Put All Your Power On Blue

Hello, and welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. We are your host, Stephen Craig and Parker Dohmen. And this is episode 113. Awesome. 1313. Lucky number.

Yeah, lucky number. So seeing what's going on. So this this

last week, I actually started jumping on to Fusion 360, which is a Autodesk product. Yeah, not a desk project, which is a CAD CAM project, a product that's freely available to hobbyist and startups. If you just go to Google and type in Fusion 360, you can use it. It's basically a, like solid work slash Solid Edge. Clone in a way. And it's, it's pretty awesome. We've used it at the fab before. I know you have for Yeah, yeah. But back when we first started using it, which was probably about a year ago, or two years ago, something closer somewhere in that range two years ago. We I know, we kind of like cracked into it and started playing with it. But I know I didn't really jump into it much. And this last week, I was like, You know what? I really want to give it a shot and start playing with it. And it's awesome. It's absolutely killer.

What's its biggest selling point over? Like, let's say SketchUp? Which I use a lot.

Okay, actually, so a little bit of a story that will answer that question right there. So you might be surprised because this is this was actually a year ago, it doesn't even feel like a year ago, but about a year ago, this time. Parker and I were contracted in a way to potentially build a four by eight CNC for a friend of ours.

Oh, yeah. That was a year ago. That was a year ago.

I know it does. That feels like a week ago. No, that feels like

another lifetime ago for me. For me, it feels like a week ago that feels like eight years ago for me. Yeah, I know. Because I completely forgot that even happened. And so he has brought it up.

So yeah, we were gonna we were gonna and actually this was when Parker you first got all your welding equipment? Yeah. And we were going to use all of your equipment, plus all the drive electronics and everything that I had on my CNC we're going to kind of build a steel monstrosity?

Yeah, I think it was the design for that thing was like Uber CNC. Oh, yeah. Oh, it was like it was an eight by four. But it was actually more like 10 by six. So you can put a full sheet and have run out?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which, which in general, you want you want a border, but I think we built in, like a thick border. Yeah. It was, it was a huge,

it was like, the, the the actual gantry parts were made out of like, four by four steel tubing. Yep.

Yep. Yeah.

designs,

I do I do. And, and this sort of like ties into the fusion 360 thing. Because I, I've been wanting to just learn fusion 360. So I watched a couple videos, and just started playing with it. And I did, I did a good bit of solid works back when I was in college, it feels like the same program and in my mind. But what it feels like it works in the same way. Because it's a it's a drawing program by engineers for engineers, whereas SketchUp is not by engineers, even though they have a quote, Engineer mode. Engineer mode means that they take the background away, such as flat color, and they give you decimals, that that's what Engineer mode means. It doesn't mean anything more than that. Like, we'll take take, for instance, in Fusion 360, if you're going to draw something, it has to be properly dimensioned, it will actually not be considered complete, until it has all the right dimensions to make sure that it's constrained by your drawing. So in other words, like, if you're drawing on a rectangle, you want to draw a circle on a rectangle, you have to have the proper dimensions and a, you know, a proper diameter for that circle. And that seems like really goofy. It seems like a lot of extra work. But the thing is, when it comes down to it, like, you know, in the future, you might want to, I don't know, you want to move that circle, when you have all the dimensions that you can just modify on the fly, and it will move within SketchUp you have to redraw you would have you'd have to delete and redraw everything. Or let's say, you know, let's say you use that circle as a hole through the side of a box, then you added fillets and all these other things to that box. But you realize that you wanted to scoot that hole by a quarter of an inch in one direction in Fusion 360 it will move everything associated with that circle. Okay, cool. So I group elements together. Yeah, you everything is constrained by whatever, you know, two lines can be parallel concentric circles. In other words, it's a professional drawing program. And so it's it's weird because at first it seems like a program where you're like, Oh, this is super clunky. I don't know how to draw anything like Google. SketchUp is like, give me line Draw a line, you know, it's kind of that kind of thing, which is nice because you get drawing really quick, but, but I've been really enjoying playing around with this and it's super easy once you get the feel of it. Regardless, I've been porting the CNC designs from SketchUp over into Fusion 360 sort of out of like a, you know, just fun and exercise, can I do it, but I've also been modifying the designs because previously, we had actually gone with a rack and pinion design, which would have been really cool. But I actually found for less money, you can do ballscrew designs, and they have less run out. It won't sound as cool though it will know a bracket opinion sounds amazing. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, you know, it's actually the funniest thing is the the the most difficult design thing we were having to deal with was how do you keep sawdust or metal shavings out of the rack and Pina because you don't loading the racking and pre loading? Yeah, cuz you have to have a spring loaded motor at that point. Well, you don't have to, but

yeah, that was basically you need a spring loaded gear that goes on it. Yeah, yep, certain force preload on it, to keep it

right. And as it wears down, you want you want that force to continually be the same. So you have to come up with a system. Whereas with a, you know, a ball screw system, you just put a bearing on it and spin it, and you're, you're good to go. So I've been just playing around with that. And that's been fun. So I just, maybe maybe a little bit of a shout out to Fusion 360 I've been gushing a little bit there. But it's really cool. It's really fun. I

can you share the videos that you that you watch to learn how to use Fusion? 360

Yeah, sure. They the guy that I watched, he's a little bit of a goober but. But like he's he's got a three part video where he makes a junction box. And the junction box has three parts to it. And actually, what's really cool, so it has a base plate, it has a lid, and two screws. And I guess, fusion or Autodesk has got some kind of deal with McMaster. Oh, yeah, you can pull their stuff. So this guy when it came down to do the screws, he's like, I'm not gonna model the screws, he just, you don't even have to go separate. And download their the CAD, you go through the fusion program, and it brings you to mcmaster carr. And when you click anything in it automatically just loads it into your program. You don't have to download it and then upload, you know, CAD files and stuff bringing in your project or anything. It just does it. That's right. Yeah, that's cool. And so you know, one of the things what's the guy's name? Yeah, inside yet. I don't remember his name. I just search for like, Fusion 360 tutorial. And I think it was one of the first things I will put on the Yeah, I'll find it. But but, you know, the, it's funny, I want to use Fusion 360 to design and build the CNC. But you can also use it for cam it has a full built in cam program. So you can do you all your toolpath and create your G code for running the CNC on

there. Is it actually run it? Or do you have to go through a G code interpreter still,

you know, you still have to you still have to have something else that actually spits the bits out on? Yeah, like my Yeah, which there's a mock for now. Which I want to I want to start playing around there Mach Five. It's the it's gonna start just being like pictures of razor blade. Nah, yeah. But But yeah, so the thing is, I had actually designed and cut some guitars, using Rhino and Rhino cam, the plugin before. And Rhino has an awesome, awesome CAD CAM program. But it's it's funny because rhino is way more. Uh, well, it's not like engineered mindset, like a lot of things you draw in there. It's not very obvious how you define units and how you like say, oh, I want this line to be this long. 18. Unicorns long. Exactly, exactly. In Rhino, it's kind of like I draw this curve, and it looks good. And then I and then I sweep it around. It's more like just like graphics modeling, but extremely powerful. You can do all the like, constraints stuff, but you know, the difference is like we I was saying earlier, if you want to draw a circle in Fusion 360 You have to say the circle is this many inches away from this thing and this many inches away from this thing and it has this diameter, whereas in Rhino, you can just be like, I want a circle, and that looks big enough. And it's right there.

You know, like SketchUp then yeah, fancier versions got fancier that's how I've heard Rhino being billed. Yes, it's a more precise I guess maybe not precisely the right word, but more full featured modeling program than SketchUp.

It's also way way smarter. Because like, if you you know in in SketchUp, if you give it three points in space, it can create a polygon in space. But as soon as you start giving Like 567 points, it's just gonna crap its pants and like not know what a curve is a curve in SketchUp is a bunch of poly like bad triangles. But in Rhino, you can give it like 50 points and say like, give me the best curve that fits all of these points, and it'll just do it. And so it's a lot more powerful with with things of that sort. But it's funny because for how, on the surface, imprecise Rhino fields, it has an excellent cam program for programming CNCS. Like, the best I've seen around Now, what's interesting is fusion 360, a free program for hobbyist has won that, you know, my initial impression feels just as good as Rhino. It everything seemed really smooth, it was really straightforward. And it did everything that it needed to. So I was I was really impressed with that. Now, the cool thing is, you can actually get a license to a fusion 360 If required, like Mac fab would require a license and things but or you're selling stuff yet, but But what's interesting is they have it set up where you only have to pay for it after you are making 100k in your company. For startups. It's still free. Yeah, until you break that point. But the whole license is 300 bucks a year. That's it 300 A year gets you a full copy of fusion 360 whereas Rhino, Rhino by itself is a few $1,000. And then the plugin Rhino cam is also a few $1,000. So it's kind of you know, if you can get by with Fusion 360 Which does almost everything that Rhino does. I'd say go with that. Looks like I'm

trying to do this weekend. Yeah, model a junction box.

Actually, you could model your beer brewing box. Yeah, in there. good

segue. Yeah, that's actually the only good segue ever had just ruined it.

So Parker, what have you been doing?

So, um, follow me on Twitter or whatever. I've been posting pictures of my brewery box I've been working on. It's similar to the project that Steven was working on about six months ago. Except it's not in a UPS USPS box. You know, you did finally upgrade to a proper metal box. So

right yeah, but but when I go to like my final box, the one I'm actually going to do I might paint it. So it looks like a USPS.

That'd be actually get a vinyl wrap for it. Yeah, you gotta do that. Yeah, look, I think you keep like the same like aesthetics of the dampness that box had. Oh, yeah. It had water stains all over it. Oh, yeah.

It was nasty. Yeah. And the brewery brewery could just be called humble beginnings brewery. Ah, yeah. Yeah. Or first class

first. Oh, first class. Yes. Better.

Okay, you've got a box and you're putting crap in it. Just like a planter box.

Yeah, I've been Yeah, mine's a proper electrical box for machines. So that's the only difference really? You went with a circuit breaker box.

Yeah, I just went with a Home Depot $20 special. I ripped that all the guts all the like terminal blocks. Yeah. And just kind of screwed everything in. So the I mean, really, what I did was upgraded from cardboard to steel

steel. Yep. I'm trying to keep everything mostly watertight. As much as you can, I guess

it's safe when you're dealing with you know, 10s of gallons of water and 220 volt

50 amp breakers. So yeah, so I basically I punch all the holes out in the, on the front panel and put everything in the thing is I went with like, oh, waterproof stuff. And then I decided to put a power meter in and you can't get those waterproof. So I well,

a silicone caulk just like yeah, but all over it because

I made that slot the right size with the pop in and think about popping it back out, putting it on the back side and mount a piece of plexiglass with some silicone so it's just watertight and you just look through the Plexiglas at the thing because then then the whole front panel be waterproof again.

What would you use to cut the square holes? Like a Dremel or angle grinder? Oh, he's holding up his hand he had some some battles

that's actually the first time I ever got nicked by the by the angle grinder.

Yeah, yeah, so like just like the 110 like big handheld Yeah,

yeah, four and half inch and Grindr nice I basically marked it out and just went near near near near you just take

a file and clean up the square edges Yeah, I

just cleaned up I don't want took about five minutes. Yeah, cuz on the on the PID loops because there's a square holes. I actually 3d printed a a square hole two round hole adapter. Nice so it basically rounded off the square. Yeah, so I don't have to do is draw like a two and a half inch hole and then they just dropped right in. Hey, go. So yeah, that made that really nice, but I couldn't do that. With the with the rectangle. Yeah, cuz it would mean the circle would have been like eight inches in diameter. Gotcha or six or whatever.

Yeah, I did a I use a Dremel. When I did the my PID just because it was like, actually 400 gauge. You know, steel is like paper so you can get through with a Dremel real quick,

because my problem is I always wear this is the first time actually to I've never I didn't wear my PPE because usually I'm welding right get the angle grinder out yet. I wasn't welding I was just like cutting metal. So I just grabbed it and I forgot to put my own gloves on and just cutting. And

I don't think maybe I should but I don't think I've ever worn gloves with a angle grinder. I mean, it's just like you just pick it up and go to town. You know? Yeah, I mean, half the time, half the time you're welding and then your angle grinders on the ground next to you. You flip your your helmet up, you grind a little bit and then you go back to welding. It's like just like a, you know, here and there. But but you're pressing the little pressing the little switch on the angle grinder is annoying with a big old pair of gloves. Oh, my gloves on mine just

got a big toggle on the side. That Okay, plastic slide thing that you just click, it's easy to use. What's the gloves on? Oh, Okay, gotcha. And I don't run with the guard on it. So

I bought a while back a pneumatic angle grinder or? Well, it's a pneumatic cut off wheel. Okay, those are awesome.

Yeah, I'm getting one except I plan to upgrade my air compressor. Oh, you don't, you don't really need

that much with it. Really. I used it with a with a small tank. And I was able to cut big stuff.

Alright, next time on the map. I will have a cut off wheel and you'll see more Baldon Yeah, it

was his hands will be cut more.

Let me get this in my forehead.

Hey, actually, what's crazy is I worked at Walmart back in the day I was the owner. No, no, I was not. I was not the greeter. I was the dude who threw bricks in the back of your car. Like guys would pull up into the garden center. And they would they would have ordered like 15,000 bricks and it's the middle of summer and they'd be like Steve go out there fill their truck hit the count each one. No, no. And it's and what Yes, I do. And on top of that, they like you'd have all these construction workers and they'd stand there and watch me fill their truck with bricks. I'm like, come on their job. Like it's yeah, it's not their job. Yeah, exactly. But regardless, I was while I was working there, my boss at the time, she came up to me, and she's like, Hey, check this out. And she showed me a picture and it's a dude in a hospital bed. And he's got a grinding wheel from a bench grinder. You know, like the ones are like three quarter inch, ya know, like, taken out of his head. And I was like, Oh my God, what did you find? She's like, No, that's my husband. He's in the hospital right now. Jesus Christ. Are you getting out of here? You know, like he's got

the right attitude.

It was it was funny. How nonchalant she was about it.

Like that happens all the time. Last week, nail on the forehead.

Yeah. Yeah. Cuz I mean, like, it was like a big triangle of stone. Sticking out of this dude's head. He survived. So that's my Walmart story.

So this weekend, I'll probably start filling the guts out of it because it's completely empty the box

you just have switches and stuff on it. Yeah, just switches

in. The main important thing though, is I found a what was called a RCD. I don't know if we ever talked about this in the fight. Maybe we did. We

talked we talked a little bit ago about getting a GFCI

GFCI. So I did a lot of research on this stuff. And a GFCI is while an RCD is a GFCI

I think it's, it's actually the other way around. Because RCD stands for residual current device, right and a GFCI is a residual current device. And so in

the industrial world, you have our our CDs. And so I wanted something that was DIN rail and if you try in DIN rail GFCI you won't find anything for they're super expensive, or they're really expensive, like you won't find it so I started looking up. And basically I just stumbled upon our CD as a term and started searching for our CDs. And I found a lot you could buy it buy these normally and you know, industrial stores and stuff Ranger but they're usually rated for 30 milliamps which is the which is the basic basically the highest rating your heart could take before you die.

Yeah 30 Millions at 220 volt. That's gonna hurt.

Yeah. And but that 30 milliamps is what it takes to make your heart not heart anymore,

right GFCI is usually topped out at five, five to

10 It depends on what it is like the spa one I was looking at was 10

like the ones in your bathroom. You know where you have a hairdryer next or a toaster next to the the bathtub, you know Yeah, those are usually five.

But so I started looking and see if I can find when these are CDs that was in 10. And I found one I had to order from AliExpress. But the company was pretty reputable. And the big thing was when I opened up the box, it didn't smell like Shenzen didn't smell like this shinjin plasticky, like smell. Yeah,

you didn't open it up in a cloud a smog comes up.

No. So I ordered a couple of them because I'm gonna give one to Stephen so he doesn't kill himself. Yay. And so I ordered spares good. Took like, three weeks was awesome. That's how I'm I'm like, when I'm buying all these parts. I'm ordering spares in case that could be that's like the worst thing to happen during the brew day is like running out of propane. Oh, god, that was terrible. Yeah, I've had that happen. Yeah, I've had that happen multiple times. Yeah. It's just like, I want to make sure that doesn't happen with my electric setup. So I run out of money. No, you won't run out? Well, you might use it as a hurricane or the power goes out. But barring that, like if a part breaks, I wouldn't be able to get around that quickly. Oh, buying like s especially when you blew up your SSR yep, yep. Spare us as far as having spare PID controller all that stuff. So I can just swap out and fail. I had four

extra SSRS lying around. So yeah. So the but so so the RCD is not like a traditional breaker. It's not gonna break if it overcurrent.

It will. The problem is you can't find they don't make them in 50 amps. Oh, what are breweries are rated for? Right? This you either get like 40 something or it goes up to 63.

So it does both it breaks if there's an offset and it breaks if an overcurrent strikes. Oh, that's what

this is right at 63 amps. And 10 milli amp of RCD.

1. Okay, so that's not bad.

Yeah. So how am I going to set up those I can put I have a breaker on the wall. That's 50 amp already, but I'm gonna put another 50 amp breaker in my box just so it's closer to the stuff that can be going wrong, right? And then it goes to this RCD. Gotcha. So that way, the that I still trip on the 50 amp, which is what my cords are rated for. So I don't have to go at 63 Yeah, or if there's an issue at the box or something like that,

right. And multiple levels of protection never hurts. Oh, it's always good. Yeah. And and for the most part, there's, there's there's actually only a few processes that would actually utilize the full 50 apps. And they're rare when you actually need to do that for a prolonged period of time basically

on my setup would be running both elements and all three pumps at the same time. Right, right. Which is like I've yet like 49 amps.

Yeah, that's That's hardcore, even when you're boiling the element. Like once you actually get to boiling temperature, the elements only running at like 10% Because all it needs to do is keep it at a boil. Yeah. So it you know, the time it takes for it to get up to boiling is where you're kind of dumping 100% into it.

So one question I don't know a lot about is should we be grounding or pots that have those elements in it? Should the pots be grounded? Yes,

absolutely. Okay, absolutely. You

have a wooden a wooden holder for everything. Oh you're grounded

then my my pots are grounded through the through the element. Okay, well the sorry i i have a box that that hangs off the side of my pot that houses the connections to the element that itself in there I have a full ground connection that reaches back to my control box and it's grounded through there Okay, so

I should ground my pots

yes 100 But you're not grinding the element you have a separate connection that grounds okay to some solid connection on the pot.

Yeah. How to make sure that that happens.

Yes, yeah. Because Because the thing is like in the elements there are ceramic element that's surrounded by steel. If for any reason that steel cracks, then the water gets electrified then the tank gets electric or the pot so you want a direct path to ground in that case. Then you want your RCD to pop yes yeah. Yes you want to it but I have seen it before where guys use a steel cart and then they ground the cart also. Yeah, which that's a good idea.

Well, I'm gonna build my cart as steel Bob's gonna have wooden slats across to help insulate insulation so I'll just make sure the pots are grounded through the

element the that's all I do and that works fine and you don't have to have all the pots insulated like my mash tuns not insulated. Oh, yes, but But you know the water through it is you know, because my whatever pot is is actively boiling at the moment is, is grounded. Yeah. And in fact, you're going to have you have two separate pots with two elements in them. Each connected to your box. Each one of those should have its own individual ground wire up. So cool.

three wires elements. Yes, yeah.

Hot, bad and ground. Bad. You know, actually, I'll tell you, I'll tell you a joke. In fact, this guy, I doubt he listens. But maybe maybe he does. There was a guy that I got. He's a good friend of mine. But I haven't I haven't actually even talked to him in years. But he was in like, all of my labs in college, just somehow it always happened that he and I would get paired together in a lab. So we were always lead partners. And we had this thing going, you know, you'd get those like real crappy breadboards Oh, yeah. They give you anything up. Yeah, yeah. And then they and then they give you like a pile of resistors that 400 Kids have used before where all the legs are like super messed up. Oh,

squiggly, squiggly together and pull them apart. Yeah.

And you can't push them in. Yeah, but yeah, this these are college lab woes. It's like, Man, I gave my my college how much money and I can't get a resistor with a straight leg. Regardless, this guy and I, the whole this this has to do with the wiring thing we just said, You know how in breadboard. They have the power strip from top and bottom. And they're usually marked red and blue. For some reason, we got the mentality that blue was power and red was ground. And we had these phrases for it. It was blue so hot, and red. Not so hot. And blue was always power and red was always ground. And so like every time I do a breadboard nowadays, blues always power and reds always grow. So

if you're ever in Stevens shop, that's don't wire breadboards up wrong.

No, I just thought that was funny. Just because I don't know. Like that was like our thing. And we did it for like years on end. Blue. So hot. Red. Not so hot. So I wonder why

they chose color blue? On pegboards.

Yeah, I don't know. You would think green would make more red and green or red and black. Yeah, yeah.

Because the screw terminals. If you have a fancier breadboard, it's got the screw terminals at the top. Right. It'll have red, black and green. Yeah, but like, it doesn't have red, blue and green. Right?

Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. I don't know. Maybe Maybe Blue was just available when they made all the breadboard maybe

all the boards in the world. Yeah, they made them all like one

made it all within like a week and they're still selling them. You know, it's funny that they're not asking the

hard questions. on breadboard.

So, kind of we're talking about beer brewing. In the same vein, this is actually super annoying. But one of my favorite hop rising varieties is Citra. Yeah, it's an awesome, delicious. Oh, it's so great. The thing that sucks about it, it's a proprietary blend. And there's only one basic conglomerate that grows it, okay. And they don't grow it regularly. So right now, almost every, you know, bag of Citra that you get is from the 2015 crop. And it's just been degrading. And the funny thing that's interesting, I brewed a batch in 2015 that had citron. And it was delicious. And I brewed a beer recently that had citrus in it, and it just wasn't as like, bam, it wasn't as you know, lively and vibrant. So basically what happens is this company as long as they have the, I guess, patent to grow Citra they grow in big batches, and then they sell out of the until they finish that when they grow another

source. They own the genetic code. It's like what's a company such as the M? Monsanto?

Yeah, Monsanto. Yeah. Yeah, they, they have the code, but they they grow it in huge batches. And then they sell until they they're out. And apparently they haven't sold out of Citra yet. And so pretty much every Citra hops you get now is three years old. Which sucks and and you can't get the bulb so you can't grow it yourself. No, the rhizomes they, it's illegal because they own that code. Damn. I can't remember I actually did some research on it. I looked it up the other day. It's something like I they own it for like 10 years or something. So it's gonna be a while until Citra can be grown by anyone has written around for a long time. It has been but it's still not out of the it's called the Gobi couple years left. But like if you try to go get like, what is it like centennial, or, or any of the other like big one SCADA cascade? Oh, if you cascade it would have been picked like yesterday. If you go to the the hop store and yet it

cascades great because you can use it here and use and cascade grows like a weed. It basically is. Oh yeah, they are like I've grown cascade in my backyard. That was my, my best. My favorite beer ever brewed was from those cascades. I grew in my backyard because it was just fresh.

You can cut them off the vine to throw it right in as I did. Yeah,

I didn't dry him out. I put like pound of Hopsin because like me dry mouth, they lose like a 10th. Or they lose like nine tenths of the weight. Yeah, so, right sosman Nice. Alright, so actual electronics now.

Yeah. This is the variety. Our right here, a variety our.

Um, so I had an article that came out about those PCM 5122 DAX, I've been working on. Yep. So I'm working on the next article, which is about doing low volume testing on a product. And so I'm using this board for this, when you

say low volume, like, what, what numbers are you thinking?

From, like 500 to 1000 units, basically, like, at that point, you kind of want a test fixture? Yeah, you

don't want a guy sitting on a bench one by one plugging stuff in. Yeah,

it's still gonna be one by one. But it's designed to be quick. And you just you don't have to plug anything in. So like I added test points to the bottom of the board. Getting the board made right now. And so I started working on the code to talk to it because the problem with the Raspberry Pi is it takes like 30 to 45 seconds for it to boot up. And you have to basically re initialize that I squared C and I to S Bus with Linux every single time so you had to for each board, you'd have to turn off the Raspberry Pi, swap the board out, put a new one in, turn it back on. Wait 45 seconds.

Oh, you can't do that through Linux. reinitialize.

I haven't figured it out. Oh,

I bet you there is a way to do it. But it's probably hard if you haven't figured it out.

Yeah, I haven't figured it out yet. And so I basically spent the last day making an Arduino zero because zero supports itu s making it talk to the PCM 5122.

So I got that working, which you can swap in and out on.

And I've tested is all I made the routine basically is it runs the the drives the PCM. It has a soft initialization that was the hardest thing was setting up this saltation. Figuring out what registers I needed to talk to that chip to actually send it. I squared our IQs data to make noise. And one at one point I actually sniffed with my DLA, I sniffed the I squared C bus between the Raspberry Pi and in this DAC to figure out what it was sending to drive it. It's interesting. I'm pretty sure about this, I'll post the the, the stuff I sniffed off the bus. So it tries to drive two different i square C devices with the the Hi Fi berry driver is trying to hit nine a and nine B. So nine A is the I square C address and nine V was another address it was trying to hit at the same time but always return as knacks. So not not acknowledged. But it kept you think you will try to figure out how to like a left and right kind of thing. Yeah, or something like that. But you think you would try to do try to test and then stop doing one. But it was trying to configure anyways, I'll post it up. So maybe someone's smarter than me can figure out why it's doing that. It's actually setting up the DAC to output the to actually drive the Raspberry Pi that tell the Raspberry Pi how to send out the data. Oh, so it's it's basically talking to the Raspberry Pi tells the DAC say hey, send me the clock data. And I'll send you the data at the right rate.

Oh, so the deck sort of masters it in? Yeah,

yeah. I might not be 100% Sure. But when I was looking at it, that's what it look like. That's weird. So I'll put the post something I might even make a little tiny blog article about that, because that's kind of funky. So anyways, the rest I

mean, don't you normally like you pull the address? And then you say here's the speed. I'm going to give you data.

Yes. And then you and then the raspberry Raspberry Pi for the master would drive the Clock Line for the IQs and then send the data to

right and then and then whoever's whoever's listening at that address line yak would get it it would Yeah, so but in this case, it's saying like I want to talk to you and then it says I'll only talk to you if you go this fast.

No, no, no, no no. Is it because the ice we're seeing IQs are different data lines. Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. It talks to the DAC and says I'm going I'm I want to set up this this sound data here this fast. And you're going to drive the line. Oh, I got you. I got a DAC is driving the the the data back or the clock lines I should say. So it's driving the bit clock and it's driving the frame clock.

You That's yeah, that's a that's a that's a nifty way of doing it. And

then the Raspberry Pi is sending out the data at that. Right, right.

Well, and I guess what makes sense about that is the deck then has a very fixed audio rate, like, yeah, it doesn't change. And you're pretty much guaranteed that whatever's driving that deck is going to be running faster than the deck itself, supposedly. Well, it's, I mean, you would think it would, that would make sense. And so whatever, so that way that the deck always holds its timeframe. properly, as opposed to being slaved to Yes, you know, that whatever computer decides to go to Yeah,

so the thing is those the Arduino IDE, s library isn't set up like that. It's set up to where the Arduino drives a DAC and says, This is going to be the bit clock, this is gonna be the frame clock, and here's your data and deal with it, basically. And so I basically had to go through the entire datasheet of the PCM 512. To figure out which registers I had to adjust his, like, 30 of them. And that initializes it and then made my 400 hertz tone.

Oh, nice wave. I thought you were gonna just write your own iOS driver. No, no, I'm

not that crazy. I, yeah, yeah. So I got the, the frequency setup, and the code is kind of hacked together right now. Because it's kind of just cycling through. And it's not perfect. Like when I'm updating the, the channel, I'm not on just like throwing bike up. Throwing the baits at the the driver, right now, like bait, like, what needs to be is needs to be interrupt driven setups, where it's what throws it at the I square C IQs. Lines, it's actually on a normal basis, because right now it's kind of in the tournament. So you can kind of hear it, sometimes I will click but for testing right now it works.

Well, yeah. But the whole point of testing is, can you get a tone out of it? Yes. If you do, who cares if it's like clicks every once in a while, that's, that doesn't matter.

And so then I wanted to Okay, now I have that working. Now I need to read back that signal back into the Arduino. Oh, so you want to actually test the frequency? Yes. Because then you have a feedback loop of this board actually working. And so I fed back in and then of course, the first thing you do is analog read a three right? Yeah. And that like, completely blows up your your loop because it's that takes forever to happen on Arduino. Dude.

Digital, right? Analog, right and analog read and analog, right? All four of those are just like, holy crap. They take so many clock cycles. If you actually look under the hood of the Arduino, it's like, wow, that's really slow.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you start timing it out and stuff. And so it was it was so bad. Actually, I couldn't fill up the data. It basically uses a DMA, which is a special kind of direct direct memory access is what DMA stands for. It's basically sending stuff out to the eye to s buffer, a Hardware Buffer, direct from memory, is what the drivers doing. And I couldn't fill the DMA fast enough with that analog, or analog read in. And so I went online and found a project by Albert van Daylin. His websites AIVD web, he wrote a analog read fast. happens, like it's like 400 microseconds for a normal one. Wow. No, that's a normal analog reads are slow. Oh, okay. I see what you said. Yeah, I see this other ones like 20.

He's doing a lot of like Port calls instead of like, inherent Arduino calls.

Yeah. And that actually works. Like you can't even tell when that's innate. Like I actually measured it on the scope, the frequency coming out, you can't actually tell if there's an issue or not. So that's good. I just want to move that the DMA filling to a actual proper interrupts and then that could be done.

You know, just a suggestion, something that's really easy for hammering out frequency detection. If you're working with sine waves, you can just throw a sine wave into a Schmitt trigger, and turn it into a real nice square wave, and then just use the Millis function on an input wave, and just basically capture digital edges. And you can Oh, so I'm actually it's a zero crossing.

I'm actually using the FFT library.

Yeah, you're doing, you're doing so much overhead.

But the thing is, it doesn't need to do it. It only it runs for like five seconds. Yeah. And then it stops it stuff and then does an FFT.

Well, basically, it fills a buffer fills a buffer and then runs the FFT on the buffer. Yeah. But then, after it does the FFT, that just gives you another buffer full data, you then have to interpret that data

know that actually the FFT library will give you frequencies. Okay. Well,

under the hood of the FFT library, it does that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So

you can actually just pull the main, basically frequency, and it's 400 hertz, and I'm like, are close to I'll have like a window, it'll say pass,

huh? So we, we did a project back in, in college where we made a guitar tuner. What we used, gosh, I don't remember what the program was, but we were sucking in data, then we'd run a, an FFT on it. And then we just fill an array. We took that array, we just sorted all the values, rearrange them all and then pick whichever one was the highest. And that turned out to be our fundamental. And like we were able to make like a real time computer. guitar tuner is cool. Yeah, it actually worked out pretty well. But I would assume that an Arduino is probably not Grunty enough to actually pull that off and not in real time. No, maybe Raspberry Pi.

Maybe. Match? Yeah, yeah. Depends on how much sample

maybe a Raspberry Pi three b plus three.

That's a new one. Yeah. What? 200 megahertz?

No. 1200 megahertz. Oh, 1.2 gigahertz for core. Okay, cool. But yeah, yeah.

All right. On to the RFO. Mm hmm. So I forgot to look up what episode we talked

about this guy. It was a handful of go Yeah, mad my cues is back. This is the guy that is the professional stunt limo driver. And

so but but but, but he's got a secret Second Life.

Yeah. Flat Earther. I can't remember episode we talked about a min. But it was like 20 episodes ago, something like that. And yeah,

something where we actually talked about this happening. Yes, this

happening. He was building a steam powered rocket to go high enough to figure out if the Earth was flat or not. And we talked about like, that kind of got like a conspiracy theory episode ish. Yeah. But anyways, we're not gonna talk anything about that. We're just gonna talk about what actually happened, right? He wanted to see with his own eyes, the curvature of this, and he went 1850 feet up, which is not high enough. It's nowhere near how high you need to go to see that.

Okay, so I actually did a little bit of research right before, and a typical airliner cruises at 37,000 feet, which is quite a bit higher than 1875 feet. And

and his buildings higher than this. Right? Right. He could have just gone to the top of a building,

or Mount Everest is 20,020 feet or something like that. You could have just climbed Everest, and I shouldn't say just but you know, yeah. For Sunday, Sunday drive up ever probably, you know, I bet you for the same amount of cost. You could you could learn to climb a mountain and become really good at it and actually climb Everest or make a steam powered rockets. Yeah, regardless via an airplane flying at 37,000 feet, gives you a viewing radius out a window of somewhere, or like direct view of about 350 miles somewhere in that range. Which if you look at the curvature, that gives you about a 3.4 degree arc on the earth, which for most human eyes, I would say almost all human eyes is in perceivable. Now I'm not trying to say that it's a flat earth kind of thing. But a cruising airplanes not even high enough to see a true curve on the earth or something where you would just look at and be like, yeah, it's curved. You know?

I got it. Because remember, in this year's Star Wars Episode, yep, we calculated how far away the star the Death Star was. Yeah. And it had to have one pin perfect accuracy. Like you see from the viewing deck on the Death Star, you can see the curvature of Scariff. Right? So you need to build a star destroyer or a Death Star to see the coverage.

Well, that's the next thing that the Flat Earthers need to do. They know what here's what went on. Here's the best part. The Flat Earthers need to build a giant spherical planet and put it into space so they can find out if ours is spherical or not. Yes. I love it. That'd be great. Actually, have you seen? We'll come back to this in a second. But have you seen the new conspiracy about the footprint on the moon? No. So if you kneel on Trump's first footprint, yeah, it's got like a specific, you know, it's got the Nike swoosh on it or whatever, no, but it's got like a footprint feature. It's got it's got a very specific footprint. But there's been pictures circulating about the actual space suit that he wore, and people taking pictures of like the spacesuit and it doesn't have the same footprint. But like, it's ridiculous. People are flipping out about this. The astronauts like had clip on boots that they clip underneath their suit. Yeah. And that has the the footprint on it. In fact, NASA still has the plastic mold that they use for that exact boot. Yeah. And they were late and like NASA has been posting pictures being like, Come on, guys. Really? You know you you look this up Iris. Go look up. Look up. Neil Armstrong footprint or what conspiracy? The moon's made of cheese. Hopefully Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's there's all kinds of pictures of it now.

Yeah. Regardless, so Mad Mike Hughes. Yeah, we had to post the video too about this because it was actually it's actually kind of impressive. Because he went 150 feet up, which is that's pretty high. But the fact that he went about 350 miles an hour. Yeah, that's, that's a little ridiculous. So I'm gonna do some. I'm gonna look at the video more closely and like figure out how much jeez he went.

Went through. Probably a ton. If you watch the video, it accelerates pretty. It goes from

zero to like, a zillion miles an hour in like, one frame of the camera. Oh, yeah.

I guarantee you for the first couple of seconds. He probably wasn't breathing. Probably not. No. and 350 miles an hour. That's pretty damn fast. For what? What it really ends up being is like a really big Estus rocket. You know?

It's a steam powered rocket.

It's like, Wait, is this 1850 or something? I've looked up a civil war rock

powered rockets. Yeah. Yeah. So Evil Knievel tried to drunk like snake can a canyon or something like that a steam powered rocket and failed. Because his his parachutes opened early. Okay. And there's not a lot of data on like those rockets. But then I found a land speed record of the fastest steam powered rocket like vehicle. There's 214 miles an hour. So Mad Mike Hughes, you might have the world's fastest steam powered thing on this planet.

So in order to prove that the earth is flat, they invented new technology

in his front lawn.

Actually, yeah, if you look at pictures of it, it's literally like his house. Rocket. I mean, hey, you know a mad props to you, dude. It's pretty cool. Like to Wait, I'm confused. I guess what? You have a rocket and in the back. You just have a big like fuel tank with what heaters on it? And you just eat it up? No, it gets heated on the ground. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, like, it's, it's on. Okay, so it's basically this thing was already at a at an angle on a sled. Yep. It's almost a vertical angle. And so it's already pointing up and you just heat it up. And then what you just open a little valve and about the bottom? Yep. And that's it. Like go how great would it be if it was like a little PVC valve? That guy like turn?

The best is when right you're ready. There's a video of this guy testing this thing. Yeah. And like it fails to go off. And so he's like, poking out with Yeah, you know, man, Matthews, if you want to come on the podcast. So then like rock about your rocket? That'd be awesome. Yeah, we

will skip the whole flat Earth thing. We'll talk just about the rocket. Yeah, cuz that's kind of cool. Yeah, we'll go watch the video. It's on. It's on YouTube. We'll post a link for it. It's it's impressive. And I think there was like a dual parachute landing. I mean, like, he goes up, it pops up. I mean, it really is an essence rocket that runs on water. I wonder actually been I wonder if if you just spent the money and just bought like, hundreds of Vestas rockets and just fired them all at once would have been justice. I wonder.

Okay, so he got, at least in the article I wrote. I read he got eight grand from the flat flat Earth research or research Flat Earth, society to cite whatever. So yeah, I wonder if we would need to get figured out how much energy that's going to kind of hard with figure out how much the rocket would weigh. And then it actually got to that height, then we could figure out how much energy it would have stored because it's turning kinetic energy into? Well, no. Is it wood is pressurized water, kinetic or potential energy? That's potential. So it's turning into kinetic energy to get it up. Okay. Right. Right. So

it's not doing anything necessarily at first other than just being hot.

Yeah. And then with the figure, basically, how much material you need, and all that stuff. Good. Well, no, no. So back it back in the back up. So figure out how much rocket weighs. We know how high you went. Then we can figure out how much energy he would need to get up there and knowing how much energy he would need, then we can take that eight out and see how much energy would take to buy SLS rocket solid fuel rockets, basically, and see if we come up with the same number,

see if it would be cheaper to just go to Walmart and make a rocket from Walmart of rockets. So I just calculated how many dollars per foot. They the Flat Earth Society spent. They spent $4.25 A foot to get him into the air. $4 Yeah. $4 I wonder how much NASA spends per foot to get a rocket? SpaceX, SpaceX you right? NASA's gone. Yeah. Thanks, Obama. Yeah, that'd be, that'd be interesting cuz I heard it's something I did. They don't obviously don't do it per foot because that doesn't make any sense. They it's per pound,

it's pound to lto. What's lto? Now Elio low earth orbit,

oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm basically just her dollars per pound. And it's like multi $1,000.

dollars per pound doesn't really mean anything. You have to give how far it goes. Usually it means Elio.

Okay. dollars per pound per height. Sort of. It's just the figure I saw was like, How much does it cost to get a pound into space? Yeah. And so space is a it's a pretty broad term. Once you get past a certain level, like Yeah, everything is spaced past that level. Yeah. So I know a geosynchronous like what are the the satellites for geo tracking and stuff like that? Those are like way the hell out there. Now those costs a ton of money. But you don't need as many satellites out there. You know, for getting Yes. synchronous orbit. Yes. Well, geosynchronous orbit. Yeah, I think it's something It's ridiculous. It's something like 33,000 miles, or something like that. Whereas like, I don't think that far. I don't, I don't remember exactly. It's huge. I looked it up a while ago. Whereas like, you know, all the like, communication satellites are like a 10th of that. Because they don't need to be that far out. Cool. Yo,

so one more topic. Okay. I, we kind of touched on this when you're talking about school projects and stuff is ideas for summer projects for students Hmm. By breadboard.

But all your power on blue and all your grounds on red, and you'll pass on do that. None of my lab guys ever checked it. They just cared if it worked.

So what sort of electronics engineer or engineer in college and he's at you know, he's got to go home and stay with his parents for like three months and hate it. Because, you know, we don't leave our houses at all.

No, the sun actually kills us. If it Yeah, yeah. 15 minutes tops.

What kind of project I'm trying to remember projects I was doing back then.

I built the my first my first Dino summer home, I built two guitar amps. That was actually while I was working at Walmart. So I work working eight, nine hours at Walmart come home and then spend eight, nine hours building guitar amps. And somewhere they were sleeping there. So I mean, that was cool. But I was already into that. Like, getting into something new. Hmm. Well, cuz

you gotta think as most students aren't like us, they didn't build the beard. Well, no. build things. Because you remember in school were like, how many of your fellow classmates actually built things on the weekends? Or after school? Oh, my

gosh, none. do eat me. It was surprising. I was surprised. I knew I knew. Yeah. A number very close to zero. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it was always surprising because I was like, that's our engineers. What are you doing? Maybe I'm just weird, but like, I sort of feel like, like, don't you get excited about this stuff? Don't you want to like go do it like outside of the classroom? The classroom sucks. Let's go do something cool. Exactly. But like, I don't know. I mean, I remember one summer we came, we came back and my buddy who had done a project in his high school, they had they had to create a boat out of cardboard, or something like that had to hold like five people. It was part of their physics class or whatnot. I remember

was like a more to science class than me then it was

it was physics because they were they were doing the whole like water displacement versus us and all that kind of crap, whatever. That boring stuff.

doesn't actually matter in a cardboard boat.

Yeah. What we ended up doing is we ended up creating like flaming arrows and we brought it to a pond out in the middle of nowhere and we we set it off. Like we shot

flaming. You gave us a Viking funeral.

Yeah, we gave a Viking funeral to and in this whole boat. It was hilarious because this whole boat they made a huge boat. I mean, it was massive, like half the size of a garage. And they kept it for some reason. I don't know why for years, and then when we finally decided to get rid of it, it was actually in the shape of a penguin and the head even painted and everything like that. So there's this giant flaming penguin in a pond. And of course the cops came and we had to run away and it was it was fun. So that's that was a summer project I

did, circa what 2008

That would have been you'd probably closer to six or seven

2006 through two, I'm gonna look this up. So you're gonna find some newspaper clippings of a flaming,

flaming penguin and upon Central Tech, you might you might be able to, you might be able to Yeah, Oh, that'd be great. It was it was fun. Project I,

I built one of my first projects that I built was a power supply an LM 317. That's a really good first project. And didn't cost me a lot. I basically went around. I went around West Campus in Austin. And like, just because people just don't shit away out in the back alleys because they're, you know, those are the like, that's like the where the rich students lived. So like, their parents bought them like a microwave and refrigerators and all these electronics and they just don't wait because they're moving, going back home. So I pick and that's how I picked up a bunch of like Transformers and stuff and made a power supply out of it. So yeah, I guess building a variable power supply. Somehow, maybe. I don't know if an LM 317 is like popular anymore. It is ish. I guess it does about an amp and a half before frying.

I mean, the thing is the LM, I feel like that 317 was super popular back in the day, when micro USB chargers weren't everywhere. Just now that those are everywhere. You have your five volts readily available all the time. So if anything, like a, you could make a little boost converter thing that's that's plugs into a USB, that gives you like 12 volts from a five volt and then drop that down to Oh, yeah. I tell you what, how about a USB stick that gives you 12? Nine, five 3.3 and 1.8. Like it just kind of gives you like the the gamut right there. That actually really cool. Yeah. And you know, that's that's a challenge problem. Can you make one, one stick that produces all those

events? Your challenge is making it run off of USB on the go on your phone?

Oh, so your phone can charge it can boost it boost it? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's pretty cool.

Now you're talking about adding some digital crap in there? Yeah. Yeah, get a little too much for a student. But I think well, especially a first semester student. Yeah. You know, everything about like a project that someone who's doesn't do electronics for hobby yet? How can they get into it?

You know, okay, so one thing I would actually suggest is, is a project that somehow is actually useful. That's a thing like a power supply. Well, and what I mean is, is okay, so if you build something over the summer, instead of something that you might just leave at mom and dad's house, or something that you actually bring with you and use. It's something that like, you might be able to show off to a professor or something that that maybe like, Oh, you got a new roommate, and you show them it's cool, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Like, you're

the lamest person ever, probably, probably, or

remember, gosh, we talked about this way early on. Remember the guy who had like, the the circuit where he could automatically lock his door from his computer? Or? It was it was some

incognito mode enabled block. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, that guy

was like, that were years ago. That was, yeah, that was a long time ago. But but something something in that vein, something that like you might actually use, because the thing about something that you might use once, if it breaks after that first use, you're kind of like, but if you build something that you want to use on a regular basis, you're gonna want to maintain it, you're going to want to build it right, you're gonna want to, you know, do the right thing. And so I think that would be a good starting point for choosing a project at least.

And I would say the biggest thing is, don't be afraid of doing a project that someone's already done before.

Oh, God, everyone does projects that people have done before.

Yeah, no, but a lot. Some people get into this mode where I've seen this online where like, I want to do a project. But when I looked that project up, someone's done it, I'm like, do it just just because someone's done, it doesn't mean you can't do it a slightly different way. Or just ignore it and just design it yourself. Sure, you might come up with the same solution. But you did all the work yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Also, I mean, take away from the fact that you design something

well, and you can you can choose at whatever level you want to be a quote, inventor. Like let's say, let's say you're looking for a project and you see one that's really cool. And you want to do that. You could either do it step by step, or you could, you know, try to do a little bit yourself compare against what they did try to do a little bit more yourself. You know, see what you can improve upon Why not? I mean, hell that's half of engineering is just approving upon what someone else has done. Yeah. So I guess we didn't give like any, like super specific. More like just like good guidelines. Yeah, guideline. Yeah, it's something we figure out what you what makes you happy and just go do it.

Yeah. Or take an existing hobby and say that you have and say if I built something that did this, would it make that hobby dowry? Enjoy more enjoyable,

right? Also, summer break is not that long. So get on it and start making stuff.

That's why I had it now in March. This

now Well, yeah, but I mean, like, once you're in summer break like clock's ticking. Yeah. Yeah.

Instead of doing your finals, design your summer project. Yeah. And don't

listen to Parker. make good grades. Drink your homework, do your milk, and you'll be good.

Okay, so that was the mega RAM engineering broadcasts home of excellent device. Home of what Excellent advice

Oh, I'm sorry, said I thought he said excellent device. I was like I'm sure okay. Yeah, there's a lot of those here Yeah. I were guest Sparky Roman. Steven Greg later on Day Good evening

Thank you. Yes, you our listener for downloading and taking the advice from our show. If you have a cool idea, project or topic that you want Steven and I discussed Tweet us at Mac fat or email us at podcast at Mac fan comm also check out our Slack channel where we talk about lots of cool people's projects. If you're not subscribed to the podcast yet, click that subscribe button. That way you get the latest episode right when it releases and please review us wherever you listen. It helps the show stay visible and helps new listeners find us