The quest for the right connector for a project! The right of passage for any hardware electrical engineer starts with a connector catalog.
This is the last installment of Stephen's 'Adventures in Injection Molding'. We are going to recap the entire two year sage and close the book on it.
The Jeep Prop Fan project rides again! Well some iteration of it at least. Lets design an open source PCM (Power Control Module) for automotive apps!
Figure 1: Engineering room at MacroFab.
Figure 2: MacroFab’s Thanksgiving Potluck.
Figure 3: Stephen’s Brewing rig after being made to be less deadly.
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!
We are recording.
Hello and welcome to the macro fat engineering podcast. We're your hosts Parker, Dolman
and Steven Gregg.
And so this is episode 43. And it is a special Thanksgiving episode. We're actually here at the fab not at our usual recording studio with Josh. Yep. So the audio is definitely gonna be way different because we're using different mics. We're in a warehouse. That sounds pretty echoey. Hopefully it's not too bad.
Well, it's actually the engineering department.
Yes, we're in. Well, it's half engineering this room in half warehousing? Yeah. So yeah, it's, it sounds pretty bad in here. We're doing our best
what, you know, we need to take a picture of our actual rig, because we just have everything kind of on our little Metro carts riding around. Yeah.
It works. Yeah. And so we're Yeah, we're here in the engineering department or the start of it. Oh, yeah. Steven just did a hand motion to me. I had no idea what I was doing.
No, I'm monitoring the audio as we're going along. Oh, okay.
Okay, so, um, and so everything's kind of basically in the disarray here, that stuff everywhere from the last shop, and our new cabinets are only like half full, because we still just haven't had time to actually organize stuff to put in there. The CNC machine doesn't work right now. Granted, it hasn't worked in like three years. But that's besides the point.
Well, we actually we have some good reasons to get it working. Yes. So we, it'll have a little bit more priority.
Yeah. Basically, the only thing that needs to be done on it, it's got a water cooled spindle, and basically just need to get a water cooling system for up and running. And it should work.
Yeah, all the parts are there. We just kind of need to, and actually everything's wired up. It's just not really that pretty right now we we kind of need to redo some of the wiring on it. It's a little sketchy. Yeah, just a little bit. But we've never done anything sketchy in terms of wiring,
never shifty eyes. What my facial expression would work is this was a video cast. Which we should do some time, we should do a video cast some time, maybe when we get engineering actually set up. Yeah, we should do a video cast.
Well, I hope I'm not spilling the beans here. I'm not going to go too much into it. But we do have potentially some special podcast coming up in December. Yes, there's some really cool stuff. So maybe, maybe that would be a good time. Yeah.
We'll think about it. So yeah, it's, it's pretty much the goes to the fact that engineering here at macro fab is just like, the catch all department that's for And so basically, you know, we spent, like two weeks, like hardcore, getting operations old, you know, buttery smooth and all that good stuff. And, you know, getting acquisitions up. And, you know, all the developers, they just have their desk. And engineering is kind of like this hodgepodge between, like, we have computers like development, but we also have machines, we all have equipment. And we don't really have time to set it all up. So it's kind of like, find what you need at the moment and then somehow store it.
Well, and we actually had during the move, it was kind of set up such that if somebody didn't know what something was there were like, Oh, well, that goes to engineering. Yeah. So like, that looks like a tool engineering. Yeah. So
we had stickers on everything that had a number on it. And like 99%, everything had a number four on it. And four meant engineering room.
Yeah, right. Well, yeah, well, four meant the entire inventory warehouse. Yes. But somehow it all kind of migrated to the engineering side of the warehouse. Yep. So and a lot to sift through.
Yeah, it's all it's actually cleaned up. It's just needs to be organized. Yeah, yeah. I'll take I'll take a panoramic picture and put it up on the on the podcast cool notes. That's an easy picture to do.
So So yeah, what's been up with you?
So yeah, the the Jeep radio. Yeah. Hack actually was working on it a bit today. Basically found out that my current plan of attack isn't going to work. So basically, I took I took it all apart and started trying to find the actual chip icees like the actual part numbers for them, because they're they all have Chrysler part numbers on them. Yeah. Which you punch that into Google and no one knows what they are. And so but the good thing is they do have Manufacturer Part Numbers on them. Alright, not part numbers of manufacturer stamps. So like S T and Mike who controls or I mean a microchip. Yeah, Philips they actually have their so you knows I made it but you don't know what it is? Yeah, you don't know what it is. So I tried to do is I basically said s like the find the, the what the power amps were. Yeah, they had Philips marked on so I said Philips, and it's like a it's a 13 pin, like wide package power amp. And so I basically typed in the package name. And, you know, it's feeling lucky on Google. And bam, I found the the actual part. Yeah, at least what matches the pinout at least that I have on my board. Gotcha. And so there are it's a, the part number that's actually stamped on it is 04231192. A, which if some of our listeners are actually like, you know, Mopar gearheads, they're like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a Mopar part number, because that is it actually is a TDA 8563 Philips power amp.
Okay, so these are just branded? Yeah,
they're just branding chips. It's to channel 40 watt power amp. Cool. And using that I was able to chase that chase it, you know, all around the board, find where he got its job signals from. And it goes from it gets the signals from this chip that's marked 4962138, which is an ST. Manufacture chip. And that actually is the fine. This one was interesting, because I knew it was audio chip. Yeah. And it was my SCSI search for St. Audio. Dip. 42.
And shotgun. Yeah. And at the
bottom of the first page on Google, yeah, was this was a it was like a website to get like old obsolete parts. And it matched that description, and it had TDA 7429 l as an alternate part number because the other part number, you couldn't actually like cross reference. Sure, for some reason. But this was in the description. Pulled up that data sheet, bam, it matches the pinout directly. Cool thing. It's a three band equalizer audio processor. Pretty cool stuff. So basically, it takes it's it has a three channel input mux for audio, and so and it communicates the I squared C to the I think it's a microchip processor in there. Yeah, I don't think no, it's not a microchip one. It's it's a pic core though, but it doesn't have a microchip brand on it.
That's crazy.
Yeah, let me actually I have it right here. Pardon the noise. It sounds like underneath my mic.
Yeah. So we got the we got the mics on our little cards and Parker's got his dice.
It's a it's a Motorola branded.
Oh, that's crazy.
Yeah. Yeah. So interesting that it's a I think I'm pretty sure it's a pic I'll double check it after after the podcast but yeah, Motorola Brandon kick.
They license a pic core.
I don't I guess you could do that. Yeah, I guess so. Interesting. This in this was built in the I think the earliest Chrysler vehicles was an 8788 that uses radio. My Jeep had at 99. Wow.
Well, yeah, it looks I'm looking at the board right now. And it looks like 90s construction. Yeah.
It's all led to construction.
All that good stuff. Yeah, it was all wave soldered. One side load.
Yeah, it's one sides, all SMT parts, and the other sides, all thermal. And they actually adhesive dotted, right all the s&t parts and waved it all at once.
So yeah, that's that's the mark of 90s. Yeah, right there.
Oh, all the part sizes are? Oh, 805 or bigger. That good stuff. Yeah. Here's something else I want to talk about with it. Oh, yeah. So when I found that three channel input, I'm like, awesome. It's got am FM and tape. three inputs. Yeah. And all I had to do is cut the lead lift the pin, and Jim I Bluetooth in there does not work. And for like, I could not figure out why it wasn't working. And like I even lifted all the inputs. And I still was getting audio through the chip. So they're not using the inputs. No, they will not use. Some of them are used for I don't know what though. Like if you looked at FM FM and tapes, the work it goes through. It has an external how the equalizers done yeah, it's got some external stuff and they pipe it into there. Hmm kind of funky so I think I'm basically had to go sit down and actually pin out the the that area the board Yeah, actually schematic draw it out and see what they're doing. And then it's got ice core C, so I'm just gonna, you know, put the digital logic analyzer on it and sniff and sniff it as I'm changing modes and volume, just to see what it does. Like, yeah, what because because I have the datasheet for it. So I know if I see this command, that's what it does.
So so it has a three band equalizer. But yes, but it's not using the inputs for the audio streams,
correct. That actual input stream is not used. Hmm.
So do we did you try adjusting the EQ when you had the pins lifted?
No. No, I did not.
Because maybe those input pins are just inputs to the EQ. To control the EQ. Yeah, that's possible. Yeah. I mean, could you get a bass mid treble made up three inputs? Who knows? Yeah. Yeah, that, that actually probably makes more sense. Yeah.
So yeah, I actually ordered I actually accidentally blew up the Bluetooth thing today. Because I was actually reading the voltage level that was coming off like the FM transmitter. Yeah. And it's, since it's a single volt supply, right? Yep. It's actually got a the waveform that the analog waveform is actually at, like 4.5 volts. DC offset. Yeah. Right. And what's coming out of the Bluetooth is zero volt offset, alternating,
which, which 4.5 for an audio signals. I mean, if you're running on a nine volt system, that's that's half scale. But on a 12 volt, it's kind of weird. And most of the time, these power amps only need about one volt input for max power. So 4.5 is a really odd DC offset. It's
pretty weird. Well, that's the power I was going into it. I never I haven't sniffed what comes out of the chip to the power amp. So I'm like, I don't care about that.
Well, it could, okay, so the chip could have some gain in there. And it doesn't
have it has a gain adjuster. So when you adjust the volume, adjust the output to the
I wonder if it's also adjusting a DC output output. Or offset? Yeah. And they got it at 4.5 because that works the best with the game. Yeah, maybe maybe.
So whatever I come up with I'm gonna have to basically DC bias my my bluetooth
device. Yeah. And actually, so when the magic smoke came out, your the words you actually said to me were wasn't used. You didn't smell the smoke. You didn't see the smoke you felt
I was holding the Bluetooth board. And I was using a multimeter probe to actually like, apply voltage to different pins. Yeah. To see, you know what,
cuz those probes actually do pretty good at for putting power in
print. Yeah, so I'm doing that. And then someone came into the engineering room and startled me like it was right before big Thanksgiving Potluck here at macro fab. Yeah. And I slipped and probably pump 12 volts into like a 3.3 volt rail. Cuz I like it cuz I was holding it and it just got really hot in like an instance. And then yeah, felt the heat man.
We have all been there for sure. Yep.
Oh, good thing is only 20 bucks. didn't love the radio. But I did order another radio just in case.
Because you might blow that up.
They're they're inexpensive. 20 radios or $20. So yeah, so they probably made like 10 million of these radios. Oh,
are you kidding me? Yeah, more. Yeah, more than that.
Maybe 10 million just went into Jeeps? Maybe?
The Well, I mean, if you talk about the life time of the whole thing. But But yeah, if you've been if you've been, or if you even say that you've worked on electronics, and you haven't let the magic smoke out. You really haven't worked on electronics.
So I'm hoping, um, next week, I get some more progress. I did try to hack the tape cassette because I actually found I can't I wish I worked on the partner before but there's on the tape cassette part. It's actually a separate module that's inside there. Okay. And it's Adobe audio chip. And I was actually able to pipe because this was after I blew up the Bluetooth chip. So I basically got the function generator matched the signal. Yeah. And with scope and then I basically just pumped it into I just pumped it into random pins on a tape deck, and I found some pins that worked. The problem is I can't fake the fact that the tape in there I had to actually put a tape in which would be kind of annoying.
So you know you actually constitute a circuit Bender now Yeah, yeah, I guess so.
I just kept poking it and then I got the one killer hurt. Coming out of the like, oh, there we go. And here it is. And then I looked at the chip. I'll post that one. Interesting Dolby audio processing chip. But the trick is you get the Fake, because it's got a microcontroller in that tape deck. So this thing actually, this radio actually has three microcontrollers in it. Wow. One on the baseboard, one in the faceplate, and then one on a tape deck.
That's that's kind of crazy. Because for a mass produced thing, you wouldn't expect that. No. But but some engineer found out that that was the way that it was the cheapest, cheapest ways. I guarantee you this was built to a price point.
Yes, it was. This was like the second level radio you could get. They had a radio that didn't have a tape duck.
Oh, even lower. Yeah. It's probably the same board. But
this board, but this radio works without the tape deck. So I bet you're everything's the same except no tape deck in the cheaper radio.
Right. Right. So what was special about the one above it? Has CD? Oh, okay. Okay, which all said and done. I bet you all the amps and all the preamps. And all those gems are probably still the same. This
mainboard is exactly the same. It's just whatever plugs into that that tape deck plug.
Right? So it's not it's not like higher audio quality. It's just more capability of getting audio in.
Yes. And we're trying to shove Bluetooth in it now. Yeah, it's just it just interesting the construction of this thing. And just how it functions. It's really weird. Oh, yeah. Well, it's like not faking the tape. So it's got a switch. When you plug in a when you push in a tape, it hits a switch, and basically tells the microcontroller. Hey, there's a tape coming in. And it starts moving the mechs and all that stuff. Yeah. And so I'm like, okay, cool. And it works. If you just press your finger on the switch, like, simulate a tape. Sure, with no tape in there, it actually is okay. But if you actually just try to actuate just the switch with like, just by bridging the wire on the switch. It will say, hey, there's a tape coming. But that switch has a lever on it. That doesn't catch. Yeah. And so that the tape mechanism, it's all mechanical. It like it will act like it's taking the tape in and then spit it back out. If you don't actually have anything actuating that arm? Oh, so you can't just say you know, you can't just bridge the the the connector. Hmm. You actually have that something? Yeah,
something something. Yeah. Arm. Yeah, right. There's some kind of use case that makes Yeah, yeah. That's
annoying. So I can't do that route. So I had to hack the am FM side somehow.
Yeah. It reminds me of a story. Justin, the ops director. He was just talking last week. Yep. He was telling us about one of his friends who had a tape deck. Did you talk about
this gauge?
Was that gauge? Yes gauge. Okay, gauge. I thought it was just whatever gauge from our customer success or whatever they called it. One of these guys had a buddy back in high school or whatever. They had a tape deck that it got stuck on max volume. And the button broke off. Yeah, and the button broke off. So there was no way to change it. And their solution was to put in a blank tape of just white noise that was as low as possible. So it always had a tape playing. And you'd hear it flip over every once in a while. Good. I'd be
you know, be really funny. If, if your friend did that, and you prank them is record like a blurp. Somewhere on the tape. Like a noise or like a siren or something. Oh, yeah. So they're just here for an incident had no idea what it was.
So okay, another another funny story. So I was driving home from college. What I Gosh, man, that was years ago. But I was I was driving home. It was late at night. I think I was I was coming home at like two in the morning or something like that. And I had some some CD on. And my mind wasn't at all paying attention to what the CD was playing and the CD ended. But I didn't realize that it the CD kept going in there was one of those secret tracks at the end of it. But it was going on for like 10 minutes of complete silence. And I'm driving on on a freeway in the middle of the dark. And then all of a sudden, at the end of this CD, there's just screaming like absolute screaming, and I nearly shit my pants. Because I'm driving. I'm the only one on the freeway. Everything's dead silent and then there's just this blood curdling scream in my car. Oh crap. It was it was kind of crazy.
Well, I think it's 20 minutes of rambling about the Jeep radio. What are you working on?
I will shoot. So this last weekend. I burned another batch of beer. Awesome. I brewed a a bohemian Pilsner and I did it in my electric rig again. So this was brew number two with the electric rig and you haven't died yet you I have not died. And I've significantly reduced my chance of dying this time, because I put all my electronics in a nice steel box. Yes, it's actually pretty nice looking. Yes. So I got some new features. The first would be an on off switch. That's a good feature to have. The second one is a ground I now the whole system is grounded. That's good. And I put a put a nice big beefy contactor in there. So the switch that you switch it on with the main current that feeds everything is not flowing through the switch. The switch just activates the contactor So and actually,
for our listeners, if y'all know what the difference between a contactor and a relay is, like, No, I think the contactors latching but they also make latching relays. So it can't just be a size difference, because you can just make a bigger relay and it's not making a contactor at that point.
Well, okay, so I don't know this to be effect, but I've heard many people and even data sheets say, do not leave power on a relay indefinitely. But I've never heard anyone say do not leave power on a contactor indefinitely. If you look at a contactor it's a relay, I mean, all said and done. That's the exact same thing. It's just maybe the coil on a contactor is more robust, maybe? I don't know. It's designed for 100% duty cycle or something like that. Well, and at the same time, I've never seen a contactor do a small amount of power. Every time I've seen a contactor it's like 5000 watts. Yeah, in fact, I was working on a, I was working on a oil drag out in the coast. And I was working with a motor controller box. Oh, yeah, this thing? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it had five, six contactors. And it had six contactors in it, and each one controlled 600 amps. So in my mind, like, that's a contact. No, no, it's more like the size of your gut. This thing is huge. Yeah. No, they were big. And they pushed a lot of power. So like, yeah, in my mind, that's contactor so when I was thinking of my brewing rig, I was like, I don't want to relay in there I want to contact especially because it makes a big chunk sound. Yeah, but when you turn it on, it's it's pretty cool. So
you should have on the power switch port is contactor engage is what you should label
the switch. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't turn on engage, engage Energize. Contactor Energize. So yeah, yeah, actually, I took a I took my first gravity sample of my beer. For those who don't know gravity sample, you're actually measuring sugar content, sugar content, but effectively, the weight of the beer in relation to water just sold water at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Right. And so I'm about 50% attenuation so my yeast have been going nuts and they fermented about half the sugars out of it. So yay, that means healthy. So yeah, an extra board FX dead board. We got the video in well we got the first cut Yeah, audio is not done on it. Yeah, there's there's there's a good bit of editing that needs to go around. I shot it to everyone at the at the fab and got a bunch of criticisms and pretty awesome it's fun. It's a it's a bunch of fun I I'm happy with how it turned out.
I'm glad that my 15 seconds if that fame on it too is pretty freakin hilarious.
But Parker has a cameo. Yeah, good gaming
it pairs really nice with your very calm voice and what I do on the screen
Parker Parker rises it Oh, yeah. Very well. So yeah, we we still got some editing to do on it. Josh has been an absolute trooper and he's been knocking that out of the park. So we'll it's as soon as it's available. I'm sure everyone on the podcast will know. Over and over and over.
Yes. So we'll probably have it in description it'll be on Twitter it will be
everywhere. Yeah, it needs to be so then last thing for me I've been talking about the my synthesizer that I've been designing
Have you talked about on the podcast?
Oh yeah a couple times in but it's it's been small parts. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So
eventually you're gonna have to like list out like I think maybe next podcast like the entire like scope for this project. Oh, geez. Enormous.
Well, I have a I actually have a dedicated notebook that I bought a while back and called the book it should be I so there's no book is nothing but since I have the entire notebook, like predefined what pages are what I actually have pages that I know are going to be schematics for something but I haven't written a schematic on their table
of contents is all filled out complete basically. Yeah, hen
like calligraphy?
Yeah, it's like, like, oh, like click Like in the old, like an old monk. Like holy book they have, like all the figurines and stuff.
Oh, yeah. Oh, you have, like, make it like a
synth is like super stylized.
Yeah. So one of these days, we're gonna have to go over all the features that this has. Regardless, one of the many, many modules that go inside this in the the VCO. What's the VCO VCO center voltage controlled oscillator, you apply zero to 10 volts, and you get anywhere from 55 hertz all the way up to 14,080 Hertz. With every volt up, you double your frequency. So you go up an octave. Yep. In other words, it's at a no 880 Something millivolts per musical note in a tale. Regardless, when I sent the VCO was almost complete i to let the magic smoke out of a chip. And finally God finally got the chip in it's a. So I way back at the beginning of the podcast, I talked about my 16 inch 16 hour breakout board with just a board with a 16 bit DAC and a 16 bit add. And I blew my DAC on it. So that was doing most of the magic of creating my sine wave or my output wave, whichever you chose. So I've got that up and go. And now I just need to slap it back on my board. In fact, I've been developing the synth on the FX dev board, because all the voltages are right there. And it just just works out. Yep. Shameless plug.
Well, I'm hoping that the FX dev board does really well, because I'd like to do a synthesizer version of it. Yeah.
There's a lot of things that could be done with that platform.
Yeah, but that platform is also on to a digital platform of it too.
That would be that would be sick. That's something I would really
like. We'll see what happens. We'll see how this goes. I think I think going the FX dev board route is a good use case for this kind of platform. Sure. Butter board is what we're calling it. Right?
Well, so So the board itself is the FX dev board. But the two solderless breadboards that are on the FX dev board. Those are each called the boat aboard the boat cuz they're easy as butter.
Yeah, that same doesn't make any sense.
That's part of the video. So yeah, yeah, that's that's what I've been up to. Cool. RFO Yeah,
are we only have one RFO I'm sorry, guys. It's Thanksgiving. We're recording this on Wednesday. Hopefully this podcast comes on Thursday.
And we're in a food coma because we had an awesome lunch. Yeah, that was like
I probably eat like five pounds of like, mashed potatoes. It was great. That was like and someone brought. It was Chris. Chris. Our cocklebur Yeah. Chris Coburn, our operations manager. Our floor upper floor. Yeah. He brought a barbecue pit and like KFI he knows and
stuff. So yeah, we did. We did a Houston Thanksgiving. So it was like fajitas with, you know, all the casseroles and everything that you had expect. Yeah,
cuz I brought it in a sweet potato casserole. You brought in green beans together. Yeah. And then
we had tacos and tacos. Which Hey, that
prevents in some brought in a pumpkin roll. There was pecan pie. There was Oh, man. It was solid. I'll put this where my eyeballs hurt after eating all the food.
Okay, so what's that sorry.
This is actually been pretty big news this week. The open V which is the first open source RISC V microcontroller. You can actually buy the the researchers and students behind it there at the learning university in Colombia. And they basically have a basically a crowd supply for this chip. You can actually buy the chip or buy a development board with it on it Coulomb. I haven't looked too much into the toolset. But I'm going to assume that the tool sets also open, because that would make sense. But it's a 32 bit microcontroller based on just normal risk. You know, operating set of commands. I betcha it has a C compiler. Most likely Yeah. It's 160 megahertz. I'm going to just read the spec sheet 160 megahertz spy IC stdio J tag, so it probably has really good debugging, I would hope Yeah. 10 bit ADC 12 bit DAC, which is pretty interesting. It's got a built in DAC. Oh, that's cool. It's got 16 GPU bios, which is a little bit on the low side, but you know, I like to say at least 32. I mean, 32 makes sense, because then you have one register is your output register
completely. Right. Right. Well, and with 16, GPIO. I mean, what if you needed? What if you were putting this to 288 bit parallel chips? Yeah, you've killed all your GPIO.
Yep. The only there's a couple of downsides to this chip. First of all, it needs multiple voltage sources. Okay, so I can't I didn't see what voltage sources they were, but it's probably like, you need the core, which is like 1.2 volts or a 1.8? Yeah, something like that. And then you probably have to give it 3.3, which is the IO, right? That's kind of normal for like, FPGAs. You have to do that. Yeah. But for microcontrollers. No one has done that in like years. Make a chip like that? Yeah. You expect that on an FPGA? Yeah. And it requires external, external flash. It doesn't have built in flash. Now they have a good reason why? Because flash memory, compact, fast flash memory that's on die? Well, it's cheap. But it's actually expensive to license. It's cheap to make. But expensive. License instances is open source. They kind of went the other route, basically make off board Cyril, ROM.
Well, and if they have, if they have plenty of examples, that's plug and play where you just drop it in, then that just who cares?
You know? And then the other downside is it's $49.
Okay, yeah.
And then for 99 bucks, which isn't actually bad, you get the development board. So the development board cost price is actually not that bad. Yeah. The IC itself is not good.
A $50. IC? Yeah, well, you got to start somewhere.
You gotta start somewhere. Pretty cool stuff. The dev boards got like an SD card slot and USB, all the regulators need and blah, blah, blah, blah. Sure. But yeah, that's on Crowd Supply. Pretty cool stuff. Very cool. We'll be interesting to see if where this goes. And how the maker community either ignores it embraces it. I know, there's gonna be a subset of people who will totally embrace it. Because open source it's completely open source. Yeah. Yeah. Or be interesting that they actually have the manufacturing masks open.
You know, I can I can see people I can see them having all about this.
Yeah, I can see them having the, like, the like, the Cadence Design files, or whatever you use to draw out the the actual, the gate level gate level masks, but they actually have the, the mask. Files didn't actually make the masks for for the different layers and the semiconductor fab. That will be interesting if they have that, because I kind of just want to look at that.
Well, I mean, if it's open then they should, right.
depends on your level openness. What beam is open
source? You know, I would love to see if on the mask, they have the gear. Oh, on the actual mask? That would actually be kind of cool.
That'd be cool. Sorry about that. Guys. I just bumped a card. Or we just vibrated up to the mic. Um, yeah, it's because because they have this whole new like, know, what is open source and all that stuff? The whole open source Foundation, right? Personally, I don't I don't like using Word open source for my projects anymore. Because then you have to go through all that. As almost like paperwork nowadays.
Do you like open hardware? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
I like open hardware. I like to see more of, well, I don't think you should be opening it up your software or software or hardware up, just so people can copy it. That's just lame. As an engineer would afford it, that'd be a dick move. To just like, copy the design, because it's open. That's what you see with Arduino. Like people just making straight 100% clones. Yeah. And not adding anything any value back into the community? Well,
using it as inspiration is different.
That is that correct? That's what should be its you should be learning from that open source project or hardware of how did they do that? I can go look and see how they did that. So I can figure out how to make my product work better, or my project, make my project work or something like that.
I like the idea of Thinking of it in terms of kind of building blocks in a way, where you're like, Hey, I know these guys have their whatever they're switching down or or, or they these guys handle power really well. So I'm going to look at their circuit see how they did that? And then I'm going to apply it to whatever I do. Exactly. So you're taking chunks of it. And like you said, making the entirety of the whole community better by, you know, you're using these blocks, but you're building something new.
Yes. I'm not a big fan of the clone community. But that's what that mean, that's what when you actually read the open source? Mantra, I guess, is that's what they enable, I think. Sure. I think the, if you have just the schematic open, I don't think you can say it's open hardware, but it's open enough for me, personally, well, sometimes I'd like to see like, the actual, like, board layout designed sometimes. But
yeah, there's a limit to that, you know, because if somebody was, I don't know, I'm gonna go ridiculous here. But if somebody opened like, a really, really fast oscilloscope, or something like that, like a crazy board layout, but they only gave you the schematic, you would not be able to make that into a board. Well, it's
not about making into a board. It's about learning or fixing your oscilloscope. Oh, okay. Sure. Yeah. It's like, like the pin pin hex system. It's all open source. Actually, it's all open source that board is the code that we use to test it the test jig is open. Yep. The and this is actually even manufacturing files up on GitHub, all that stuff. Because the reason why it's open i Are you because sometimes like, chalk who's who's who went through the pinball, you know, the whole pinball community is kind of really secretive of like all the secret sauce stuff.
Like through hole moss fence Yes.
They're very secretive, all the secret sauce that goes into the boards and all their their design elements and stuff. So sure, there's not a lot of openness and like the fact that this system is open is like, completely different in pinball. Sure. And the crazy thing is, if I ever opened up a competitor pinball machine and saw that board, I would just die laughing because I'm like, Why did you do that?
Yeah, I can't can't play me on that.
Yeah. It's a good board. ginormous though,
oh, 14 by six inches, and the test jig is is huge, too. It's even Yeah, it's, it's a beast,
that's a big jig. I got to work on that thing. Actually, I got to build a nice pressure plate to clamp it down with you right now. It's just got toggle clamps. And sometimes and not enough, not enough of them. And so sometimes the board would be you know, a little skewed to the fact that it goes through selective solder and select the solder. You know, you only heating up certain sections of the board, but not really hot but really hot for the through hole parts. And sometimes you might get a little warping. Yeah. Especially overboard that big. There's only so much of the inner, inner, you know, copper planes can do to keep it straight. Sure. So, yeah, open source. I really liked this open source microphone, and I'm actually gonna buy a dev board for it. Cool, just to see how the toolkit is and how well it works. And they can get the price of the chip down to like, you know, eight bucks. They don't have an expensive but yeah, they can get about the size of the price of a problem, right? Parallax propeller prop, which is actually open source, by the way, too. Is it really? Yeah, you can download all the files and run it on FPGA. They have hold. You can't you can't get the masks. Well, you can turn that into a mask.
Yeah, I suppose you could. Yeah. It might not be optimized,
though. Yeah, it might not. I think actually, the parallax propeller at first was all designed. gate level wise. First. They didn't have a verilog or VHDL description of it. That came later.
Well, isn't that normally how it's done? Not
nowadays. Really. Nowadays, you do a VHDL or Verilog.
You write that that would make sense. And then
synthesize it, all that good stuff. And then then you start laying it down and into the copper?
Well, nowadays with processors, you have so many Step and Repeat functions, that you just let a computer chug away at the billions whenever it needs to do you know? Yeah, yeah.
Gone are the days of an engineer in a room size piece of paper. You're seeing those pictures
I have and actually I heard some interesting stories that engineers work with architects, actually. Because architects were fantastic at drafting. And the engineers would basically guide the architects to draft what's going on which which is pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Gone are those days? Yeah, synthesize it. The computer handle some of it.
Actually, I was talking to Parker earlier this week about the old film technology with making PCBs. The place I used to work at, we had some, we had some products from the mid to late 80s. And we still had films of them. And they were in giant manila folders. With I mean, it because they I gosh, I can't remember the size. It was like a two foot by two foot film that we would periodically send off to our board manufacturers. And they would, you know, do using lithography, they would reduce it down to the board size, which was like two inches by two inches or whatever. It was not cool, actually, to see all that old stuff. There was some poor engineer who sat there long ago with with scissors and tape and taped it out. Oh, he taped out on on plastic. Those days are long gone.
Yeah. Even this cheaper do is not. It's it's computer done.
Yeah, but it still has all the traces that are not 40 fives and 90s. Oh, yeah. Got some of the old school. It's got that. Yeah, yeah. But it's still it's definitely not been taped out. No, no. There's probably an old copy of protel or something like that.
Probably. No one Chrysler. Yeah. Or whoever was contracted to design it. Right. Oh, cool. I think that's gonna Oh, yeah. 42 minutes. Yeah. Yeah, so I guess I'll be doing the display the episode 43 Great. That's right. So yeah, this was the Mac fab engineering podcast. We're your hosts Parker Dolman and Steven Craig. Catch you later guys. Take it easy. Hopefully the audio is not too bad.
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