Stephen gives an in depth update to his Vox in a Box project! 100 Watts of Class D amplification!
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Figure 1: Parker giving his talk on Ways to power your product at the monthly hardware meetup.
Figure 2: Roomba Spy
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 are your host, Stephen Craig and Parker Dolan. And this is episode number 78.
So this week, I gave a presentation at the macro fab engineering meetup. I did a talk on basically how to power up your project,
which was interesting. Yeah, you know, you don't hear about that very often.
It's a lot of the Comp of the first couple concepts like, you know, removing your power source or like a physical power switch are kind of like, obvious solutions of like, how to turn your power your thing off and on.
But but but to be honest, not always obvious.
Yeah. Because it's like removing your power source. You might think that's like, kind of a ghetto way of doing it. But it's like, how long was every single USB device works?
Well? Yeah, exactly. So it's so obvious that you skip over thinking that that is a solution.
Yeah. Yeah. And we also I went over like, soft power, which is kind of like the new thing, but the past like decade or so. And they have a newer thing, which is like using MCU sleep mode, or using a low power mode of your computer to wake up faster. The power on faster. Yeah, cuz sleep modes are just ridiculous nowadays. Yeah, you're talking for at least my controllers, you got my controllers that could do like nano amps,
even less in some situations for and it's normal for them to have asleep mode now.
Yes. Whereas, you know, a decade ago, you had to like search for that my controller that had sleep mode.
So I don't actually I can take some guesses here. But I don't actually know what what is sleep mode? Does it shut down most of the functions and just listens?
Correct? Yeah. So a lot of times it will actually shut down the main Aliu the main basically main core of your microcontroller and will only leave basically what you need to for to continue to operate.
Is it? Is it like isolating during that time? That
depends on what level of sleep mode? what kind, what you need it to be doing, like some some microcontrollers support. Having the counters inside the microphone are still be alive. So to speak in sleep mode?
Oh, it depends on how deep you want it to Yeah, like the
sleepy B that I'm using for the macro watch. You're able to have the, the sleep mode, you can have it so you can still read the pins. Or you can new trigger interrupts on the pins. So like if the if it sees a zero to a one on a pin change, it can wake up it also, you can wake up on the Real Time Clock triggering. Yeah, you can just set up lots of different flags that actual say, Hey, wake everything up and do stuff again. Right? Okay, so it basically keeps a couple of the peripherals inside the microcontroller alive and working. They're kind of they don't need the main core alive to do stumpings do something.
Right. But then getting whatever event causes the core to come back alive, correct? Yeah. Yeah. So I guess that would also shut down memory?
Um, it depends. It depends, again, some shut it down. Some keep it alive, or just refresh it like basically, your memory controller still be alive. Because if it dies, then you lose all your volatile RAM, which is not good when you basically come back alive. And oh, what time is it? Oh, I don't know. We just know that the second pass.
Oh, I gotcha. Gotcha. So so the the amount of current that's being pulled the nano amps in some situations, that's basically just leakage right
now. Well, it's mainly keeping, you know, whatever member you need alive still. And whatever peripherals are running.
I'd love to see the inside workings, like what transistors on the grand scale are turning off? Oh, yeah. I would love to see that. I don't know. I don't know if that's like readily available that kind of information.
Oh, and how would you measure that too? Because if you had, you'd have to have enough. Find that resolution to be able to see that. If it transistors on or off? Well, if you have electrons flowing, basically. Oh, well. And
when you're talking about currents that low it starts to get really ridiculous. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, you probably have like thermal heat is. Well, we'll
get look, it's really hard. I know from my experiences when you get that low, just measuring it can turn things on. Yes. You have to have some pretty you're talking
quantum mechanics now.
Well observe it. Yeah, you get you get a little too close. Actually, you know, so funny enough, I had a situation I like that the just the other. You know what? I'll hold off because I'll talk about that in a little bit. It's part of a project that I'm working on right now. So so we'll come back to this kind of false triggering thing. So yeah. Your presentation go back to that.
Yeah. And so yeah, we just talked about, you know, soft power and that kind of stuff and open up the floor. And surprisingly, only I think only like two people had questions. It's my first time actually giving a presentation like that. And it's a lot different from talking into this microphone. New week. It was good. It was it was fun. I personally learned stuff from it. Yeah. I love going to those kinds of I tried to make it entertaining. By going to turn that that set of slideshows into an article next week. Cool. So it will go up on our blog and, yeah, nice. Yeah, there's a lot of fun. Steven, that's a project you're working on. You decided to postpone talking about it for 30 seconds.
I didn't know how much more you had to go on. Okay, so while ago, we kicked up some projects for the Science Museum here in Houston. With Patrick Renner and Kelly O'Brien, they were guests on a previous episode. So I've been I've been working on those projects. There was two of them. One is a drill project, and one is a lager project. And we finished the drill project, I don't know while ago, and the logger project is basically going to be complete tonight. I've got one last little granulation Yeah, no, it's it's kind of it kind of feels good. Inside of my control box, because I've been the electrical caught No. Contract. No, no, no guru here. No. So I've been the guy who's done on the on the on the electronics work. Yeah. And we used some Arduino compatible PLCs inside of this project, to drive all of the will to basically be the brain to control the whole project. And we use these Arduino capable PLCs that were available on Amazon. I don't think they they don't sell them there anymore, but they still sell them on some other sites. But the website that that basically manufactures them were created, the original project is plc.us. And we're talking about those guys before. Yeah, yeah, really cool little guys super easy to program. They're super easy to operate, they run on 24 volts. They're just great. I like them. And they're cheap, inexpensive, but there's a better word here, right? That's a much better cheap has connotations attached to it. You're right, you're right, they don't necessarily feel or operate cheaply. They're inexpensive. So all of the inputs are protected on these things. So they're optical, optically isolated, you can run them anywhere from three to 24 volts on the input. So most of the sensors and most of the things I've been dealing with on this project are 24 volts. And I had a PNP output, I our optical sensor as a sensor for the project that's going directly into an input. So the common input strip on this PLC is connected to ground, such that if I were to apply 24 volts to a pin, the pin would go from zero to one. But internally that actually goes from one to zero because I have a pull up. Yep, so nothing special there. However, I connected my PNP output of my sensor, my IR sensor to it, and it always read zero, no matter what if I pulled the wire out, it would read one. So something about my sensor was actually pulling down the thing, regardless of if the sensor was active or not. So I ended up just playing around with resistances in line in series with the sensor and eventually found a resistance that caused it to actually work so there was leakage through the IR sensor that was just enough to trip the diode in the optical input of this PLC and the PLC thought it was tripped, huh that's interesting. Oh, yeah, it because it what it is, is on the input of these things, there's two back to back diodes on the PLC and connecting a PNP transistor directly to that actually was a third diode effectively in parallel. And they were just matched enough to turn on the
the PNP had two diodes in it right?
Oh, any transistors is technically two diodes one and a half sort of it's like one super diode well and one little tiny
wall to its two diodes that share a junction
with a shared Okay, so this this was interesting, this exact same conversation came up in my electronics class at a&m. We were doing transistors, and the professor was teaching us like, you know, a, an NPN transistor is you can sort of think of it as two diodes in series, where you know, from positive you have your anode facing down and IBMP are backwards. So one of the students was like, Well, why can't you just put two diodes in series and make a transistor? And it's because the, the physical distance of the dyes have to be really close. Yeah, for for transistor action. That's what it used to be called transistor action. And make that to actually happen make that the code word. Oh, transistor action is the like, that was the secret code word for episode 78. So please write in transistor action to podcast at macro fab.com, along with your address and Wilson some swag your way. So yeah. So regardless, that was kind of the first issue I had with this, this kind of project, which was that it was annoying, because it took me so long to figure that one out. And like, What the hell is going on here. And then eventually, it all came down to just slapping a resistor in series
is that you put like 100 ohms or something? You know, I
started with 100 ohms. That was the first one and that wasn't enough. I ended up with 18k. I just started going up and up and up. Well, actually, no, I'm sorry. I went way far up. I went like 56k. Yeah. And then I started going down. Because 56k, I was worried about the sensor. If you tripped it the way it was supposed to, then that might be too much resistance. So I just empirically found a resistor, which to be honest, when it comes to this kind of design work. You don't calculate this kind of crap. You just put resistors in until you're happy with it. And then you test in a couple situations.
You know, after the podcast, we should like, draw it up on the board and actually figure out what's going on.
Yeah, we should. It's tough. I tried doing it on a piece of paper. And it still was like a head scratcher. So
we know what Valley picked that makes it work now. Right? Yeah. Right.
And I know, I know, the actual part number of the chip that's inside the PLC. Yeah. So I know the diodes. I know what their characteristic looks like. Yeah. And
what we can do is, you know, measure the voltage across that resistor, and then know how much current is going through.
Well, okay, so this is where it gets weird. It is so low, the leakage current, that if you measure the voltage, at least with the crappy multimeter I was using, it says zero. Ah, so it's very low. But I need it is enough. So so we need
the that that seven segments.
That super special meter. Well, unfortunately, for this kind of project that you're talking about here, we're delivering the project to the to the Science Museum. So I guess we could go do some science in the Science Museum later on. Awesome. It would
be super cool. We actually have a another one of these PLCs. Yeah, we could always do it and just mock it up. And yes, let's get get the seven segments and do a mock up in our lab. What?
First, let's see if we can do it with a meter that we have right now. And then if we can't, let's get the seven seven. Yeah, that'd be fun.
I'm gonna bet you're our meter that we use every day is not good enough, either. Probably is a two digit is a two digit on a good day.
I think it's more than two. I think it's a five and a half.
Well, you talked about our bench one. Yeah. No, it's only two segments. No, it's more than that. It's only Yeah, only goes to point. Oh.
Uh, yeah, I guess you're right. It's crappy. Yeah. It's, it's good enough for most of it was
a I can't remember the brand. It was 80 bucks. $80. And it's a benchtop model. Yeah,
it's got a big screen
on it. I was like God for I got it because it had a big screen. And it was a benchtop. So you can just leave it on and never worry about battery's running out. Yeah, yeah. It's actually pretty good at what it does for just checking like continuty, which is like, what 90% of time you use it for?
Or you're just trying to make sure that you're five volts plus or minus, like 200 millivolts. It's good for them. Mm hmm. Yeah.
Actually got, um, got one of those for my house. That meter. What's the link of whatever mean? There it is. And
we don't even know what it is. It's a it works. It's
charcoal and orange colored? Yeah, it's got a really nice display, but only it
also has a light up display. Yes, you can you can activate light on it.
But it's not like a timeout because a lot of like handheld meters have one light, but at times out this you just press the button and it's
always on. Yeah. And it's continuity is fast. That matters. And loud. That's right. Yeah. So yeah, back to this project. Some other interesting things. So we had a interesting stepper motor driver that was kind of in Our tool chest, and we use this same stepper motor motor driver on a project five years ago, or maybe even more, I don't remember, for a Summerfest, which is a local music festival, we made a thing called water wall, which I think there's still pictures on Google about that. Basically, it was just this giant sheet of water. I think maybe we talked about it. But like, it was supposed to be like a grocery store door where you walk up to it, and the whole sheet of water would open and then you could walk into the festival, which was really cool. What it really ended up being was just this giant like water slide attraction thing, that all the people at Summerfest would go and cool off. Oh, I
was about say go and pn but Well, they probably did that too.
So the one of the one of the biggest mistakes that that was made, it wasn't made by us. It wasn't made by anyone else. It just kind of happened was some of us had a paint slide. On the hill. Literally, they just poured paint on a slip and slide and people would go and slip and slide in paint. And then they're covered in paint. So they'd come to our thing and wash off. Oh,
well, we certainly in the water. We researched the water.
The water went from like crystal clear. Nice to like black. And on top of that, like it was really cool water. And we actually had some guys tried to drink it were like No, it was like filled with like, just slime and paint and it was gross. It was a bad idea. Bad idea. Whatever. It all worked out. So we oh yeah, it was discovered about 20
years to be like, I shouldn't drink that paint 25 years ago.
Yeah, exactly. Summerfest was just filled with bad ideas that year. So I used this stepper motor driver that someone else had actually purchased for me, they just handed it to me and I was like, Okay, great. And it's just, it's made by Sure Step. And it's called the STP dash DRV dash 80100
That's got a TI partner. Probably the DRV GRV. Well, I
think that's stepper driver. 8010.
Maybe it's what they were trying to take one of these apart now.
I haven't like we can take it apart. The thing is, this is a stepper motor driver with a ton of weights at the other shop. But it has a ton of smarts inside of it. They tried to really make a stepper motor driver that was just like really like, packed to the gills with all this crap. You know how normal stepper motor drivers have like DIP switches on the front, you change the microsteps current, you can't do that with this one. This one has an RJ 11 port on it. And you have to communicate over what is it? You are you're you have drivers like that before too. Well, okay, it that's cool and all and you can like send configurations to it. And you can actually have it do acceleration. And you can have it monitor the current and do all this super cool. A lot of cool stuff, but it doesn't work. And it's annoying, or at least the one we have. And it might be the fact that it's five years old and has just kind of like sat around for a while. But we had it turning a motor, but I wasn't able to configure it because I didn't have a USB to Rs 232 converter. So I went to Fry's Electronics here and I bought just Joe Schmo converter.
For those that don't know, Fry's Electronics is kind of like a like your version of Best Buy. They also carries like gadgets and Andy and candy. Yeah, actually does carry a lot of cane. A lot of appliances. I guess Best Buy lords. It just CDs. It's almost like if you combined the electronics section at Walmart with Best Buy
with a smaller version of the toy department at Walmart. Yes, yeah. And then all the candy at Walmart.
But you can also go there and buy computer parts.
Yeah, if you want to build from scratch. You can do it at Fry's. Yeah,
it's very limited in what you can get there. But yeah, and they also have components like Radio Shack. Yeah, better selection and Radio Shack ever.
You know what I always thought was interesting about fries. Okay, when you go to a place that sells electronic components along with stuff, they're usually like, they put that way in the back. Yeah, it's like all the nerds have to go back there at Fry's. They put that crap right in the front. Yeah, well, they know
that US nerds can't walk far. Oh, that's
it. We overcast? Yeah, yeah, right. They put all the components up front, but they still like you can go by a fluke meter at Fry's.
You can get a lot of industrial level test equipment there. Well, least down here you can
apparently Fry's sells crap occasionally, and they probably don't know it. So I bought an RS 232 USB converter, so it's literally just a USB plug with something ala FTD FTDI chip in there. It's not an axle FTDI. It's a prolific chip. And then it connects to a dB nine connector. So I had to go USB two DB nine, then DB nine to rj 11 to get into my stepper motor driver. Well, apparently, I got one bit by one of those counterfeit Chinese chips. So I get this whole thing, bring it over there, I'm trying to configure this whole stepper motor driver, I can get this prolific chipset to read on Windows, but it will not communicate no matter what. I spend three hours trying to diagnose drivers trying to get through all this stuff. And you know, after a bit of searching on Google, apparently there's a lot of people who have trouble with this exact model, which it's one of those crappy, like, obviously made in China. Oh, yeah. Things that Fry's sells a bunch of that crap. And everyone's like, Yeah, apparently this prolific at the exact same problem that FTDI did.
So that's actually what it is is prolific actually precedes FTDI gates right long time ago, right? Yeah. Yeah, it would have been faster if you just drove up to the fab and just grabbed like, the actual legit FTDI cable you
have. Well, yeah. So the thing is, I did actually do that later. So I have a I have a that's what like, you know, what's funny, I have another I have a USB two FTDI converter. That's a breadboard mount one. And I didn't want to use that because I wanted to literally go right to a dbx nine style connector. Yeah, because I didn't want to have jumper cables or crap like that, whatever. So I ended up doing that. And apparently, my the stepper driver is kind of crap on the connection. Anyway, I just ended up saying screw it. And I went and bought an $80 Regular stepper motor driver. And you know, it runs so much better. And it took me seconds to flip the DIP switches on the I don't like this, this stepper motor driver that has all this like, whatever this extra like hoo ha with programming and stuff. I I'm doing that all in my code anyway, I'm doing my own acceleration. I'm doing my own stuff. I don't need the stepper motor driver to do it. So moral of the story. There isn't a moral I just didn't like it. So yeah, what regardless, everything's working. I'm going to finalize
that boils down the macro engineering podcast. Oh, yeah. There's no more.
There's no more. Yeah, it just, I wasted probably five or six hours of my life working with drivers that I really wish I could have back right now. Yeah, so
you thanks for watching. Did you strong back the fries and be like You wasted five or six hours of my life? Not yet. Give me my $10
Okay, it was 15 it was 1499 and it is a absolute paperweight. I can't do anything with this. It sucks.
Go over there. And just like,
on top of that, how often do you need a USB two DB nine?
Depends on what you're doing.
This is the first time for me.
Hey, it actually might be like it might be, you know, less, like going to return those kind of items. Like takes more time than you would you know, say with $15
Oh, yeah, probably. And you know, not to open a can of worms. This will be a real quick statement. This is exactly what I hate about digital electronics. This is where digital electronics absolutely grinds my gears because there's ground TX and RX three connections and I and six hours of my life that I will not have back because of those three.
Yeah, but it's not because that is because of
what but but but the digital side of it is the side where it's just like it doesn't work. And I cannot figure out why. Or at least I didn't until I just went and just like brute force it and bought one that just works with switches.
But you know what? Speaking of counterfeit stuff, I guess it's not really counterfeit, but grinds my gears? Yeah. So um, I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago and when my friends bought a whole bunch of Diet Coke
what counterfeit
Coke, but and so I've been like, he left it all down here. And so I've been like, you know, okay, free soda, basically. So I'm drinking it. And I opened up last pack. And all bad, huh? It's the first time I ever opened up a coke product and was like, basically, it tastes like the syrup is missing. Oh, so it's just it's just brown carbonated bitter liquid. Oh, that's roll them that is rough. Yeah, every single can.
Yeah, I'm sorry Parker. You only have six months to live now.
That's a higher estimates and I call myself
we're gonna have to we're gonna have to subscribe to the earth. This package so, yeah, so I got hit with malware with hardware. Ah, so So smell hard now hard or some some hard now.
Well, I was I was thinking about it and that's that's what like, you know going back to Fry's and return it's like, I can go to Kroger, which is the local like chain in the South for groceries and like get my $2 back if I really was an asshole, yeah.
Do you know how psycho I would look if I brought back this open electronic thing and be like, this is Chinese counterfeit electronics, they would look at me like I'm absolutely psycho.
You have to come Yo, you should do it and actually wear a tinfoil hat.
Oh my gosh, yeah, tinfoil hat. But I've got like a Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirt that's open and a white white shirt underneath that has like mustard stains on it. And I'm wearing sandals and socks and a gold chain with a gold chain and like really short khaki shorts, and walk in there and just like you sold me Chinese crap and you're
wearing Yeah, wearing sandals. Birkenstocks was with white. Like the whitest
socks. Oh, yeah. perfectly white. Yeah. And
couldn't get your undershirt clean. But your socks are pristine? pristine?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, you know what? All said and done, I probably would actually get money back cuz they're like, this guy's psycho. He's gonna kill us if we don't give him his money. Now and then said because like, I know, I got gypped by that, but no one would probably believe Yeah. So. Okay, so in one other one other news. I've talked about this for a while, because it has been a while. But I finally got the chips for my ladder filter for the synthesizer.
Yeah, you the like to have five parts or whatever
the tuba five parts that are, you know, they're vintage. And it's been a long time coming long, long, long time coming, they finally showed up from Germany. That's not where you ordered them from? No, I did not order them from Germany, I whatever, I got them. That's all that matters. So now I can go and build one of these chips. Again, they're just, they're just five match transistors inside of a DIP package. That's
all they match the transistors inside the package.
They don't, they don't actually like physically do anything, they just build them all at the same time. So the silicon substrate is all the same, they just have
a higher tolerance and building the transistors and
well, okay, so little bit of fun stuff here, when you first create a silicon wafer, when you cut the big crystal, one of the first things you do is you measure the characteristic resistance of the silicon itself. So every chip that is built, built on a single wafer will have effectively the same resistance in xy direction. But if you build a chip on a separate wafer, it'll have a different characteristic. So if you have a transistor from this wafer lot, and that way for lunch, they might vary slightly. But if you build them all on the same wafer, they'll have the same
Gotcha. So even though on the same way on different wafers, you might have the same production lots. That's right, you would have different characters. Gotcha, gotcha.
That's right. In fact, we actually tested that in college, we had 20 wafers, or something like that, that all came from the same crystal. And they all had slightly different resistances in the z direction on the crystal.
And that's part because as they're pulling that crystal through, there's slight temperature differences as the crystal cools and heats up
and very slight. impurities. Yeah, along with it, it's like, I think we had 99 point, then five more nines, pure silicone crystal in, in our little wafers. But that was enough. And here's in here's the thing with the, with the meter that we were measuring them, it's about, we were shooting for 100 ohms, with the crystal that we had, and the differences was like half an ohm between chips, but that was enough to make a MOSFET act differently. So so these are all matched in a package, which there's nothing particularly special there. But this isn't a vintage chip, and whatever. I chose to go with it.
So I can't wait to hear it. It'll be fun. I think our listeners can't wait to hear it either.
I need to build it. Yeah. Now that I actually have it. So maybe that's a weekend project this weekend.
Yeah. Well, after you finish your your project at the museum, right.
Right. But that's done tonight. And the weekends just around the corner here. Yeah.
Okay, so we'll go on to the pic of the week. Yep. And this is actually a project of the week. Cool. I'm always a soft spot for business cards that have electronics on them. And this is called the electro card Okay, it's a business car that has an OLED display on it. Wow. And I picked this because he ran into a manufacturer not a manufacturing problem, but he ran into a assembly problem. Okay, he used a 80 Tiny 84. And so he put an SOC eight package down. But the 80 Tiny 84 got a si si eight wide package. Yeah, you
gotta watch out for that and watch out for that one. There's also isn't there an si si eight N package for narrow
there is an error. You gotta watch out. Yeah. So I thought that was really interesting. Because I think almost every single embedded designer probably gets bitten by that sometime in their life.
And, okay, so yes, you can get away with it. The lead leads in well, and and depending on how you design your package, it is totally not up to IPC code. But you can you can heal solder them. Yeah. Which works, but not long term.
Yeah. So that's pretty cool. I think the guy's name was Michael towel, T, whatever. Yeah, that guy. Okay. Also, the only thing I was kind of, I didn't really like too much is, it's like, I think it was like seven euros or something like that to build one of these, which is like, I think the current exchange rates like $12 $11 $11, or 10, the city of say $10 $10 is pretty expensive for business card.
That's obscenely expensive. Yeah. That's one where you carry around like two or three of them, and give them to high powered executives.
So I think that's the only problem with that is I made a I made a PCB. Business Card way back in the day, but mine was unpopulated. So it was
like, was it on a was it on a point? Point, millimeter. Okay, so it didn't stuff.
Yeah. And it had a QR code on it that you would scan, and it had all the bill materials in it. And then it had a link where you clicked it and it brought you to a Mouser project link, and you can just click Order.
Nice. Yeah. And you could build something out of it.
And it was a, a boost converter. So you'd put a 3.7 volt battery on it, and you can charge your phone off of it.
Okay, so 3.7 to five. Cool. Was there like some kind of like ti chip or something like,
Um, no, it was there was something else I can't remember. It's called the Super boost. It's still up on my GitHub from like, you know, a decade ago.
I bet you I bet it was a maximum chip. Man with a maximum chip, because they have they have those stupid names like that. You know, I used a maximum chip once that was called the Viper. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, they always come up with those goofy names. Yeah.
I like that's cool name. Yeah. It was cool. I,
I had I had that chip going 370 volts DC, down to 24. And it did a great. Oh, it was called the Viper, then. I don't know they have a whole series of Viper chips.
We should make that the other pic of the week, the Viper chip the vise because the name was cool.
Check it out there. They are very weird chips. If you look at their datasheet they do some real funky stuff to do.
And we talked about this before. But maxium is one of those weird companies that make random chips. Extremely ran. The problem is though, is you'll find that one chip that you really like, and you can't buy it. Like it's active. We just need someone to buy 10,000 of them before we make another you know, couple of wafers.
You know, I think we talked about this kind of topic, like in the first like 10 episodes. Oh, yeah, it
was a long time ago. It
was a very long time ago. Yeah. nexam always does like that one weird chip that somehow does your application. Exactly.
Exactly. with like, the minimal amount of external passive components.
Right. It's like how did you know? Yeah, and then you can't like they can't. Alright, on the
Yeah, onto RFO. So we got three this week. Yep, we have Roombas Next Big Thing selling your house layout to the highest bidder found on Gizmodo. The end of Arduino 101 Until leaves maker market fell on Hackaday. And until is now number two electronics weekly. So we'll start with the first two. Yeah, cuz Stephen found the third one. Yep. So the first one is, you know, Roombas next big thing, selling your house layout to the highest bidder. Basically, what they're doing now is the last couple generations or Roombas can basically cord how it drives around and so it's instead of like, bumping into your couch every single time it knows to avoid your couch now, right? Yeah, it learns your room. Hitler's room it's an but apparently now it can send that data up to the mothership, mothership, of course. And basically, you know, iRobot had data mine your layout of your house, huh? Yeah. And so now you got this, like, you know, cute vacuum robot. Now, it's a sinister spy robot. What?
So there's probably a gazillion reasons why somebody would want to know the layout of your house, I'm coming at a loss as to what any of those was, oh,
home automation. Okay,
like, I'm one way.
So if you're a company that's developing home automation, you can get an aggregate of bet you most people that go have like a robot in their house, that vacuums, they're probably more likely to have more home automation stuff. And, you know, they're more they want more automation in their house, which makes sense. And so if you could get that data of their layouts, then you can figure out what kind of products to either, you know, advertise to them or develop for those kind of people.
Hmm. You know, I sell furniture. Well, I was just about to say, if a furniture manufacturer could get an aggregate data of how much room people have, or like, what's the most popular width, or length of a couch, they could then build to that size, and get
data and I was actually thinking, it's something the article doesn't cover. But companies like gaming companies like Nintendo and Xbox, you know, they had the the Xbox Kinect, kinetic content, no. Connect. Yeah. Oh, that. And then like the Wii Mote where they both need lots of room to like, swing your arms around, like the can the Connect needed like, like a 12 foot by 12 foot space that's empty. We're like, no one. Living rooms like that. Right? Well, now, if you have all this data of what people's room sizes look like in layouts, you can probably better tailor your your device to do that.
You know who I wish. Okay, so we're way past the days of controllers being wired to your system. But good lord, could they make those cables a little bit longer? You know?
Especially the charging one.
You remember? Okay, so have you ever looked at the Japanese Nintendo the family calm? Yeah. Okay. So well, the cables are attached to it. The cables are attached to it. They're attached in the back. Yeah. So the cables exit the back of the device, and then you have to pull them.
That's a stand over from the old Atari days. Yeah. Well, they were similar. And the thing about the Atari was, it had really short cables as well. Yep. So what you would do is the RF and the power cable were really long. And so you would grab the atari from my pull it onto your coffee table, right? And then that way, you can swap carts really quickly. Right, right. And a lot of board Change Game Mode or whatever. Yeah, cuz a lot of the switches on there's actually a lot switches on the console itself, that would affect the game, right? Most notably, is the space shuttle game, which used all the switches on the on the red like console. Yeah, so you can like switch different modes and landing gear on the console. You know, we should, that'd be a really fun game to play. And like, maybe record it somehow. Yeah. And for the podcast, space shuttle on Atari 2600.
That'd be great.
I have that game.
And will you have like a flashcard. Right.
I do have a flashcard for it. But I actually have that cartridge. Oh, yeah,
we play the original. But, you know, the family come even know that the wires entered in the back. If you open them up, they go all the way to the front of the PCB and connect. So like they put a whole extra like eight inches of wiring to make it go out the back and then around.
It was probably a holdover from the attorneys that probably Yeah. They probably thought that was, well, it's like when they brought the design to the states. First they actually caught Nintendo contacted Atari, and see and saw it all they asked basically Atari. Hey, do you want to license our products? Yeah. And Atari said no, because at the time they were working on the Atari 7800,
I think yeah, yeah, that's right.
And so Nintendo said, well, oh, well, we'll launch it ourselves. But they didn't want it to look like a game console. They wanted to look like just another piece of your entertainment center. And so they were the they went with the black would go no, no, they went with the with the front loader. Oh, yeah. Which is and they didn't want people to associate that with gaming. Like, because at that time gaming was a bad gaming was dead, right. And so They wanted to make it look like a VCR basically, right? And they succeeded.
Well, they succeeded, but Nintendo did too. Because Nintendo and talking about Nintendo well, but Nintendo made it like a an education device. They sold it as an education device. That's how Rob the Robot exists. That piece of junk Yeah. rubbed the robot was it was an American kind of thing. Yeah. Because how do you break into it?
Yeah, that's all I also like, you either got the gun combo or the rod the robots combo. And that was kind of their way of breaking through the video games are dead.
Well, or video games are bad. And waste of time kind of thing. Yeah. Have you seen the new Atari punk console? Yeah,
that um, the the what? Nintendo mini clone for Atari? Yeah, it's basically a is i I'm more interested in seeing what kind of software they put on it because atari is IP from back then isn't really strong. No.
It's called the Atari box. Tarbox. Yeah. And it has, it has their like, you know, quintessential original design features. It's got the like the whole like, razor thin black plastic with the fake wood in the front. It looks pretty. It looks very Tron like Yes. Yeah, I like it. I think it looks cool. And apparently they're supposed to they claim new content. Who knows what that means? This reminds me
of the Wii console. What was that? It was a Android box console. That was like one of the biggest Kickstarters of all time. And when it finally came out, it was a big flop because they just couldn't get content on it. Oh, that sucks. Yeah, it's all reminds me of but anyways, selling your your house layouts. Vitor Yeah, I could see it being useful for like, services like Amazon, like because the Echo can play music. I think about if you had the layout of your room, it could figure out what size of a room it was and adjust its acoustical parameters. And its equalizer to make it sound better.
Or they could just data mine and try to sell you things that
I see you have an open space over there inside your room. You won't buy a couch.
Yeah. Oh, there you go. Oh my gosh, then you know, they're gonna do crap. Like, oh my gosh, they're
okay. topic to the end of Arduino 101 Until leaves the maker market. So first of all, what is the Arduino? 101? Do you know? No, I don't either. I think that's why I failed. There also, I think
we talked about it. I'm gonna look it up right now.
I think we talked about this on a previous podcast about like, the Edison and stuff went away. They discontinued the Intel Edison module. That's right. Yeah. So basically, this is signaling the end of until being in the maker market after only like two years. All right. And supposedly, all this stuff had really bad documentation. You basically had to figure out how to make everything work on your own.
That's right. Yeah, yeah, actually, we kind of did mention this a little bit before and yeah, good a handful of episodes go.
The thing I'm wondering is did Intel have an availability guarantee? Because a lot of people put this stuff in their products and it's like, did the ental actually have a because like, some companies will say they'll come out with a new product and say we will have this for eight years guaranteed. Right. Or your money back I guess.
You know to be I doubt it. I really doubt it was something I mean with Arduino. Of course not you know.
I mean, think about if Arduino stopped making like the UNO. Uno.
Uno. Yeah. Well, I think they stopped making the UNO people would lose their mind.
Well, people just use third party ones.
Yeah, but but but the thing is, like, if you go down the street to I don't know Fry's Electronics or whatnot, you're more likely to get an official Arduino Uno. Yeah. In fact, of all the places I'm aware of the fries is actually the only one that sells both the official and non official Microcenter
sells the unofficial ones which one and Len, I think inland brand I bought
an O S EPP which is a terrible name for that they should come up with OSEP I don't I don't know how to pronounce it. I bought I bought one of those a while ago from fries, but
I don't know. So yeah, it's it's one of those things I think until this until thought if they do They would come and idea and it didn't happen.
So well it has a Okay, so it has a 32 bit system on chip.
Yeah, it runs. It's the curry chip. That's right, which is x 86. Actually.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's cool. But I guess it just didn't take off
now. I'll put it this way as I was reading the comments on Hackaday. And people like I bought one, but I haven't done anything with it yet. I guess I'll get rid of it now because it has no support.
There didn't seem to be any from the get go. Yeah, yeah. So unfortunately, with these, when you come down to these little boards, where they're meant to make your life easier, you have to have excellent documentation. Like Arduino has unbelievably good documentation. If you need to find something out with Arduino. You literally go to Google. You type in the word Arduino. And then your question. Yeah, like the other day. I Arduino and partnumber make it work. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was working with an Arduino the other day. And I had a question about, um, it was either it was either functions accessing global variables, or it was case statements. I can't remember one or the other. And I just typed in Arduino case statement, and then that page came up and was like, here's everything you need to know about a case statement and done. You know, that's good documentation right there.
Well, I think it's more the community behind it, too. Oh, of course. Yeah.
You know, we were talking about that earlier today. Not or earlier this week. If you go to what is it? Stack? Exchange a stack? Stack? Exchange? It? Yes. Stack Exchange? Did we talk about this last podcast? I can't remember. The very first thing you see. Everyone post is they have a question. We talked about this. Yeah. On the last podcast? Yeah. Don't do that. Oh, no. Basically, what it is, is the very first thing you post is a question. Always include your code when you post a question, because the next post on every forum is please post your code but it's all your schematic or, actually, yeah, no, that's true. When it comes down to like, Oh, my circuits not working. Post your schematics. And then we'll start talking or my board doesn't work. Post your board layout. Kind of funny. So cool. Okay, so the last topic, Intel is now number two, and we're not we're totally not trying to beat up on on Intel here. This was this. I found this and it's interesting. So Intel is now not the number one chip manufacturer. Ah, yeah. So, Parker, you haven't seen this? Right? You haven't. Okay. You want to take a guess on who is number two now. Samsung? That's right. Ah, Samsung is now number two mecca of engineering podcast brought to you by Samsung. Who is now number one. But okay, so you'll Yeah, I I don't exactly lead the article on electronics weekly doesn't really go into massive amounts of details as to why Samsung is now number one. They were talking
about CPUs, I want to guess that CPUs,
well, okay, so it's chip revenue is what they're going off of. Samson reported 15 point 7 billion in chip revenue. And I think that's everything, everything, everything in anything, anything you build in silicon, basically. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So Intel has been doing good. It's not like Intel is falling. You know, it's, it's a Samsung Tibet is, until pretty
much only really makes CPUs. And it is, it has an they're good. One thing it does is CPUs, right. Right. And it was number one in silicon production. Yeah, that's insane. I always thought it's not just once if you they got like the server line and all the all the like I seven i Five and all that stuff and like chipsets for your motherboard and stuff, but like, Samsung makes memory it makes drivers it makes all this other stuff.
In addition to process it does do processors, effects. I bet you your phone has Samsung stuff in it. Oh, yeah. Pretty much guaranteed. So here's an interesting thing from the article. I didn't know this. So TI was number one. At one point in time ago. Yeah. Can you guess how long TI was number one for
the 46 years?
Not really not. There's a little bit too much. 25. Okay, so sim. Ti was number one from 1959 to 1984.
From the beginning the time basically till the time when Japan was basically killing the electronics market.
Well, okay. Yeah. X actually that's that's about that's about right. In 1959. It was both probably really hard to be number one because it was hard to manufacture chips, but it was also probably not really hard to be number one, because you're the only one doing
that at the time. You'd have basically Fairchild and ti
That's right. Yeah. And didn't they used to be the same thing, and then some of the guys broke off to make Fairchild. I think that's how it went. I know, I know, somebody broke off and took a handful of engineers and made Fairchild because they were pissed off about, you know, whatever politics in the office. Regardless, ti has held the record for the longest of being number one in the chip world. And Intel was on track to be to beat that. And Samsung dethroned them
Hmm. Cool. Yeah. So I guess we'll be wrapping up the Mac fab engineering podcast, right? Yep. That was episode 78. We were your guests Parker
Dolan. And I was a host Steven Craig.
Oh yeah, we're host this time.
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