This week we are talking about Breadboards. Is breadboarding a circuit or design still applicable in today's SMT component dominated world?
How low can the power consumption of the Cat Feeder Unreminder go? Parker and Stephen discuss leakage current on this episode of the podcast!
What lore have you discovered in component datasheets? On this episode, Parker talks about how he picks electrical components and risk management.
Parker
Stephen
R.F.O.
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 and welcome to the Mac fab engineering podcast. We're your hosts Parker Nolan
and Steven Greg.
This is episode 233. Well, unfortunately yesterday, today is what Tuesday July
14 14th. June 14.
July.
It's July.
Yeah. You just said June or did I say June?
Nevermind. No, we're good. We're good. Continue.
Good. We're good. Okay. Unfortunately, Grant Imahara passed away Monday this week, which was a huge loss to electrical engineers or actually anyone that followed Mythbusters stuff like that. It's kind of a shame he was taking way too early. 49 years old.
Yeah. Unfortunately, it was a brain aneurysm. Yeah, Grant Grant was was super creative on Mythbusters. Well, and all the shows that he was on, like he was, he was always the guy that like, really, when something needed to get built. He was just like, I got this. And there'd be like, this weird contraption he makes? Well,
not just that, but also had a really good eye for like the scientific theory. And making sure stuff was repeatable when they were doing tests. And actually, just how do you test something was a big part of what he did. I actually got to meet him at a Maker Faire out in San Mateo. One year, he probably didn't remember he I saw him and I was like, like, ah, that's you? And he's like, Okay, you're that guy. Now. I mean, he probably ran into 1000s of people that day. Yeah, there was a lot of Parkers there. Yeah, a lot. Lot of randos. Yeah.
I tried a handful of times to get grant onto the show. Just because like we had a connection with Mauser and Mazur had a slight connection with him. So it was like a super way back door kind of thing. And it didn't work out. Yeah. Pour one out for our homies.
Yep. You say it's like a celebrity passed away. Most celebrities I don't really care about but grant is one of those actually. He's not just a celebrity. He's not famous because he's famous. He's famous because he's a really good teacher and really cared about you know, educating other people
in our space. I think he fit within the influencer model, but like influencer as in like, not Instagram model influencer influencer as in like, wow, I can potentially do that or be that smart one day, you know, yeah.
Yeah, I guess that's that's a good way to put it. Really kind of a bummer all day. Yeah, it sucks. So speaking of bummers all day, Stephen. You've been working on spy code.
I've been I've been working on something really stupid all day. And I'm kind of laughing now. Only because I'm at home. And I have a beer in front of me. Because So I designed I designed the product. I've been designing this product for the past handful of months. And we got one of the initial prototype made, and everything fired up on that initial prototype. And like, I had to make some board changes, you know, cut traces and what runs wires and stuff. And that's fairly normal, honestly, for the kind of stuff we do. And so like, it was time to make another board change. And I just got the boards delivered to me, like two days ago, and I finally decided to turn them on today. And lo and behold, like, they just don't work. And oh, no, yeah. And
you said this was like the second Rev. This is this
totally second rev first, rev worked. I mean, first, rev had every function working, like straight up, just didn't have them in the ranges we want, or they didn't have kind of the flavor we want. That's the that's the weird thing about working in, in this particular
sector of engineering. Because you can you can get something working on paper perfectly, but no one likes it. And so like, okay, great. Yeah, you have to go change.
Like how you how you describe that it's the flavor.
Oh, my God, you'd be surprised at all the words we use for this crap. In fact, in fact, the the the main work that we call is, or the main thing we say that our work is voicing, like you get the boards, and then you have to get them functioning. But then they usually sound like trash. And so you voice them you give them their own voice until they sound your way. And then everyone gives you kind of pointers on voicing. things. And what's funny is you usually start with like pure good solid engineering practice. And then you butcher that until it sounds good, you know. So, but but but we're not talking about the aesthetics side of things right now we're talking purely functionality. And I, I was pulling my hair out for like half the damn day, because I get my boards. And they, you know, we made a handful of changes like a ton of changes to the analog side of things. And mainly just a few small changes to the digital side of things. Previously, we ran the first prototype on an RC oscillator, we decided to go with a crystal to make it a little bit more accurate this time around, we changed our like, we changed from running LEDs directly from our processor to running an LED driver, because we added a handful LEDs, we changed some buttons and some encoder things. But all of these are just like, signals, you know, nothing like big that just, you know, so pins change. And they're just the salt and pepper or the flavor. Yeah, right. Right, exactly. Very simple things. And this board has to quad DAX, 12 bit DAX on it, which we've used these DAX for years, they've they're proven. We have SPI code that works with these that's proven. I mean, there's nothing special here. I even wrote code on the first revision that made the entire thing work. So I go and I fire them up. Absolutely doesn't work. I try to port my code from the previous revision on to this revision, doesn't work. Nothing happening, the DAX are just not spitting anything out. Funny, funny enough, I actually, that the very last minute. Well, actually, my firmware guy requested this. But I was also like, you know, this is great idea. I added four surface mount pads that just are in the processor area that are just SPI ports, that like I just dropped SPI lines to it. And I was like, Well, I'm not going to need it. But you know, he asked for it because he wants to lick it on the scope. Well, I ended up needing it all day long, which SPI is super easy. Well, okay, I shouldn't say super easy, but it's not difficult, right? Like, you have a few settings, you have some speeds to deal with, you have some timing to deal with. But other than that, like, it's really straightforward. And you can use the built in functions on your processor, or you can bid bang, and like, you're probably going to be fine. Especially because I'm on a prototype level. And I'm just trying to bring up my unit here. So I ended up spending half the damn day just trying to figure out why my DAX. They were either spitting out zero volts, or half scale or some other thing and they were not controllable. And I got down to the point where I've got multiple probes going on, and I'm trying to figure out crapping out, like I was fighting, not bringing out the DLA. I just I feel like once you bring out the DLA, you're like, Okay, shifts real like I've got well though, because like you like okay, now I'm gonna fire up a bunch of different programs and like solder on wires or whatnot, like, and it's just like, I if I can figure this out, without getting the DLA out, that'd be great. And what's weird is like, I spent most of the day looking at my chip select signals. And they all look fine. Guaranteed My my, what is it? Mozi mo si? Will okay, I guess we're not supposed to call it mosey anymore, right? The data out, I can't remember what what the the new approved words are for, for the master out, slave in ideas, whatever. Regardless, that signal, like I'm getting all of my data out, and my clock is running fine. And I'm measuring these right at my deck, and everything looks great. And I do that for like, God hours today. And it's just blowing my mind. And then I have no idea what change but later in the day, I ended up just like setting my scope ups to trigger off of my chip select and I'm watching my my data and my clock, you know, separately because they only have two probes. And randomly the chips like starts going high, partway through transmission, which the code just doesn't make that possible. Like I have no idea how my chip select is going randomly high, somewhere in the middle of my data transmission, which I don't remember seeing that earlier in the day. I remember seeing my chips like being low the entire transmission. So I just kind of get pissed off and I just start throwing no ops, some NOC code, there's like in the code somewhere, I just start barfing knops and then copying like 20 at a time and pasting 2020 20 For like, just like I'm hammering tons of just like random delays. And after posting like, an unbelievable amount of NOPs, like, the code just started working. And like, I freaking hate that, like, I hate that so much when, especially when, like, I'm literally posting are pasting in a ton of extra code into code that I know works on a previous revision that has the same processor, and the same DAC. But for some reason, it's just different. There's a different pins, same, same data pin and same clock pin, different chip select pin.
I wonder that chip select pin is doing something else. I wonder
if it is too. And the thing is, like I went through, because I use cube MX in STM world to define all the pins and do all that jazz. I went through Cuba max to make sure that all the settings in that looked the same at least. And then in the GPIO and nit functions that it automatically craps out. I did a side by side comparison of my old firmware, my new firmware, and they look identical other than the pin number. But something about changing that chip select pin just made everything puke and need some delays.
Because you remember when we were doing the the macro watch the first revision with the pic was a picture 12
or 16. It might have been at 12 Yeah,
I think it was the old school pick it really old because it was the cheapest PIC microcontroller you could buy Yeah, basically on on Mauser. There was an A QFN style package because it was small enough. And remember that pin on port a pin one, it's set up by default as a comparator. And it doesn't let you know that except it's in a footnote in the PDF somewhere. And we were trying to use it as an output of the an output for an LED. And it just would not work until we basically had to write in Oh, yeah, turn that off. And so then you can turn this on, and then everything worked fine. Yeah, everything were you think writing the function to turn that pin into an output was like pin out a pin port A out or whatever it's called and pick land. And you think doing that would turn that stuff off? No, you actually for that one pin, you have to say, Hey, turn the comparator off. Yeah, I was funky. Something gonna be like that, it's gonna be like that.
The you know, and here's the thing. I'm not the guy writing the firmware for this product. I'm the hardware and analog engineer. Well, I'm the hardware engineer, because I did all the digital stuff, too. I was literally writing bring up code, just to make sure I could write to the DAX to prove that the analog section is working properly. So my code is just going to be forgotten, like, no one's going to use my code. So it's super annoying when you spend six hours trying to just get SPI to work. Knowing that you're only doing that to begin the work, you know, like, it's so annoying. And testing is all about though. Yeah. I mean, this happens, and I'm sure people listening are like, Yep, I've been there. You know, like, it's just, it feels awful when you burn a day. Although here's the thing, I have to admit, I was so frustrated and so pissed off at this. And so determined to do well, that the last like two, three hours of the day, I just flew through validating this stuff, because I was just like, I know what I need to do. And I'm gonna do it because I hate this thing right now. You know. So and the great thing is like the majority of the new stuff that I have worked, I mean, there's a few small changes I have to make. But like, I could have figured that out by lunchtime if I just got in this morning and was like, hey, DAC, right? Like I've always done and but no, no, it had to just and here's the worst part that I absolutely hate is like, I made a new revision, brand new board layout 100 Different things changed. You know, I fire it up and I'm like, Hey, old revision works. This one should work I load the code onto it and it doesn't work immediately in my head I start going is the board messed up? Or is the did we place a wrong component somewhere like you stop and yet you say like, oh god like the the the the possibilities of problems here are huge, endless. Yeah, endless right. Yeah. So it's just like I said, I got a beer now I'm sitting I'm doing the podcast like, everything's all right. It was just it was a crappy day. But we got it. Whoa. Yeah, I hate SPI code, even though it's like super easy.
So I've been working on that, who I just bought my mic. Sorry about that everyone. The cat feeder and reminder. And Tom Anderson in our Slack channel suggested a couple different parts but one that caught my attention. And it was the US that bagel toaster controller IC from couple of years back.
So so so remind us what is that Parker?
So that's a dedicated ice from diodes Incorporated, that is designed to run a toaster. It's a simplified toaster I should say. But it's a it's an SRC eight or dip eight package part that is designed to run a toaster and it got kind of social media renowned as having the bagel pin.
Yet, like legitimately the datasheet has a pin. But yeah, it's
the chip has got a pin called bagel. It also has one called reheat and defrost, but bagels pretty funny. And so I pull up the data sheet today. I'm starting to look at it. And I'm like, I wonder if we could actually make the cat feeder and reminder with this. And the big the big thing with is gonna be low power. And it's got to have like an 18 ish Thai hour timer on it. Right. That's what we're shooting for.
You gotta really cook those bagels.
Yeah. Well toasted toasted bagels. And so I started looking at the ice and I'm like, Okay, I wonder if you could actually set this thing to trigger at 18 hours. I completely gloss over the fact that that's actually in the fourth line under features, what the timer could be set to the I immediately jumped to the frequency calculations.
One of the things I think is funny is is almost every podcast before we actually press the record button, Parker and I bullshit for I mean, we've had some times where we bullshitted for like an entire podcast length before pressing record. And we were like, Oh, damn, we should have been recording that entire time. Because like, we have to repeat all of this. But you know, we never really seem to have a problem with talking too much. So, but then what the funny thing is, like we talked, we talked so much and like dug through this entire datasheet. And and we're trying to find all of his timing stuff. And it's written on the fourth line of the datasheet.
Under features where it says adjustable timer, 30 seconds to about 10 minutes.
Yeah, that's a really that's a key word with this datasheet Yep, out.
And so I started looking into Okay, can we actually set it to 18 hours, and it says the timer circuit with the default, it's got makes an RC circuit that sets a timer. And it says you can set the timer with the was 8.192 kilohertz, which is I guess the oscillator, or what the oscillator is set to by default, is 30 seconds. And so I'm like, Okay, if and then you keep reading and it says the external RC oscillator can be set between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz, which is funny. That's actually audible range. Hmm, kind of interesting. That's,
that's, I wonder if this is a repurposed?
Yeah, could be. And so I'm like, Okay, if 8.192 kilohertz is 30 seconds, if I said to 200 hertz, what you would get? And it was like, What 20 minutes? About? Yeah, it was about 20 minutes. And so I'm like, Okay, I guess that's about 10 minutes, right? Yeah, but the best thing was how they came up with that calculation for that 30 seconds. So they have the calculation is 245,720 divided by the oscillation frequency, which in this case, 1192, which equals 30. So I'm like, Okay, where did they get that? 245720 number from
which, which they just pulled out of their ass and just put it up on the datasheet? Yeah, it's just, it's just there.
It's on. It's on page three under a timer circuit that people want to follow from home. And so I'm like, okay, where does that number come from? So I start digging through insert, like, Okay, we have the RC circuit is 47k resistor with a 332 capacitor code. capacitor, which was what 3.3 Nano threads, right?
Three, two, I think is yeah, 3.3 nano farad. And so
if you just do one over RC of that, you get, you get nowhere near what these numbers are. So it's not it's not one of our RC. It's not it's not a classic
RC filter. No.
It's So I keep digging in. And I'm like, Where does this 245k number come from? And then I read internal oscillator has a frequency of about 256k. Ah, if, if about 10 minutes is about 20 minutes, that 256k must be about 246k.
There's a lot of about isms going on. I mean, just just stop for a second and focus on the fact that like, this is a bagel toaster. Chip, like about is good enough for a bagel, right? Yeah. Yeah. But like, you would think that if you try and like, this is an actual data sheet that that, like they give information on you would think that, you know, there'd be some form of like, Hey, we got this number here, or here's what this number means. But no, it's just a string of 245720 divided by this gives you about 30 seconds. Yeah, good luck. Yep. I mean, with these kinds of data sheets, down at the bottom, there's a recommended toaster schematic. And by recommended doser schematic, this is the toaster.
It's like this circuit, this this IC only works if you do this. Right. Yeah. Only works up out if you do this way. Yeah. So I think I, I want to try to get one of these ICs and just like put it together and be like, what if I just went below that? 200 Hertz? Yeah.
Well, and this is all function, if you look at the block diagram for it, I think the oscillator feeds the logic control circuit. So the question is, I mean, they say the minimum is 200 Hertz. Uh, but like, what is it? That's preventing it from going lower than 200? Like, why is 200 minimum? You know, maybe you find that about one hurt is good enough?
Yeah. Well, it could be whatever, register the using for the timer stops operating below a certain frequency,
right? It could be a lot of things. Yeah, it could be but that this, that would be great to have a bagel controller to be your cat controller.
Yeah, that'd be awesome. But there's I can't remember the right name for that. But there is like in microcontrollers. Why you a lot of microcontrollers, older Microsoft, you could like step manually by given clock signals, and to the like, that's how you could step through your program. Nowadays, you can't really do that. It's there's something with the memory needs to be refreshed. It's kind of like DRAM. There's a certain name for it. I can't remember off the top of my head right now. Someone will remember and then posted on on Twitter.
Or the Slack channel. But yeah, yeah, these are about a buck apiece in singles. Yeah, so
prom is the the classic bagel pin. Is a is obsoleted. But they do have another one that's similar. The part numbers PT. Eight 825 14. But they have a PT eight a 2511. That's still in stock.
I don't know. I just looked up the 2514 and it says there's over 1000 of them at Mauser. Really? Yeah, you can get the official bagel pin.
Who might have to do that right now. Okay, all right. They have over 1000 Yeah,
maybe they they restocked?
restock the bigger pins. Oh, there's a 2515 What does that do? Oh, advanced bagels. Yeah, one more bagel.
This is under Support products.
Yeah. No, it's a CMOS chip designed for timer applications. Oh, maybe we could make this the cat on feeder IC.
Let me let me look that up. We'll do some live design work right here. Hot design tips.
Yeah, it's just got an oscillator pin and then a relay output pin.
Oh, look at that. The adjustable timer is now goes from it was 30 to 10 minutes. Now it is 30 to about 20 minutes.
About 20 minutes. Yeah. No, it's got the it's got the same calculation except it goes down to 180 Hertz.
Oh, they've extended the range. Yeah,
but it's still got the same number. It's got 245720 divided by 8192.
Yeah, this is just a slightly modified data sheet here. Interesting. Oh, and now has two toaster application circuits that at the bottom so you can do it two different ways. It's cute. I you know, I'm surprised like it's weird when so in the RC field or the RC calculus Shouldn't they provide the R value as 47 kilo ohms. And then the C as 332? You don't see that very often where they give the capacitor code as opposed to like its legit value. I mean the same thing, right? But
yeah, it's Yeah, but I've actually never seen that before. Yeah. And I was like, what is that?
332? Yeah. You know, I've, I've gotten to the point where I'm, like, I'm glossing over those numbers a lot, because because of COVID, there's only four people in our shop. And one of them is a pick and place operator, and then I'm the CNC mill, and I do design work there. Well, every time we put a new program on the pick, and place, I have to go over there and check it. So I'm looking at reels all day long. And I look at part numbers for, especially on capacitors for their values, and stuff. So I'm looking at 105106, you know, to, to, to that kind of thing. I've checked because I check not only our part number, but I check the manufacturer's part number just as a second level of of check on that. So you see that all the time when you're looking at part numbers, but not when it's recommended, especially like when they when they have I don't know, it seems like they have two different paradigms going on there. And it's just, it's awkward.
So I just looked up, a slightly different. It's a Broadcom chip, or no broad chip. Broadcast broadberry pies and bagels. Yes, and bagels. The BCT 5511. It looks very copy paste data sheet wise. But it has a other note here in its its general, like functionality. scription is if you basically go if you try to if you slow down the oscillator too much. The the IC will stop heating because it thinks the oscillator stopped working.
So it has internal protection based off.
Yeah, if the ice is switched on over 30 seconds, the ice will stop the heating for safety.
Oh, well, Tracy, if
you're not brakes on your toaster. Yeah, it doesn't just keep heating forever.
For 18 hours. That's for 18
hours until cat is toasty.
Well, I don't know. It kind of seems like this is not gonna work for your application.
No, unfortunately.
Unless you wanted to get really goofy and have this dump in
Tosa controllers all the way down
cascaded toaster no just have this go into a counter, right. Have this lock.
I think there was a I see someone recommended. That is basically one it's it's like a low power oscillator with a decade counter built into it. Oh, what is that? Yeah, but
that's cheating. Like, you need to have a bagel counter and
it's an MC 14536 B.
Let me look that up. MC 14563.
MC one four or 536 B three, six B. S.
Alright, let's let's check this thing. question is is it low power? Oh, wait, it's just a flip flop. Oh, RAM, timer. 24 Stage binary ripple counter.
Okay, provisions for on chip RC oscillator.
You will count from two to the zeroeth power to two to the 24th power. That's plenty. That's way more than enough.
It pulls on average typical. 0.1 micro amps of power. Yeah. At
room temperature. Yeah, so that's 100 100 Nanos.
Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. Yeah.
So there's no problem there. Yeah, this
would work. Yeah, that's pretty cute. And you can actually drive the led directly from the the MSB pin. So technically, you just the trick would be after this is you'd have to blink the LED you or you need one LED to blink them know that you're it's still operating. And then one turns on fully. When it's time to feed. When feeding is enabled.
It's time to feed
the feed you got to chip select feed up in this is a feed select pin.
Look at that on chip RC oscillator provisions. So you can do it basically all from here. I mean with a little bit awkward stuff. Look more so so then it almost makes it seem like you Your next challenge with this is to make it as small as possible.
Yeah. Or, and also the LED power.
Yeah. I mean, let's be honest 99% Of all the power of this device is just going to go to making those LEDs bright. Yeah, that's
actually the thing is trying to figure out how to make that. Maybe some other kind of output. Oh, I got it. I have something that might work.
Oh, what do we what do we got here? Barker is rummaging through his. I don't know what, like the room that Parker's in is weird. It's like a back room. That's part of his garage. And it's, it's become like a lab.
Okay, I got my box of I got my box of misfit parts that I've collected over like the last decade. Okay. Every electrical engineer has got one of these. Oh, sure.
I see. So many mouths are bags.
There's this the greatest resistor in the world that we never built? Oh, the resistor resistor? Yeah, because we could never get it into the platform. So we couldn't feed XRS data into our Well, it's
hard to put 40,000 resistors into the PDF. Yeah, I should try again. It took a long time to upload. And then
try this again. Yeah, we've done some improvements recently on that. Yeah.
I'm sure the dev team would love you for doing that.
Could you imagine? Colbert who's our? Our He's the director of operations. He would love me if he I tried to send that job through.
Well, we I think we, we even calculated at once like having the machine which I think you have a different machine now. Or another one, having it placed 40,000 resistors was like, I can't remember two to three solid hours of placing. Oh 402. Kappa?
Well, this would be this would definitely be feature creep. But I have a laser, we can we can entertain the cat when it's not time to feed.
That is some serious feature creep.
We won't do that. That's feature
creep that you only brought in because you saw the thing.
versus four. Ah, here we go. It is a eight segment.
Oh, take a flip.
It's a flip.is what they call a segment. Electro vein thing is another search term. You can find these, but it's a electro mechanical eight segment display. And I bet you I can find a I can either use this and you can just have them like flip all them off. Right? Yeah. And then you could just toggle one as your Blink right? Because these barely use any power.
Well, okay. I mean, the other thing is to keep in mind is like if you're toggling that those are slightly noisy, right? Sure. Well, you don't want that like clicking away in the background all
it's gonna be in the utility room. It doesn't matter. Oh, okay. I
thought it was going to be in your kitchen. Which Your kitchen is adjacent to where you watch TV and you wouldn't want to display just clicking away. Yeah, exactly. As you listen to that for 18 hours,
I wonder if I can find just a single signal, that signal single flip dot like dot
I think at a fruit has some don't they?
Maybe if that's true, then I would just use one of those. That'd be awesome.
I could be it could be off there. I'm going to look real quick.
Because then we could just drive we can have this MC 14536 B drive a foot dot and and that would be very low power. Doesn't look like
that advert hasn't flipped out this is definitely the
episode where y'all can hear us Google search.
Oh yeah. 100% This is the Live episode. That's not live maybe SparkFun seems like the kind of thing SparkFun would have
Yeah, could be Didn't you have
a flip that like like a neon yellow one at one point in time?
No, I never did we've looked at him before the fab
maybe maybe that was like a customer that had it
because the flip dots.com They do make what we're looking for. We just need to find status indicators you got part number for me website.
Why don't you make it super ridiculous and have it flip an LED like mechanically move an LED and then turn the LED on? Come on, that's great. What was that? What's it flipped.com?
Yeah, flip dot.com Yeah.
Flip dots.com Oh, okay, plural.
Where do you buy these ads?
Oh, well, I think that's the right way to go. Seems power hungry.
Now they're not really that that power hungry, while Google or eBay searching flip dot gives you a whole bunch of rifle scopes. I can get flip dot signs on Ebay. I just need the indicator. I'll find it. I think that's right. We're all right route to go.
Seems seems overkill, but I like it. I'm not gonna
think it's good. So my train of thought as
Fierro. So you're going to try to use that 24 bit counter, or at least credit code,
it fits the bill. If I can get to work correctly, that might be the way to go.
Yeah. You know, the thing is like, you could probably do both functions of blinking the LED on a regular basis, or blinking, whatever you need to blink on a regular basis. And the timer based on that one chip just based off of its output. Yeah. Right. So it seems like a good all in one. Yep. Yep.
Yeah, we'll try that.
And then I guess you could I mean, what are you going to drive that chip with? Like, what's the actual clock? Are you going to use it's RC? Probably uses RC. Yeah, that might that. Because, like, just like the bagel controller? About is good enough for you? Right?
Oh, yeah. I mean, we have to hit somewhere between the range of 12 to 18 hours.
Man, actually, the cat is not going to be happy with it anywhere
from anywhere from like 12 to like 22 hours is actually probably acceptable. Yeah. I got a we got one more thing to talk about today.
Real quick. I love the idea that you're going to. Well, I mean, I don't know. Like, it'll depend on what you have to do. But like, you call like a family meeting to talk about like your cat. Feeding box. Oh, I'm like, You're gonna teach your family how? Yeah, the process on how to use this thing? Because they're gonna just look at it and be like, this thing is blinking. And I don't know what it is.
It means the cat food is about to explode. It's ticking. Why is it ticking?
So remind me once again, it blinks. And then like when you actually do feed the cat because it says it's okay to feed the cat. Then you just press a reset button?
Yeah, we'll just have a reset button. Got it. The our last subject today or topic today is maxim is being purchased by analog rude undone. And it's an unbelievable amount of money.
$21 billion.
Stephens doing a little pinky thing. Dr. Dr. Evil,
okay. So, I mean, I don't know if Parker and I really have anything like super educated to say about that. However, one of the things that I'm we've mentioned multiple times on this podcast is enjoying maximums data sheets, because they don't do things like oh, this is about 30s. Yeah, like, and they have an extensive amount of like, here's applications and things application notes. Yes. Although the one thing that's cool is analog also does too. So when they kind of like gel together, I kind of hope it's like the best of everything, like the two guys who are really good at these things. Actually, linears really good at it. Also, linear has a lot of good application.
Again, the problem with linear is like, you'll find that it's like maximum to actually you find that one special like God chip, it guess is a good way to put it. And you go look it up on Mouser and DigiKey in stock of three, or like, it's not in stock,
oh my gosh, well, my boss has asked me to design a bagel toaster, I really need a chip, right?
It's that kind of situation. You know, one of the first situations I had with maximum or like experiences was actually super negative. And it wasn't negative from my side. Like I didn't have anything against them. But I was working under an engineering manager. And they had used a maximum chip on a product. And they just said, you know, after hours of testing, we found that this chip did not meet any of the specs. It was well outside the tolerance ranges and whatnot. And so this person just wrote off maximum in fact, they made it a rule, no maximum chips allowed in any future designs. And I think that's kind of like okay, yeah, you got burned I understand and I would be pissed off too. I think it's a little unfair to just say like, this entire large corporation like we can't touch any of their chips because we got burned one time by one time. Yeah, it's just a little unfair. But the thing is like every time I've used Macs and chips, I've always been, you know, pleased with them. I found personally that their data converters like they're the 80s 80s. And their DT A's have been on the more affordable range and higher feature set, just in general. Usually, when I'm going in searching for a to DS now, like, I've gotten to the point where I'm like, I'm going to search for a to ds, and I know that maximum is going to kind of come in on the high feature, low cost, just like because they always seem to do that. In fact, I think I'm using a maximum ship in a maximum deck coming up here soon. I've got like, I've got too many irons in the fire right now. I can't even remember like I'm juggling. All right. But I'm pretty sure I have one that I'm supposed to program on Thursday. That has a maximum deck on it. A 14 minute little fun guy. Yeah.
Well, I think my biggest thing is I gotta find the indicator now because I think LEDs are gonna be too powerful for the cat on feeder.
I'm kind of thing that I'm a little bit concerned about is like, you got to flip that display, which is a coil effectively. So like it's a mechanical thing. You got to put a bunch of current to move on mechanical thing, you know, bunches relative, right?
Or you could have one LED that's the indicator and you're only pulsing that like every, you know, 30 seconds so it's power drawls really low, but then the one that turns on all the time to let you know it's time to feed. That could be a flip dot because then that's just flipping it just stays that way until you hit the reset. Oh, like it's a flip. It's a latch flip. Yeah,
it's a lot chain style. Yeah, if it's latching then all Yeah, your energy payment is just moving it Yes, suppose the holding
it. Whoa, that website just freaked out. Watch it scroll down. That was weird. Well, all right. Close off that website.
You got anything else to add burger?
No, no, I
don't. Cool. Well, that was the macro fab engineering podcast. We were your host, Stephen, Greg.
And Parker Dolman. Take it easy. Later, everyone
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.
How low can the power consumption of the Cat Feeder Unreminder go? Parker and Stephen discuss leakage current on this episode of the podcast!