What are the common Design Rule Check errors that Parker and Stephen see as Contract Manufacturers? Are these DRC errors the ones that you run into?
On this episode, Parker sifts through marketing gimmicks for component ratings and Stephen discusses dual rail power supply designs.
PCB serial numbering? Parker and Stephen cover their thoughts on applying a unique identifier to PCBs in production for inventory and testing control.
Figure 1: SSPS front panel test layout. Miniature version of the real front panel to test physical placement and new parts.
Figure 2: Two TPS65982-EVM booster packs. One is powering the other over USB Type-C. Parker was able to pull 20V @ 3.2A before his Re:load Pro overheated.
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 macro fab engineering podcast. We are your hosts, Parker
Dohmen and Steven Craig.
So Steven this week, you've been working more on the FX dev board enclosure, right?
Yeah. Getting closer and closer to our goal of launching the crowdfunding. So I've been working a bit on the enclosure and getting the PC board just ironed out. We've, we're on the second revision of the PC board. And I think just some minor silkscreen and some hole movement here and there just to get the PC board up and running.
Okay, yeah. The mounting board, mounting tabs and stuff changing Yeah, yeah.
Simple stuff that doesn't have an impact on the on the actual operation. It's just, it makes more sense to move some holes around for the enclosure that we're doing.
Yeah. And you were also working on the on your an updated version of your diode clamp, op amp, right?
Yeah, yeah. So the first version I made was actually just a single supply op amp. So you only have one op amp, similar to like a DL 071 version. But I always initially intended to make a dual supply, or I shouldn't say supply a dual op amp version. So I actually designed two separate boards, one of them each containing an op amp, and I'm going to stack them and solder them together in a vertical configuration, so that I can have both op amps.
Are you using, like, longer headers or something to make that work?
Yeah, that's, that's kind of the plan right now. I haven't really figured out the legs yet. Initially, I'm kind of thinking about thick resistor legs, just sticking them through the holes. In the other hand, it's a little ghetto. But the thing is the the standard, like the square pin headers, they don't fit into IC sockets. No. And the way I want to make this is this op amp is such that you can just pop out whatever, eight pin DIP chip and put this thing in as a drop in replacement. So I got to figure out the the leg situation.
Yeah, eventually, you're going to have a skyscraper PCBs. If 1520 1520 high that are all just like, you know, like, that's how you would do your 505 timer, discrete five, five timer that fits in a dip eight packet. It's
easy, right? It's, it's a point four by point four inch chip. But it's five inches tall? Yeah, five
inches tall. So I've been working on the super simple power spar. Yeah. The I got the front panel test board done. And I explained it a bit last week what that is, but I'll explain it again. It's basically just testing all the physical footprints and new chips that hadn't used before. Basically, in a lower cost version than running the giant for their front panel board. Yeah, that board is gonna, you know, just the PCB alone is gonna cost, you know, probably 200 bucks. Yeah. And, you know, basically make a small scale version that's cheaper.
So what's what's on this test board. So
it's got the VFD display, it's got all the 16 segment, guys. It's got those 16 bit PWM controllers for LEDs constant current drivers made by St. I can't remember the part number. It's got an, it's got the RGB encoder. It's got a parallax propeller on it for this. It's that sense of that. That's what we're using for the controller for the system. And all the pins on not using are broken out. And so eventually, we'll be able to interface this with the op amp. And like kind of a low level scale test. See, oh, yeah, this actually does work. kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's that's pretty much it on that base, and mainly using the making sure that the, the LED placements are good, because they're stacked right next to each other. And if you're off by a little bit, it's going to be, you know, not the LEDs won't be flat.
Well, and last week, you were talking about having spacers to set the height of everything. Having that having the actual board in front of you a visual, being able to touch it that I'm sure that'll help a lot.
Yeah, making those I have. I have the one made for the 16 segments designed. And so I just got designed the rest of them, and I'm just going to print them on my home printer. Oh, okay.
Okay. you're eventually going to have that manufactured or just
do it all apart, just printing them all in on my house printer. Yeah, I mean, it's not like we're making a lot of Yeah, And then it's not like we're we have to do anything super precise or anything like that. I mean, it's just a flat piece of plastic with holes in it. Sure. It doesn't have to pretty either.
So he said there were some new chips that you were dealing with.
Yeah, the those St. Constant current drivers. And so they basically work like shift registers you clock in into the data, and then you latch it when you're done. Okay, and they just, they're just cascaded down. So data in, and then there's a data out, but they're designed for driving LEDs. Yeah. And I haven't said I have them all set to 20 milliamps of current, which is what all of us,
but she said it's PWM, right?
Yeah, my. No, I'm going to be PWM mean, the control the controllers. Oh, okay. I gotcha. Yeah. So parallax propeller is going to be basically hammering them as fast as I could. Yeah. Or as fast as I can. So I can do demean with these constant current drivers. I gotcha. Okay. That should work. Well, hope i The big thing is if I can, if I can hammer that that clock rate fast enough to actually make that work without flickering. How fast do you think you need to go? I don't know yet. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Yeah, figured out when we actually start programming. And then a little update on the USB type C stuff I've been working on. I got those evaluation boards that TPS 6598 to IBM's. Ti. I got those in and I was able to basically power up my phone with them. I was able to power another evaluation board with them with 20 volts. Yeah. And I was actually using my reload Pro, which is a constant current load constant. Yeah, constant current load. I was able to pull like 3.2 amps at 20 volts before I overheated my reload Pro. Well, that's 60 to 70 watts. Yes. Almost 70 Watts, with just a passive heatsink. Awesome. So I'm gonna bring my reload Pro I have at home actually has a fan kit on it. So I'm gonna, so can go. Yeah, I
think 100 watts or something? Yeah, I can't remember
the exact value you can do. I think it actually can do 70 Watts continuous. Cool. Yeah, I'm playing more with that. I have a USB 3.0. Like, power distribution sniffer. So it actually can read the packets it sends to do the initialization.
For the power, oh, where it asks to draw.
manages. Yeah. So I'm gonna I'm gonna play with that. And basically see how configuring that TPS, 6592 Chip changes those packets, and how it requests data. Cool. Yeah, it's interesting. There's not a lot of documentation about type C for makers and hobbyists yet, so I'm hoping to change that.
Well. And the the chip, the main chip on those TPS boards is like a 190. Something pin BGA
Yeah, it's a nice a 90 pin BGA. And they're almost 10 bucks in singles.
Yeah, it's it's not hacker friendly.
No, but they have an evaluation board that makes it hacker friendly. So yeah, right.
Right. Yeah. And we'll but and also, type C is so new that it really hasn't boiled down to really simplistic chips yet.
Yeah, there's no like, like an ft 230 X FTDI. Chip. There's no like, you aren't chips or anything like that. There's basically just Kitchen Sink chips, right? Do
everything you need. And I was actually kind of
actually getting the AI doesn't have USB 3.0 chips. Really? They have like some USB 3.0 GPIO chips, which are really weird.
What is what is that? Just you talked to it, and then you can toggle pins? Yeah. Huh. So I guess if you if you wanted to, right. You could you could almost toggle the pins as a communication. Yeah, I think that's what it's, you could sort of work out your own protocol.
Yeah. Something like that. But there's no like, they don't make a USB 3.0 UART. Chip yet, which is interesting. Yeah,
yeah. How long is 3.0 been around two years now? Yeah. I'm surprised.
Yeah, I think it's mainly because you don't need that kind of speed for 2.0 I guess. Yeah. And I think there is a USB 2.0 Like specification for Type C. But I haven't seen a chip that handles that. All yet.
I thought all type C's were going to be 3.0
No, so type C is just the connector. Oh, okay. Because you can have you USB three point over type A. Yeah. But type C is can be is also backwards compatible.
Interesting. Yeah, he learned something
new every day. Yeah, it's, uh, there's a lot of cross information about type C and USB 3.0. But, uh, basically, you know, sifting through the data and information.
Yeah. And I was actually interested on those chips. I thought the they were having it such that all the power ran through the chip. And apparently that's not the case. No, they just has external control lines. That turns on MOSFET to dump the power.
Yeah, the these evaluation boards have two giant MOSFETs on them. Yeah. To basically pass, you know, you got past five amps of power.
So you know, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a really boiled down chip in the future that has all of that and the MOSFET in
it. Oh, rolled in. It'd be like a giant motor controller.
Yeah, basically, yeah.
And I'm still waiting to hear back from TI, because one of the things they mentioned in their documentation for the configuration utility for these chips. So basically, you can talk to the chip, and you can change how it you basically can change the program on them. And to do that they had this really nice windows utility. But you had to talk to the chip through ICRC and spy. And so they, they told you to get the things like Aardvark, like spy controller, whatever, programmer, but the thing is, like, $300, of course, and I'm like, that's not really maker hacker friendly, you know, especially when the evaluation boards only 30 bucks. It's 10 times the cost to program it. Yeah. 10 times cost. So it's not really friendly in that nature. But they mentioned this thing in their documentation called USB to the numerical to many board. Okay, and there's when you search, Texas Instruments website for this, this thing, the only thing way it's references in this datasheet and one thing on their form, and basically yet the contact ti to get it. Okay, that's, that's odd. Yeah, it's really odd. And the I saw I did this and they give you this weird email address to send a request to. And so I sent the request out today, we'll see if I hear back from them.
It sounds like some kind of d&d quest where you have to go and gather the secret email address and then speak to the magic guide.
Lay out 10 bypass capacitors, and come back to me.
Yeah, exactly, just just random tasks at Random House.
So they had to jump through three hoops so far to to hopefully get one of these USB two mini boards.
So wait, okay, so you buy this eval board that costs 30 bucks and it's it's pre programmed it has
got jumpers on it, yeah. Right. But
But what it comes with unless you have this either this $300 programming that programmer that is readily available, or this mystical thing that you have to go searching for questing for questing for. If you don't have the either one of those, you're just stuck with whatever config it has,
from from the get go. Yeah, and you won't be able to use it in a design, because you won't be able to program it. In your design. Oh, it's or if you use it in like a product you're you're making? Wow. Yeah. So we'll see if I get one. I suspect that the board is going to have because it's it uses the FTDI drivers. Yes board, I was able to figure that out. Because when you install the utility, it installs FTDI drivers. Oh, yeah, I can just see it pop up. Yeah, it pops up and says installing FTDI drivers. I'm like, okay, so it's using that. So I searched FTDI site, and they have a USB two i square C chip. Hmm. It's the ft 201. X. Okay. I suspect that all this board is is a fancy breakout board for that, that plugs into the this eval board.
That that would not surprise me at all. Yeah.
Yeah, so I'm gonna see, I'm going to get the legit board because he I had no idea what it is. There's no documentation on on Texas Instruments website about it. I wonder why they were doing this. I think all this stuff is so new. That because the documentation for this eval board is all over the place to Yeah. And that's how is on everyone's like, cypresses site on everyone that's making these USB 3.0 chips type stuff that it's all over the place on documentation. Like it's half marketing, half. Like, Bs, half actual data, I think has three halves. But
wouldn't you think that ti would be the one who's like or just pick anyone who cares? But But somebody being the guy who's like, here's type C demystified and Here's all the stuff you need. Not yet Not yet.
They do have the best eval board, because it's inexpensive. And you can buy it at Mouser.
And and it can actually handle the the total power.
Yeah, total power. It actually has a 20 volt five amp setting, because
some of the other eval boards are like, we have given you
the speaker that it's hard to find a cable that can handle that. Because most of the like, oh, yeah, we do. 100 watts. Not really, it's 2020 volts, three amps. So I actually think the ones that I got that are SPECT at 100 watts. Can't do that.
Is it like 100 watts for a short period of time?
Yeah, I guess. But I think they just say 100 Watts, because that's what the USB spec is. But they're like, not really. It's three amps. So, huh? Yeah, it's hard to find it's, it's
it's new technology. It's it's on the edge. Yeah. And really, it's a specification. Type Type C is a spec. And so now the the chip manufacturers and the cable manufacturers are having to scratch their head on how we're going to actually accomplish it. Yeah. And make it affordable. Right? Well, $9, a chip is not really affordable right now.
No, but someone will build a cut down version, Tia will probably release a cut down version that doesn't have the kitchen sink. It's like this is the chip use if you're making a a a device, a dongle device? Yeah, this kind of stuff, you know, like they do with USB 2.0.
I'm gonna put them I'm gonna put down my opinion here on this. Maxim, maximize C is probably gonna come out with a chip. That's just like you want. USB type C 100 Watt output. Do this. And that's it.
Yeah, I can see them being one of the first people do that. Because because they do that a lot. Do they have any USB 2.0 stuff, though? I don't think so.
I haven't looked in a long time.
Yeah, I think it'd be FTDI that will come out or something.
I'm sure it's in the works. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's kind of the bread and butter.
Yeah. Well, that's the only thing they build pretty much. Exactly. Yeah. Then we came up with this cool idea for I think these already exist, but we kind of want to design our own is a a super fast data logger. For, for voltage and amperage like, like a basic a multimeter that's got that has USB. Yeah. They exist. But I want to just do the exercise of designing one to see how inexpensive can we build one. And like quantity 100?
Well, it's fun to because you get to do the whole high speed digital side of things. And then you have to build an analog front end. It's a good exercise
in it, you know, it deals with you have to isolate it, right and your computer cuz you don't want to blow your computer application to, you know, dump 50 volts on the on the poor thing,
right? Or if the chassis freaks out or anything like that.
Yeah. So I was hoping like, we could hit like 15 bucks for like, if you build 100 of these 50 bucks in quantity. So I was looking, I probably use like an FM eight from Silicon Labs. Yeah. Which is a really inexpensive 8051 style microcontroller. But not like all the 8050 ones. These are like really brand new tech
stuff. And they're beefy.
They're peripherals are insane what you get with them. Yeah, the thing I was going to use is the laser be one because they have the laser be sleepy be busy be. I think that's all and universal be. Yeah. Right. So the universal B's got built in USB. The busy bees are kind of stock one. They're just generic. Yeah, sleepy. B is they're super low power. And then laser B is the super fast one. Yeah. And this one does. It's 75 megahertz at 51 core. Wow. And it's got a blazing fast one megabit sampling on their 12 bit ADC. I really hope
we start seeing more projects pop up with these things. Yeah, cuz because we were looking at pricing earlier for the laser beam. Laser
beam. I'm talking about 7575 cents and quantity.
But But even in singles, it was only $1
Yeah, only $1 that is cheap, really cheap. And so yeah, so you came up with a name for it.
So yeah, yeah. So we were the idea I came up with was the data acquisition dongle or dad? Yeah, because dad is always watching. Yeah.
So we'll see what we do with this project. Manager goal is to make as inexpensive as possible, which is the exact opposite of the super simple power supply.
Yeah, but still make it make it usable, usable. Yeah. make it worthwhile. It does only do voltage and current but sometimes, you know, voltage and current at 500 kilo samples a second for 15 bucks. That's not bad. Yeah.
One Mega.
Okay. Yeah, well, your sample Sure. Yeah, one mega sample Nyquist that down. Oh, yeah, I said it wrong but 500k Yeah, input. That's, that's pretty awesome for 15
bucks. Yeah, that way you don't miss a, you know transient event events and stuff like that. That's actually what I got the idea from and like, I really wish because I was actually testing my prop dipstick bit flicker. And I had it plugged into the front USB ports and I had this USB power meter plugged in. And you can see that the USB on the on the front panel was basically really badly designed, I guess, because the voltage is tanks.
But yeah, we were seeing like 4.5 volts,
4.5 4.6 volts being like the low, and sometimes you wouldn't would, which by the way, is the LBO voltage for the regulator. Right. So it kicks out sorry. So it bails out and resets the Browns out the microcontroller. And so I was like, I really want to see is how long that pings for and and when it happens, like how it timestamp? Yeah. But I don't have anything to record it. I can, I can probably stick it on our scope. And then in measure that, like set it set a trigger event for like 4.7 volts. Yeah. In you know, snag that, but just be nice. Just be able to plug it into your computer and just copy paste serial data. Yeah, plug it into dead. Yeah. So yeah, we'll probably work on that. Probably build up a bill of materials first, before human design it see if if 15 bucks is reasonable.
Well, the 15 bucks includes PCB and labor too.
Yes. So. But if you hit a $10 bill, material bomb. Yeah, you hit you hit that $15 mark. Pretty easy. You're right, right. 3d print the case that kind of stuff. Make it real cheap. Yeah, I actually I think the most expensive parts are going to be the banana jacks on it. I was looking at those and they're like, almost $2 apiece. So I'm like, well, six bucks
and connectors. You have $4 left for actual active components. Yeah. Well, you're gonna have to have a USB connector. Gonna have to have USB communication. And then the laser B.
That's $4. Oh, there we go. There we go. That's actually yeah, plus passive stuff because the laser beams got a built in oscillator and stuff. Yeah. It might be possible. Maybe? Yeah. And we'll just go right into the RFO section. Sounds good. This week was actually a little light on news. So we only have two things on this list this week. Yeah, but they're fun. Yeah, they're fun. So I was searching on Mouser for what was I searching for?
Some kind of LED driver? Yeah, I
think it was an LED driver and this popped up from thing that's fair child. Yeah. Fairchild Semiconductor makes this chip called the FA N fan 5646 And they bill it as the fan 5646 as a flexible and compact solution for blinking or breathing LED indicator. Okay, what is so does that mean a five pin I see. Okay, like I saw it, like I saw 23 Five or something like that. That blinks an LED for $16 What? Yeah,
a single led a it doesn't do like a matrix
of LED no one LED OLED does is a soft blink. And it is a ramp on ramp off blink $16 $16 and singles.
Which you could do with a you could design an entire board with multiple micros and a bunch of LEDs blinking for $16
you can use a was it 40 cent at Tiny to do this. Yeah. Or a 555 timer and a resistor cap yeah resistor cap for that would be like three cents Wow
$16 This thing better cure world hunger
Well, apparently it's got some kind of communication to it. So I think it's more for like watchdog type applications. How so like your indicator to make sure your system is still working. And so you communicate to it and say hey, I'm still working I'm still working because got like tiny wire technology one wire communication to it. Sure. It's a you can I think he's got to talk walk through it every so often and it stays glowing.
Can you can you just the rate at which it glows
like that foreign to that? Okay,
so I but but still I mean, okay great if you want to have a watchdog that has communication, put it put a micro on there
for us one of Your i o pins is one.
Well, okay, that would work too. But I guess it would if you wanted it to sniff your communication bus and see if that goes down. Maybe still, it just it doesn't make sense. $16 Yeah, that's the big thing. Yeah.
I think it's really sweet chip. This is one of the more ridiculous things I've seen.
This guy, it has to be a mistake. Yeah, I think it has
to be a pricing mistake. But like 1.6
dollars, still seems a lot for something like that. Yeah, this
should be like 40 cents.
Yeah, exactly.
Cuz I wonder if their child, someone came to them with this requirements. And they built it for them. And this is just like, they just keep making them for some reason. Or it's just like leftover run.
And they're just trying to get rid of them at an extreme profit.
Oh, that's how much it cost? Yeah, maybe some like, you know, military contractor that, like we need this chip to do this for a child in the fridge. I was like, Sure. It's 20 bucks a chip. No questions asked. And then there was a Hackaday article about this BeagleBone on chip IC. Mm hmm. It's made by a Tavo systems, which I've never heard of before. Okay. But basically, they are taking a the TI di for the ARM chip. And they're putting the RAM on the same die. And putting it all in one enclosure, one package. Hmm. And they're calling it system. On package. It says system on chip. So it's a CLP not COC? What
would make a different? It's got built in RAM. Oh, okay. But I mean, that's still sort of not new.
For this kind of stuff. Yeah. How much RAM? It's got a, I think 512 megabytes? Oh,
okay. Okay. Ram. Gotcha. Gotcha. I thought it was still like, there's there's 10k of row No,
no, no, no, that's okay. Great. But you can run Linux on this thing. All just the chip by itself, basically ship by itself well, and a PCB board and power. Right,
but just just gonna set it on your desk and your screen lights up,
wirelessly transmitting HDMI to your monitor. someday, someday.
That's, that's cool. I mean, I we're moving more towards these credit card style computers, and then smaller, smaller and smaller and more integrated like this. And that's cool. That's glad to see that they're moving that way.
Yeah. So the interesting thing about it is it's a 400. Ball. BGA, which is, that's pretty big. It's a 20 by 20. Package. Yeah, but it's 50 mil spacing. Hmm. So it's actually, you know, 1.27 millimeters, which is fairly large spacing for a BGA package of that size. Most time you get a BGA, which is only like, half a millimeter spacing. And that size of ball ball array.
Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I was I was getting confused. Because you said 50 million for some reason. I thought you said point five millimeter. And I was about to say that that is half a millimeter there. Yeah. But no, no, no point five is huge. Yeah, that.
So actually, I bet you're with this board with a chip, you can probably get something working on a four layer board. And then there's actually a link to a, what's called the guys calling the pocket bone. Okay, that's probably not the best naming you know, the real basically a two inch by one inch, two layer board. That's got this thing on it. What and then like an SD card, and HDMI port.
How do you escape a 400 pin? On too late? Well, okay, here's how you do you just neglect like 350 of those pins to the outside. Just the outside ring. That's it. That's it
power ground and then like enough to hook up SD card and HDMI probably didn't
really say that was all it takes to turn on the computer.
Yeah. So he's actually has it shared a shared project owners Park. Okay, that's pretty cool. Um, I might actually try and build one of these things. Wow. I think he's got it and it's all on GitHub. That's all Open Source. I haven't checked what the source follows. But if it's Eagle, I'll probably just download it and tweak it out and throw it up on macro fab and see if I can buy it. Yeah, they sold these chips at Denshi. Now these are cheap.
Yeah, that's what I'm hearing. I'm, like 100 bucks.
They're about 40 to 50 bucks. Okay, yeah, this is the first one in their series. Yes, I think they're gonna make another version of this chip that has more RAM on it and that kind of stuff. Oh, yeah. And the part number for those wondering is OSD 3358 Dash 512 M, which is the memory dash bas?
Do they offer different memory sizes?
Their datasheet alludes to it?
I don't think yet Not yet. Okay.
But yeah, they're probably you know, have like a one a one gig one gigabyte version? And yeah, and it's actually runs at like one gigahertz to wow. And that's
really cool that you as the designer, if you choose this chip, you don't have to mess around with different memory timing and all that. That annoying jazz, you have to go through drop. That's kind of cool.
So yeah, we're gonna have I mean, this thing is, this is a Haas chip. Yeah, it's speed and how much RAM it has. Yeah, it has some grunt. And the fact that basically, you can build your own smartphone now.
Yeah, why not with this with this guy? Because I bet you can get it to talk to so module pretty easily.
How many cores does it have?
I don't know. Whatever the BeagleBone. Black has. I haven't looked into it enough. Yeah, me neither. Anyways, it's really cool. I like how there's how a basically a new companies to try different things and actually making them accessible without like signing the NDA and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I would think that the documentation on this is probably volumes of books.
Yeah. So I really want to see is how much of the original BeagleBone Black like Colonel, they can just toss on this thing. And it just works. Why wouldn't they be able to tell us? Well, the majority I'll it because it uses different how the Rams hooked up or something like that's different. Well, you're gonna
have to change definitions and pins and things like that, but
we'll see. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Really cool. Looks like fun. And unfortunately, that's all the RFO we have. Unless you can come up with something now your head. No. Yeah, it's been a pretty slow news week. So but yeah, so I guess that's gonna wrap it up this week. It's a little shorter on the podcast, but that's okay. No worries. Yeah. So this is the macro fab engineering podcast. We're your host, Parker.
And Stephen. Later guys. Take it easy.
What are the common Design Rule Check errors that Parker and Stephen see as Contract Manufacturers? Are these DRC errors the ones that you run into?
PCB serial numbering? Parker and Stephen cover their thoughts on applying a unique identifier to PCBs in production for inventory and testing control.
On this episode, Parker sifts through marketing gimmicks for component ratings and Stephen discusses dual rail power supply designs.