Parker and Stephen discuss and choose the winner of the contest for the MEP Favorite Category!
Parker makes small progress on the SDR Wagon Project and Stephen officially launches his new blog Analogeng.com.
Stephen creates a new blog and starts documenting his projects and Parker pitches a SDR based car radio.
MacroFab Design Contest: Blink an LED Sponsored by Mouser Electronics
Parker
Stephen
RFO
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AND!XOR DEF CON 26 badge with the MEP SAO installed!
Rusted out gas tank skid plate off of Parker’s Wagon.
New gas tank kid plate welded together. Made from 14 gauge sheet steel.
Test fitting the gas tank into the new skid plate.
New gas tank skid plate painted and installed in the Wagon.
Board layout for Stephen’s uTracer project.
Enclosure fully printed for Stephen’s uTracer project.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!
Hello, and welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. We're your hosts, Parker, Dolman.
And Steven Craig.
This is episode 132. So we have a special announcement. We have a macro fab design contest. blinking LED, and it's sponsored by Mouser. Electronics.
Oh, it's like really official,
we have four prizes to giveaway and four different categories for blinking LEDs.
That's right. Yeah. So
for the first category, we have pragmatic Blinky, which is basically useful ways the blinking LED the most complicated blink. So like a design net, make Steven and I scratched our heads of how it works for maybe you design a ginormous Rube Goldberg machine at the very end, it blinks an LED
that would actually be really amazing.
Next category is wearable blink. So a human or other animal wearable device that blinks an LED, that could be also like IOT and stuff like that. And then we will have the McWrap engineering podcast favorite.
That was okay, I have to admit, that one's probably the most difficult to design to because it's like, what do you decide to?
Exactly? And the thing about that one is all if you enter into any of the categories, you're automatically entered into that category, right? Right. One of the rules is like if you make a project you have to entered into a category
Can you can you just choose that one as a category? Ah, as the rules are written, no. Okay, so you have to choose a prog pragmatic, Blinky, most complicated blink, or wearable blink, and then you're automatically in the fourth category, the engineering podcast favorite, correct, which knowing us is going to be really dumb.
So and So how the how we were going to pick the other three categories. The first three, is we're going to have a panel of judges to be announced. And they will pick and judge those three, and we pick. So we as in Steven and I, not the royal we, the macro engineer, podcasts, everyone. And so how to enter is do a blink design, something that blinks or something involving something blinking, preferably an LED and documented on hackaday.io, basically build a project there. And then there's a certain tag that you can tag your project with. And then we will know that that project is associated with the contest. The tag is there's a big blog post on the Mac fat form or forum blog that has the correct tags and how to set up your your project so that we can get the entry
who also have the tag connected to this podcast. So if you're listening and you go to the notes for this podcast, then you'll be able to see the tag there to
correct then there is the Oh, yeah, more contest rules of it starts August 8, which is when this podcast comes out. And it goes through September 10. I think like 8am, central time or something like that, the project must blink at least one LED but can blink as many. So you can do a billion, that'd be really cool. And the components, this is one thing, since we're sponsored by Mouser, electronics, your components must be able to be sourced from Mouser. I have a sample project that's on the contest, blog post. And basically, my bill of materials has a link to the Mouser item that you can buy. So it makes it really easy to show that you can basically buy it through Mouser. And the reason why we're doing that is so that people can easily replicate the projects and get the build materials. And then of course the source must be available so we can make sure you're not like
faking it. So we're gonna check. Yeah,
we're gonna build everything right. Yeah. I'm Cillian like shit, we have to make that. Oh my god, we got this. Yeah, so complete rule list and other information available on the Mac fair blog, check the podcast description and social media and all the normal places where you get our Mac crab news.
So by the time you're listening to this, it will be time to start designing so go and have fun and create something wacky and maybe you'll be a winner.
Yeah. Oh, yes. Scott talking about the prizes. So all categories have a $500 USD prize associated to it. There is no first second or third place though. So only the top winner first place of each category gets a prize. While the contest is going on. Steve and I are going to look at entries and talk about them on the podcast and see which ones are cool. I'm hoping we can get the winners on the podcast after the POC at the after September 10, which is when it closes,
especially the Mac Feb engineering podcast favorite. Yes. Because that one will be fun. Yes. So yeah, you get 500 books and a chance to, you know, hang out with us. They might just want the 500 bucks. Yeah, just just give me the 500 bucks so Yeah, have fun with that, everyone. And we, are you going to design anything? I mean, we're excluded from it. But are you going to design something Park? Ah,
yeah, actually does like sound like a lot of fun. Um, I already had an example project, but it's like, it's a microcontroller blinking LED. So it's like really lame.
There's gonna be people who are listening to it and be like, damn it. That was my idea. Yeah, I think I think you and I should add, you know, just come up with some goofy ideas. Maybe Maybe we'll throw some together and just toss them out on a podcast. Oh, yeah. It's good. Yeah, we've got, what, four weeks or something like that. So maybe we could just toss out some ideas. You know, like we did with the fly killing mechanism.
Yeah. Ah, it's good. Yeah, we'll do that. Cool.
So actually, you created a LED blinking device recently, right? Perfect. Yeah. See that segue? We're getting better. Yeah, it's
good segue. Yeah. Now we just can't call out or segues.
That's the next
the macro engineer podcast shitty add on. Is completes the people who ordered some I think a Brandon from particle he ordered a couple. And he actually has like, some tweets of it on his badge, which is really cool. The and not XOR. Guys, I think. Get them tomorrow, which is Yeah, zap in higher on. There is a blog post I wrote about the design and software. And
did you did you put your code in the in the blog post?
Yeah, the code is there's some snippets that the code that's important in the blog post, and then there's a link to the source code. Oh, cool. Cool. Yeah. Then I got the Mac 6682 breakout board. That's the thermistor max, maximum chip. I got that working.
Oh, we we've been waiting for that for a while. Yeah,
I finally got that working. I don't have a blog post or anything about it yet. I basically just got to upload everything and write an article on my, my blog about it. But it does work. And I'm pretty happy with the like the temperature you get back from it. It's pretty reliable. It's not too far off of what like my blue thermometer says so I'm pretty happy with that.
You're comparing it to a booth. Remember? I love that. That's great. Well, yeah, that's the
because that that my birth thermometer is actually like, NIS T listed. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Is that is that the I think NIS T is standard for for calibration. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's actually has it actually is paperwork? For my brew thermometer,
got to get that good beer. Yeah, gotta get
the beer. So I think I'm going to with that working, I'm going to actually work on that Jeep computer board. Like, for the Wrangler.
This isn't the old Jeep computer board, right? Yes, the old Jeep computer board. Oh, wow, that thing's getting resurrected. Yeah, it
used to be called Jeep prop. There's a repository somewhere on my personal GitHub account for it. So yeah, that'd be resurrected. And basically, I'm gonna rip off all the because it uses thermocouples. And so I'm going to rip all those off, put the thermistors on. I'm going to simplify the board a lot because back then I was having to do a lot of stuff and I'm going to pull it back. It's still gonna have the it's still gonna have satellite connectivity. So it's not completely like scaled down but yeah.
Home gamer satellite connectivity.
Yeah. Oh, we finished I finished that a welding project on the wagon.
How'd that come out?
Pretty good. Um, I did finally did had to I had to clearance the mounting holes a little bit.
Oh, you had to oval them a little bit? Yeah, I seam
welded it definitely a tweak a tiny bit. It wasn't perfectly flat still. So I just I just busted out the next size drill bit and
the holes got good enough. Yeah,
good enough. And yeah, I put the gas tank in, bolted it in, put about five gallons in from my other tank and then drove it over to the gas station filled it up, and it did not leak or fall out of the out of the bottom.
But you would hope so. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. You were jammin on that for God. What, like, at least a week, if not longer? It was.
It took me two full weekend. So probably nine days to build it. Yeah, that's a lot of work cuz I was because I was working during the week to on it. Yeah, it just took so that project took way longer than I ever thought it would. I thought I could knock it out in one weekend, but ended up taking two
I think I think the wagon is gonna be a whole list of things that you that are longer than you thought.
Properly. Oh, yes. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So Steven, you were showing some pictures in Slack yesterday morning. About your new project. Yeah, well, new old project. Well,
the project I've been speaking about for a while, but I actually have some like good updates now on it. So in fact, I will show this to Parker. If you've been, if you've been on the Slack channel, then you've seen pictures because I've been posting them kind of along the way. Regardless, images of this will be up on our blog post for the for the podcast, but I finished the marking of the micro tracer enclosure. I got that on the mamaki inkjet printer at work and did a nice print of everything on there. So the end caps, yeah, yeah, the walnut end caps. It looks like it looks like a bold man test gear. You know, like black metal with wood end caps.
You know what it looks like? It looks like a Heathkit from like, what the 70s
Yeah, some some time around there. It was great, because I had a bit of extra space on the enclosure after I had, you know, done all the holes and everything like that. And the reason it has all that space on the enclosure is because underneath that is just 52 relays, so I really can't have anything going through the enclosure at that point. So I decided to do some some artwork that details kind of what's going on in there. So I've got you could see Stephens attempt at doing artwork for for an enclosure. Vector Art. Yeah, pretty much yeah, no, I used Inkscape and actually drew something up, I actually I got an image of an eel 34 vacuum tube, like a legitimate image and then I traced it and then modified it until I liked it and ran with that. So it's uh, so that was pretty, that's pretty nice. Got the got the enclosure done. And it's kind of fun to be able to have, you know, semi professional, if not professional looking enclosures done like one off, you know, by yourself. That looks really good. So that's, that's all milled and printed. So the enclosures effectively done now. And as of last night, I finished the PCB. And by finish, I mean, I've got all my traces down, I'm, I'm pretty much happy with where everything is. And I plan on ordering the boards tonight. But I'm going to do my like, before I order, like last check of absolutely everything. So you know, I probably got another hour or two of just looking at the board and being like, did I really want to do it that way?
And then eventually clicking by on it, you know, that's usually an effect. I'm curious, that's done, it brings up something that I was wanting to ask you, whenever I make a PCB, I usually try to at least sleep at night after finishing the PCB before I do anything with it, like I don't finish it and then just go by, I usually finish it, set it aside, come back and look at it again. At least a day later. Do you do anything like that?
I very similar, but mine usually involves beer. I'll usually because I'll design something and be like, Okay, this is looking pretty good. And then I'll come back for beers later and look at it again. And be like, is this so good?
I suppose that's a that's an acceptable Well, and that's just I've learned in the past that like as soon as I'm done like I'm not done. You know and and I have gone Oh, you always forget about something, you forget something or you made one goofy mistake, and you just kind of screwed something up. So like waking up doing a whole like fresh mind look at it. A lot of times I'll just look at my board and be like, Oh my god, I'm glad I didn't order this because XYZ reason so today's that day where I am going to do that. And because my board has like switchable voltages up to 400 volts. Uh, you know, I'm gonna like, even though I designed it with clearances in mind, I'm gonna, you know, double check those just to make sure there's not like one point where it'll arc and then you know, I spent a bunch of money and it's crap.
Arcs your case and it burns a hole in your case, and ruins everything.
It's it's a customer case, then. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's kind of where I'm at with that. So, and I told the listeners weeks ago that I would get the designs up on GitHub. So I actually created a GitHub count, and I'll upload the designs, I was gonna do the whole thing where I upload the designs like partially, but you're just basically gonna get it when they're like kind of a done state, you know, hopefully, so I'll order the boards tonight. And I'm going to use JLC PCB. They used to be like directly affiliated with EZ EDA. But they've kind of they've split, even though they're still like connected, they split into like you have used to order boards, through EZ EDA, now you have to go right to JLC PCB. They're very, very inexpensive PCBs. And I've done a few 100 boards through them, and I have yet to find an issue. It's something that like, I probably wouldn't do for a production order. But for like a project like this, I can get a four layer board that's 10 inches by six inches for a very reasonable cost. So I'm going to I'm going to go through that. So if you haven't checked them out, go and give them a look, you can usually get small boards, you get 10 boards for two bucks, or something like that. It's super cheap. And that's a little ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And, and the thing is, like, I truly honestly wouldn't like, you know, advertise I guess those people, if I hadn't made a few 100 boards and been like, fine with all the quality I've gotten,
without the boards that you made for the synth? No,
no, no, no, no, no, I got those boards made somewhere else. And those were not good quality. And it's funny, because they were more expensive, you know, than that I was I was I was vetting another manufacturer at the time when I did those imports. And I was not really particularly happy with the general quality of those. But JLC has been good to me so far. So I mean, for personal projects, that usually what I go
on to the RFO RFO. So the first one is learn FPGA fast with Hackaday is FPGA boot camp. And the main reason why I'm I brought this one up is because the format of it is really good. So if you haven't learned or even looked at FPGAs left yet, this is a really good way to get started in FPGAs. Al Williams, who was a guest on two previous podcasts map episode 94 and 57. He wrote the article and I think influenced a lot of the boot camp stuff. I don't know if he actually wrote the boot camp stuff, but I would say that he definitely influenced it, for sure.
And anything most anything FPGA related on Hackaday has al Williams fingerprint on it.
Yeah, go check that out. I'm actually I read through what they call boot camp zero, which is like digital logic introduction. And like, I already knew all that stuff. I'm like, I haven't looked at that stuff in like, you know, 10 years now. Yeah, yeah. So I decided just, I'll finger through it and see, you know, there's anything that like catches my eye that I don't remember or something like that, just as a refresher. And I'm actually going to go through all of them and see if there's any fundamentals about FPGA development. I'm missing. All most of my FPGA development is self taught. So there's definitely going to be gaps in there.
Oh, sure. Yeah, I still have that ice board that you gave me a long time ago. And I need to, I need to plug that in and play with it.
It The thing is that they're using the ice port.
Yep. Yep. So this is like a really good. This is a sign from God that I should start looking into FPGA stuff, or at least a sign from Mr. Williams from Mr. Williams. Yeah. He knows that I haven't touched it. He he knows everyone's FPGAs. So yeah, go check out the old episodes without Williams there. There were a lot of fun.
Yeah. And if you're in Houston, how we're actually going to be a speaker, at this month's hardware meetup here in Houston. August, I think he's going to be talking about like, how to be famous on Hackaday or something like that. Like how to get your projects on Hackaday. So that's what
he's gonna do. You've had a couple of your projects on on Hackaday. Right. Yeah, yeah,
I would say the biggest thing is because I had a personal blog at the time, I still do is making sure your personal blog can like handle the bandwidth. But now with their like, hackaday.io thing. You don't really need a personal blog, you just have that. You have like your own account. And then you just have all your projects under you, which is kind of what my blog is,
which is actually kind of why we were doing hackaday.io for the LED contest. It's kind of like a decent repository. But all this stuff
exactly. Well, it handles hardware projects really well, compared to, let's say GitHub, and we can we can search by tags in the tool. We can find it pretty easily on on Hackaday IO, which tags don't really exist in GitHub. So yep, cool. Go check it that out and let us know in Slack how it goes. I'm going to do all the boot camp stuff. So I guess I'll probably have more stuff to say about that next week. As I probably get through boot camp one and two. So the next topic is pebble watches get reborn? rebel.io.
Everything is a.io Nowadays, isn't it?
Yeah, exactly. You know, what do we have macro? fab.io? I don't know.
I will check right now.
Maybe I need to, like purchase that before like this podcast goes out.
Or doesn't pop up anything.
Okay, I don't have to buy that thing. Yeah,
you gotta buy it tonight before someone listens to it before the bucket.
So last year, we talked about pebble, like, the Watch Company, basically, they stopped business, I guess is a good way to put it. And basically everyone's watches kind of just died. Because their IoT watches. And they, they have to go talk to you know, the mothership
to work, which we have talked about that multiple times, like the the problem with one of the problems with IoT is that like, if something just goes down the drain, then your product is just kind of dead.
Exactly. Pebble was pretty good in that they kept the server's alive for quite a while afterwards. And there is a new group called Rebel, that's ar e BB le. And they are a project to revitalize the pebble watches IoT functionality, because like the basically the pebble watches, were still would still do time, but you couldn't get like weather updates and email and stuff. Because all those push notifications were not working anymore. So this this group rebel is basically revitalizing your functionality, which is kind of cool. It looks really easy to actually like get to work. It's not like you have to like jump through hoops, you kind of just sign up for the new stuff. And I think you update an app, I think, and then it works.
That's awesome. That's really cool that people are like, banding together to get their watch to do stuff again.
Well, I just get an IoT device. So I'm, I'm, I'm thinking we're gonna probably see this more, more often in the future. Like let's say, I think Amazon owns nest, right.
I don't know why it was
just say nest went, like belly up and their server shut down. I would say that would probably be a group around nest, as long as like nest released the server protocols, like pebble did. Yeah. So maybe Pebble is going to be unusual, cuz the company actually released how to talk to the device.
Gotcha. So it looks like Google owns nest. Oh, they bought them in 2014 for $3.2 billion.
Okay, so Google, well, we might not have to worry about Google. Well, Google's really good at like, like saying, Oh, we're not going to do that anymore. And just shut down something.
Yeah, we there was a couple people who worked at backer fab that had worked on some previous Google projects. And Google it just basically come to them and be like, yeah, we're not doing this anymore. And that was it, you know? Yeah.
The prominent one I can remember is Google Reader, which was their, like RSS feed kind of thing, right? And a lot of people used it. And then Google was like that. Not anymore. Like, can you imagine if Google shut down like Google Doc?
Oh, God, that would it would tank parts of the economy
are like Gmail, because Gmail is still in beta. Right?
Is it still technically considered beta? I don't know. I don't think it's ever had a 1.0. I wouldn't think it would be. I mean, I remember back when you had to get like invites to be Oh, yeah.
Invite Only? Yeah, yeah. I remember in high school, and then yc. Like trying to find the person that had an invite, so you can get a Gmail account?
Yeah. Yeah. I don't even remember, Google's social media thing was a Google Plus, or what was it called? nicly.
still exists,
does it? What was it called Google Plus? I can't remember. Yeah. Google Plus. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I remember looking at it for maybe like, two or three minutes and just be like, I just I don't think so. No, I just know. I don't mean that like a necessarily a bad way. It was just like, for some reason, it just didn't feel right.
I think what it was is the layout was so unusual, compared to because they didn't want I think what they're going for on Google Plus, and some Google engineers gonna be respond, be like, All right, you're wrong. What? The website came out, it looks like they tried really hard to not be a Facebook clone. Yes. Yeah. And they they try that so hard that it was not useful for people who were used to Facebook. Yeah, it
was it was so different that it wasn't enough to convince people to use it as their main social media source, correct? Yeah, that's what I think. Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah.
wasting money. Google on that one.
Yeah, it was a social experiment, I guess you could say. They got social media experience social media experience. Yeah. All right. Next topic.
Okay, last topic is operation manuals with improper English translations. And so I bought a really cheap radio for the wagon, because the one that comes with doesn't work. And this is not to replace the one I hacked in the jeep. This is just for the new wagon. So it's kind of like a right, I put it in quotes or retro style, like radio. It has blue LEDs. So I don't know how retro it can be.
It doesn't have a walnut trim, does it? No.
It's actually well, that's 70s. Retro. This is like 5060s. Retro with Chrome. Oh, okay. Cool. But it's got blue LEDs on like that, that didn't exist back then.
Just call them lamps. Blue lamps, yeah, colored glass lamps,
glass lamps. But the best thing is the manual because this is the worst case of like, improper English translations I've ever come across in a manual before. All right, hit us with it. Okay, so, first one is, this is under troubleshooting and maintenance. Sometimes consider a failure phenomenon.
Just like is that is that period? The end of the sentence? Yes. Yes. That's amazing.
Is small operation or result of wiring errors? Before calling service that please refer to following description of a brief explanation of phenomenas? So the first one unreasonable power question mark. Are you unreasonable? Number three, does not respond after opening loud.
I can see somebody like unscrewing it being like
screaming at you.
Yeah. And he's like, Oh, it was loud. That's why it doesn't work. What's another
then under? important reminder, if your car in direct sunlight were cause excessive heating side the car should enable the unit to cool before use.
If you if you start like really digging it apart, you can be like, Okay, I get what that sentence means. Like, it's a struggle.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. This one's my favorite. Okay. To protect traffic safety. Please do not concentrate on driving the process of regulating the product every single sentence in here is verbally mis translated.
Oh, that's, that's phenomenal. Yeah. No, we need to take some scans of that and throw that up somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, I'll
load this one up.
Those are really good tweets. Also, you should be hitting those. Pay make sure make sure when you drive home tonight, focus on your radio. That's the only way to stay safe. And make sure you cool that card down first too. Awesome.
Yeah. So I guess we'll just have a short episode this week.
Wow. That was That was fast. It's kind of you know,
this goes back this is yet um, I'll say is this is like, retro style map. Yeah, we haven't we haven't done a 30
in a long time. Yeah. So
that was the Mac fab engineering podcast. We're your host Parker Lowen. And Steven Craig See you later everyone take it easy thank you yes, you our listener for downloading our show if you have a cool idea project topic or if you want to miss translate our podcast. Let Stephen and I know Tweet us at macro lab or email us at podcast at macro fab.com. Also, check out our Slack channel. If you're not subscribed to the podcast yet, click that subscribe button. That way you get the latest episodes right when it releases and please review us wherever you listen as it helps the show stay visible and helps new listeners find us
Stephen creates a new blog and starts documenting his projects and Parker pitches a SDR based car radio.
Parker makes small progress on the SDR Wagon Project and Stephen officially launches his new blog Analogeng.com.
Parker and Stephen discuss and choose the winner of the contest for the MEP Favorite Category!