black double AC and a lot. I
got you guys to do that for me.
So yeah, manufacturers put, put that in their datasheet. Please.
Good but even more generically, manufacturers just make your datasheet clear. You know, if you're gonna have two dots on it, one's bigger, one smaller. Put a note to the smaller one and say this is the pin one indicator. You know, you could have 1500 dots on there. Just point to the right one. And you know,
when they laser the tops of these things with all the information, why can't they just laser in the dish? A one the hole put a one there.
I think the reason behind it is they don't want to have to align it when it goes into the laser. It can technically depending on the lot they know they can be another
All right. Well, no all the ones that we have all the same
because they probably came from the same lot.
I don't know if that's different though.
You guys are asking too much from them
to tell us how to properly mount the chip.
So I guess a Lyons probably doesn't really care.
Yeah, not not not since y'all are doing it. I lined it up on your little you know, your website. I was like, There's pin one there. Yeah, that's all you have to do. That's all I
gotta do to make sure that which God is correct. Right.
Yeah, that's, that's just a garbage way of doing it.
Yep. And for number three, the last one for today. This is kind of more of speculating. And Silicon Labs, earlier today, released on their Twitter account that something is coming September 28. And it had a GIF with like, a bunch of images and stuff in the images was like, a B, and then like a bunch of sensor stuff. And then like,
I don't know, just
random Wingdings
a strawberry
in the twit says, it will all make sense. And since was capitalized, and so Silicon Labs, they make microcontrollers. Yeah. And they make a lot of sensors or sensor company fraud sensors.
Yeah, we've been talking about them for a while. Yeah, I actually really
liked their microcontrollers, because they're dirt cheap. Yeah, I've
never met anybody that's used those
pork or pork you just finished the macro Watch right uses. So yeah, we updated the macro watch from a pic. Yeah. And it was comparable in cost. Right.
And no, it was half the price. half the price. Yeah. The the FMA CPB I was using it was half the price. Yeah, that pick 16, whatever. And it was way easier to get working. It only took me three hours to get a blinky LED. It took me almost all day on the pick to get that work. Only three. Only three hours.
You didn't see how frustrated he was with when the pic was going down. He was raging.
Programmed on a pitch and don't I feel like that's what everybody starts on. You know, they teach you that and stuff in the beginning and I never did.
You know, I think that's probably changing I because I because pics are not the easiest to learn on. No, I
remember like when I was in university, my microprocessor class we started on like a Motorola HC S 12 or whatever, you know, one of the original Motorola chips. Yeah. And that's interesting. And then like a year or two later, they just started with arm. I was like, Oh, I missed that. Did just go right. And
yeah, I was actually in I was in the same areas that I was in a switch over years. And so we started off on the Freescale 912, which is really archaic? Yeah, that's what it was the nine I was 12. Yeah, Frisco. Yeah. And then we switched over to a Cortex arm. Yeah, later a TI arm that was like, the dev board was like eight times the cost as old Freescale one, the TI? But it connect? Yeah, the TiVo? Yeah, but it connected over USB. Well, so you didn't have to have a serial converter, because no one had serial ports on their laptops.
Yeah. Right. I, you know, I never programmed a microcontroller once in college. Doing the whole analog path and everything. didn't even touch one. I didn't FPGA twice.
Yeah, yeah. It was a required class, I think for all double A's are now just certain double A's, I think. Yeah, it is certain that
I was surprised because Nm at the time didn't have specific classes like that. I mean, the head classes were like, how to design an operating system, but not how to program a microcontroller.
We started in assembly, and it was grueling. Oh, yes. Definitely started assembly. He wouldn't even give us a C compiler.
Did you? Um, was it the little computer 316 or something like that?
Now it was a dragon flies what was called cuz we had
our assembly was we learned on an emulator first. And it's like that little computer 16 or something in or something like that. It's basically a 16 bit emulated computer that we wrote assembly for. And that way you could see all the registers just in the emulator, so you can see what's going on. That's pretty cool stuff. Now, I think
honestly, bottom up if I was going to teach somebody that's how you'd have to do it. Yeah, I understand it.
Because then we did assembly on the nice 12 And then we had to actually write a robot and assembly. Yeah, we might line follower.
Yeah. And assembly.
That sounds cool. I wish I got to do that.
Yeah, no, it took like we were in there the whole freakin weekend. sitting there trying to debug assembly. Yeah,
assemblies rough.
It was actually really interesting is because we had to design a robot. We had a physical robot, but the final for that class is they emulated over Robots in a virtual space and they all fought each other. Because there were certain there are certain registers you could hit. And they would fire a cannon. What? Yeah. And so they basically simulated What, like people have like, really advanced like detection algorithms and stuff like to make their robot like, not hit walls and actually, like, find other robots to shoot at them and stuff. And one person even went into like, like, even programs like it would estimate the speed of robots. And then try to like, lead the robot. Yeah. Are robots and assembly are all a robot did was spin around, and we came in sixth place at 20. That reminds me. All we do is we fire because we have to fire the guns. We fired the gun. It just spun around.
We came? Did you do robotics competitions in college, like with IEEE? No, I didn't do that. Oh, man. So I did that I was in the robotics club. And they had to be autonomous and find their way through a course. Oh, my God was that embarrassing. I remember we got like 12 out of 12 ones because we just like kept running into a wall and then turning around and running back.
So at a&m, we had to do something similar to that. That was it was like a freshman electronics class where you had to make a robot that went through a maze. And the final was the maze, it had to go forward for a certain period of time, take a left and then take a right through this maze. And people were doing all these all kinds of stuff. Some some guys had full on program, microcontrollers that were sensing the walls, one guy made RC circuits that were so perfectly timed that it would make turns at the right time. And another way overkill, but one of my buddies actually he ended up just putting a giant wheel on the outside of it. So when it hit a wall, it would just fling itself through the rest. And he just brute force his way through this maze. And the professor was like, I guess it's a solution.
That's awesome. A lot of a lot of professors were just like, No,
yeah, no. It put it put it the way it was set up. If you didn't make it to the meeting failed the class. No way. Yeah, it was hard core.
That's brutal. But yeah, I'm not. We're not gonna go back to Silicon Labs. Screw them. Well, I guess we'll just end the podcast. Thank you. Cheers.
Yeah. Thanks for having me today. I really appreciate it. There's
a lot of fun. Yeah, absolutely. Our doors that McWrap we're always open.
I'll be back and I'll be bothering you. Didn't come new shop. Yeah. I got a new shop. It's closer to me.
The machine will be working. Yeah, yeah.
Well, that was the Mac fab engineering podcast with our guest, Michael Lyons. And we were your host, Stephen Craig and Parker Dolman. Take it easy, guys.
Parker modifies car parts and assembles the Thermal Detonator and Stephen starts working with STM32 microcontrollers.
Stephen and Parker rant (again) on bad datasheets, ARM being bought out by SoftBank, and general project updates.