Parker's pinball controller has gone gold! Revision 3 is being fabricated! Stephen then explores the softness factor of diodes and the SSPS returns?
Josh Rozier starts his design of a power transformer, the DOOM SAO gets more code, and the MacroAmp is 90% done!
Parker gets test results from his APA-102C experiments and Stephen wraps up REV2 of the MacroAmp!
Figure 1: SSPS Energon Cube. Exploded diagram.
Figure 2: 5/16″ x 5/16″ copper buss bars.
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 where your hosts Parker Dolan, and Steven Craig. Awesome. So this week will probably sound a little different. Our normal recording area that's headed up by Josh is out of power right now from yesterday there was a big thunderstorm here in Houston.
Yeah, we've been having rain pretty consistently for the past couple days.
So he's all knocked out. And so we're actually set up in Stephens living room with a computer on the floor and socks for four pop filters on these mics. I'm hoping he washed these. My face is only like two inches away from it two
inches from my nasties. Hey, we needed a pop filter pretty quick. And there was this.
Ah, it looks like it works. We did some finagling with the audio and it sounds okay.
Yeah, I think I think we'll do good. We'll be we'll be back in in regular studio next week.
Oh, unless Josh moves.
Well, he is moving that we he's moving to a brand new studio. But it's kind of up in the air. We're not exactly sure when it's happening.
Yeah, when he's gonna move out there. Yeah, are in there, because it's actually more downtown Houston.
Well, and the thing that's cool is he has a fully mobile rig, all of his recording equipment is rack mount. And so basically, it just comes down to moving it to a location and plugging it in. He's got this whole really cool rig. In fact, you know what? I don't think we have we taken a picture of his we have never taken we need to take a picture of his rig and put a post it up because it's kind of the coolest thing ever.
Yep. That's pretty cool. Yeah. All right, cool. So
this week, I got a little bit more done on the SSPs analog board. Well, sort of a portion of it, it's the more of the energy on cube the whole system, we got in a huge chunk of copper copper rod, because we're making busbars for all of our main input filters. So the capacitors we chose to be our main reservoir capacitor, their actual screw terminal ones. So we're actually putting copper busbar. And I found out that it just worked out to get both bar that's five sixteenths by five sixteenths. And it's about a six inch strip of that little bit over six inch.
And the best thing was, you actually calculated out the resistances busbar.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So it works really well. Because back in the you remember back in physics, you had to do the calculating resistance off of resistivity which resistance is equal to resistivity times length divided by area, the cross sectional area, and since this is five sixteenths, by five sixteenths, the cross sectional area is just a square. And if you if you do the calculation, using the alloy of copper, which this alloy was copper 110, which is like the de facto standard for busbar
Yeah, it was like 99% copper
99.9% copper point. Oh, 4% Oxygen. And then it didn't say anything else. So there's just a bunch of yet other crap it did say slight traces of silver so
yeah, other may contain unobtainium.
What's What's the middle that Wolverines claws are made out of? At a magic mantium at a mantium yet, just
a little bit of aromantic unobtainium is
Oh, that was that was a avatar. Yeah. James Cameron. Yeah, yeah. The first time that I was like, really? No,
I didn't realize it until like, I went back after watching that movie. Yeah. And I'm like, do they really cuz like they said, entertain me and I'm like, I just like, I just got glossed over how bad that movie actually is. Oh, gosh, I look back I'm like, really?
First time I saw that I was like, How about can't find them or I really rarely um, you know, like, it's just rarely Am I it's, it's that killed me that absolutely killed me. Regardless, the these copper busbars calculated the resistance of the bars out to be point 00458 ohms or 4.58 milli ohms which is pretty low. It's a little bit higher than I actually thought it was going to be just because if you look at these Vorster they're huge in comparison to just like, you know, 14 gauge wire, gauge wire But you know, that sounds sounds a bit reasonable and I actually tried to measure it. And with a standard like bench meter, you can't really measure resistance that low, it's gonna guess they all don't really have significant figures down that low.
So these are like budget ones that we haven't worked yet, but I'm gonna
put him in like pretty much any standard handhelds not going to get down there unless you get a specific six and a half digit. Yeah, right. And I go, go see how much of a six and a half digit Fluke costs, you know, that's gonna be through the roof
will have to train in our Unobtanium for.
So I actually tried to measure it. And the way I did it was, I just shorted our power supply across the bar, and put it at the maximum current that it could go, which is three amps. And then I and then I took a separate meter and measured the voltage at the very ends of the of the bar, so I could get the just the voltage, and I knew that the current flowing through it, I actually confirmed the current was three amps on the nose. And so after calculating work, you know, getting getting my voltage, my current, I found that it was about 2.5 milli ohms is what I could get. And you know, throw in some margin of error. It's pretty close to my calculation.
Yeah. So yeah, pretty, pretty fun. Little project.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's fun to have to think of a new way to measure resistance when you really can't measure everything.
You can't really measure it. Yeah. I wonder how much I wonder, gee, actually calculate how much amperage we could flow through that bar before it starts getting warm.
Ah, I guess you have to define what warm mean.
Yeah, I guess like a 20 degree centigrade increase.
Now you're now I want to go do that. Yeah, I'm gonna figure that out. Yeah. Yeah. I bet you three amps is not that. Three hands? No, probably more like 300. Now that sounds excessive,
then how much we would have to get the melt, start melting it.
Okay, we're gonna have to get back with these calculations, because this sounds great.
I will post it on Twitter. Tomorrow.
Cool. So yeah, also, this week, I I've been working a bit more with the macro amp. I got the board all populated and soldered up.
And for those that I guess we didn't really explain last week, but the Mac ramp was we talked about a couple times, but I think it's the amplifier that we're that Stephens designing that has the new tubes on it.
Yeah, the cord new tubes. So this is the first tube design in the last 50 years or something like that. And I've been trying to be one of the first guys in the world to have a new tube design available for people to check out. So it's actually it's up on GitHub, I believe. Yeah. No, I updated it. So So that's up on GitHub if you guys want to check it out. And I'll be posting some more images soon. So now that the board has effectively done, I need the box. And I think I'm going to go with parche badger just because they can do black anodising. And they're fairly cheap,
that use the best thing about them. Just send your your design off. And then two weeks later, it shows up done. Yeah. Just like magic. It's like magic.
Yeah. So what you've been up to
something this week has been kind of more like paperwork kind of stuff. Yeah. Redesigning the well, not really redesigning, but basically updating all the Eco footprints. There's been some there was some issues with some of the like silkscreen and that kind of stuff. So we've been fixing and fixing all that stuff up. And rebuilding all those up and also making so that our Mac fat part libraries, when you use a part at automatically matches to the house part. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, so that all works now. Um, so that's, that's one of those kind of important things that's been kind of been put on my desk to do. Gotcha. I also updated the eagle up to pull in more information like, do you want the part populated or do you not want to populate it? Or do you want the is your value field different from your manufacturer? Part number, like if you have a 330 Ohm resistor and you want to eg II? I can't remember the I think it's eg I can't remember the part number for Panasonic. I was so I was hoping I could just rattle off like a part, isn't it? Er J. erg? Yeah, pandas. Er J six. Something. Something's 331
Yeah, right. For 330. Yeah, the 331 has to be in there
somewhere. Yeah. The best thing no pants on it, because you can just immediately know that that's a Panasonic part number. Yes, that was have three, three characters, then a hyphen and then something else. Those three characters give it the like series. Yeah, yeah. And that covers like all a Panasonic parts. So they're capacitors resistors all that stuff.
Yeah, I love it. You just memorize their pattern and you're good to go. Yeah.
They're they have one of the easier patterns to because they're shorter. Everyone else like let's say like, skim it. I think it's Kevin. Kevin's got like passengers. Yeah. Kevin capacitors. There's it? Yeah, pretty sure it's Kevin. They are like ridiculously like 25 characters or something like that for a part number.
Oh, yeah. They do the ones that are like, all they start with a G. I can't remember it.
No, that's not Kemet doesn't start with a G. Is it? Is
it a VX? Or?
Oh, man, I can't remember which ones are
so the vishay. I love vishay is Yeah, Vijay starts with or they have another one that's CRC W. Yep. And then it packs and then the package size, then the value size? And it's just, it's perfect.
Yep. Simplify your port numbers. Yeah.
And we'll buy them just because the number simple,
or you can just memorize it. So that way, you don't actually have to look up the part number. Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, I know, a, you know, a 4.7k resistor exists in this package, right, and just punch it in. Bam. Yeah. Also,
don't ever make your part numbers obsolete. Because then we have to memorize a whole brand new part numbering system.
And then working more on USB type C. Cool. I actually got I typed C connector hooked up to an ft 230 x, which is the FTDI chip, USB 2.0. To serial bridge. I got that working. I basically just like jumped wires, and it looks pretty ugly. But it actually does work. So I'm pretty happy with that. But yeah, so basically all I had to do was take the CC one or CC two pin doesn't matter which one it is. And then you pull one of those pins to ground with a 5.1k resistor. And I think the spec is like a 10% resistor. Yeah. Didn't
you used to 10 K's? Yeah, I
use two K's in parallel. No, I didn't have I didn't have a 5.1k. Close enough. Right. It worked.
I guess that's the bottom side of 10%.
Yeah, the bottom side. Hey, it works.
I wouldn't be surprised if you go lower than that and still be fine. Yeah, you just pull a lot of current or not a lot. You pull more
now. Yeah. And then I've been working on this layout for the Type C connector to make it sort of work with our, our standard, like PCBs specification. Yeah. Because it's actually really hard to get these traces out of this 24 pin connector. And what people don't realize is type C has 24 pins in the same area that the old connector that had five pins in. Right, yeah. A you got a five almost a 5x density on the part. Yeah. And the great thing with with USB type C is it supports USB 2.0. And for 2.0. You only need two data lines to come out of it. Right? Because it has what? Four pair or pairs. Yeah, but you don't need all those pairs for 2.0. Right, you can just ignore him.
But but anyone who's really going for the full functionality is going to have a multi layer board and Ray so it's it should be easier to route.
Yes, I'm trying to get type C for USB 2.0 to work with our standard. And I'm almost
there. On to layer
two layer. Wow. So we're this way people can easily update to their 2.0 like micro usb designs to type C by just going poop plopping this thing in.
That's cool. Use it like a template. Yeah,
it'll be a template. That's cool. Yeah, so is the macro fab standard is five mil. Trace with five mil between each trace 12 mil drills with six mil annular rings.
Right that's that's the minimum for standard. Yes, manufacturing,
and you have to do that to make it work.
Well, yeah. Yeah. That's that's the minimum for it to work.
Exactly. Yeah. And I'm actually using a connector that's like a hybrid. It's got half the pins are s&t in other half or thermal?
Is it for like mechanical stability? No.
Makes it easier to route. Hmm, that's cool. Yeah. Because that way you're you're basically You're one row that's through hole, you can exit on the bottom side. And the other ones you exit and top side. Ah, that's that's kind of cheating. Yeah, it's pretty sweet. Because you can't do it otherwise, because the trick is on type C is because it's reversible. You have the data minus and data plus on both sides of the connector. And on your device side, you have to tie those pins together. Yeah, with traces. And if you're have, if you have four SMD connector traces, you can't actually cross them without a via, right. You can't get a via that's with a 12 mil hole to fit in that spot. Right. So you have to go with this. Like cheating, as you say connector. But then it works.
Yeah, yeah. That's, that's cool. I like the I like the hybrid mentality
there. Yeah. That's pretty cool connector. So awesome. I guess I'll post the connector in the blog post for people to look at. Yeah. And we'll be I'll be pushing the big update to the library. Eagle part library? Probably Friday. So it'd be tomorrow. Is
that connector available on Mouser?
It's on Mouser. Awesome. Yeah, so we push that big update for the PowerPC parts tomorrow. Actually just finished it today. And then next week, I'll probably work on chip trace to get all that stuff done. And then we'll be rolling it out. Finally, the key cat stuff. Awesome. Two, three weeks. Yeah, good times. Get lots of parts. And I guess that's gonna be it for what we've been doing this week. Right?
Yeah, yeah. You want to roll on to the RFO?
Yeah, we'll do the RFO. Awesome. So going more on consolidating companies, I
guess. We talked about this a lot. It's happening a lot. It happens every week. Now. It's crazy. It's everything's kind of crashing together. So Analog
Devices. Adi MX is buying linear tech. Lt. Both companies. We've bitched about a lot. But yeah, $14.8 billion. The crazy thing these have been really, these are two highly competitive companies against each other. Yeah. They both are in the same space.
Well, and that's, that's why it makes sense for them to come together. I mean, they both consume the whole amplifier and analog and linear IC. And they have a whole bunch of power management ICS they, they just command that space.
Yeah. And so I've been I've been thinking a little bit about this. And I've always noticed basically Analog Devices, their their data sheets are kind of crap.
Who do we say doesn't have craft aid and
lean your tech lead? Getting bought out?
See, so So maybe the data sheets are gonna get better as what you're saying? Or worse? Yeah, I guess it could go either way.
Right. You go either way. But uh, hopefully the people who write the data sheets Fleenor tech. Stay on and don't get cut in the merger. You know, layoff crap.
Yeah, yeah. You know, come to think about it. All the figures. And the diagrams in linear tech are really nice. They're really crisp and clean,
very nice and clean. I think they're probably in vector format, which is why? Yeah, no data on the data sheets. But they also have really good samples schematics for how to make their shit work.
Right? Yeah, no, they, they totally do. Yeah, good. App notes. Good. Yeah, yeah. They're expensive. Linear.
They're expensive. Or you
can't buy them. Yeah, well, then that's true.
Yeah. Um, another thing to think about is LT spice. What's gonna happen with that? It's gonna be called a Wi Fi analog space. That doesn't work as well EDI space. Adi spice doesn't really roll out the term.
So is it is it analog technology or linear devices? No.
I like analog technology and electric No, yeah, that
sounds good sounds alright.
But I think it's a buyout so it will probably just be Adi still. Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah, they're just gonna like when microchip but at No, it's not gonna be micromill.
But there's still like we said last podcast. There's still pumping out AV ours.
Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I wanted to update the look like the AVR will come out and we'll be AVR by microchip on data sheets just to
make sure everyone everyone knows.
That'd be like one guy that's like always under Iraq and goes why then you are the chosen one that No.
Microchip. Microchip has some awesome beginner level ADCs and DACs. Yes, I do. I was just actually do
something, something something.
Yeah, MCP and they end with like 1011 12 or something like that for 810 and 12 bit, or I think it's something like that
basically wherever the part fell on the wafer. Yeah, yeah. So there's more towards the center, it's probably a 12 bit. It's on the edge. It's the eight bit.
Yeah, you know that. That makes sense. I bet you did something of that sort. But I've noticed that a lot of open source projects and hacker projects, and not necessarily like high level professional projects, more of the just like hobbyist stuff, use those ADCs. And I was looking it up the other day, their data sheet for those is really well done. Yeah, it's really easy to read. And it's really easy to get if you don't know how to use one.
And they're also very easy to get data from it. Yes, because most of those are icy or spy. Yeah. And it's very easy to get information from these devices.
Well, and the datasheet is super clear about here's spy, here's how it works. Here's what you need to do. It doesn't assume that you have a ton of previous knowledge and it just kind of gives it to you and like a microchip did those couple chips they did them very well.
Okay, so we have Avnet now is a foreigner was going to be bought out by Daetwyler dot Waller. Is it Swedish? Yeah, it looks like Daetwyler Daetwyler. But apparently Adnet has one up them on the bid to six $691 million to buy for no out. Huh? So we already have foreigners already hemorrhaging their their current crap. Like cats, Eagle Eagle cat sauce is already been sold to Autodesk. Yeah. And so I guess that's like, who gets the rest of the chunks. And so AB net is a US part supplier? Yeah, like foreign oil is a UK part supplier. Actually, I had no idea what Daetwyler is. Besides, it's Swedish. Yeah,
I don't I don't know myself.
But yeah, for now, they also own element 14, that's kind of a big deal in the hackerspace area. And they also distribute the Raspberry Pi, which is interesting. And I wonder if AB net wants to get either in that area, or they just want to distribution stuff that Farnell has in the UK? They just want a slice of the pie. Yeah, I think they just want to expand their their distribution network. I don't think they really care about element 14 or any of that crap.
Probably not. But it's just crazy all these it seems like all of these buyouts it's not uncommon for buyers to happen it just why are they all happening in such a short timeframe?
So the last couple of years you know, if a payment which had a global recession? Yeah. And so in that period time, everyone just holds on to their money. And so you have all these companies that for the past like five years have held on to their money, and now they have a lot the coffers are full. And so like we're How do we grow now? Spend all that cash.
Well just buy out the
competition or or expand horizontally by buying someone else out. Right, right. Right. Okay. Like Softbank buying arm
right? Right. That
was that was a horizontal? No. I guess that'd be a horizontal and a vertical stack by
Well Would that they were I think that they're doing that as a strategic move towards the telecom industry.
So vertical by then yeah, I
guess we're venturing into the areas that we have no
idea. We don't know what you're talking like 90% of stuff we talked about on this podcast.
I bet you there's some business guy out there who's listening to it he's just like,
Oh no, this is all wrong. Oh, man. so on. The last thing is the we're talking about Pokemon Go a bit.
Everyone talked about how Pokemon Go. So Hackaday
as a couple articles about hacking, it's hacking Pokemon Go. All that stuff. And most of these guys are using GPS spoofing by either using like a signal Defined Radio. That's pretty cool. Or hacking the actual like underlying software kernel Which is pretty cool. But then I was thinking like, what if you try to do a direct hardware attack? Which I haven't seen anyone tried to do yet?
What would? How would you do a hardware attack?
So, open up the phone? Okay, pull the accelerometer off. solder two wires on probably it's either i square C or spy. Okay? And just pipeline in a pipe on your own data and just into the accelerometer? Well, that's up first. Because that's usually the accelerometers on these phones are, are actually like off shelf parts. Yeah, but you can you can just look at the part get the part number, get the datasheet and then get a fast enough either FPGA or fast enough MCU and spoof the accelerometer. Okay, so you send basically fake accelerometer data, like you can make it. So the phone thinks it's flipping upside down, where it's just saying still, because you can just give it whatever data you want. Right? Right. Yeah. Then you take a step further and do the same thing with the GPS module. Yeah. Because the accelerometer
thing? I don't I don't know exactly what the game uses the accelerometer for. But it certainly is the GPS. And if you could, if you could pipeline in your own garbage data, or I guess it's not garbage.
No, it's not garbage data. Yeah. And
just very directed pointed data data, you can
say it's like, so all you have to do is get, you know, get your saili or bus pirate. Yeah, hook up to the data lines in the GPS. Yep. And if you can get the datasheet for the GPS, this will be super easy. At that point, if you can get the datasheet boom, done. Yeah. But if you can't, then you're gonna have to reverse engineer the interface. But if you get the datasheet, you're essentially done.
Yeah, yeah. You just you just keep feeding it. tons of data,
you just hook up an FPGA emulate the interface? Yeah, done, then then you can essentially make and the because a lot of people like oh, man, you know, if the actual company cares about you hacking the game? They can actually detect these other methods.
Yeah, they? Well, if you use this method, you could send any GPS location at any time, correct? In other words, you could teleport? Yes, you
you. Well, that's what that that's how they do that with the signal, define radio stuff, Ray. But when they do the signal to find radio stuff, usually the phone is sitting in a Faraday cage. And so they they actually looked at the accelerometer data, it's like, you're not moving that fast. But if you pipe in your own accelerometer data.
So you could you could put this on a shaker table and have it shake. So the accelerometer going crazy. Going crazy. So even if it does check the accelerometer, it's like, Yeah, something's happening. Yes.
But I want to see someone try to do a more direct hardware level attack on on this stuff. I bet you there is I bet you just got to go online and Google, you know, hardware attack on GPS module and cell phone. And I bet you that will pop up.
Huh? We should we should. We should look further into that. Yeah, I might, I might be willing to sacrifice a cell phone to
someone that actually runs Pokemon Go. Yeah. Cuz that would be that would be cool. And I wonder, I guess it depends on the GPS. I know the most accelerometers are like a ra Q FM package. And so it's actually when we d solder it, it'd be pretty easy to hack it. I don't know if a GPS module is going to be probably a BGA. Or maybe it will be a module insulated module
in my mind, because later, but I bet you in a phone, it's gonna be a BGA
Yeah, it might be easier to hack like, something that's bigger, like a tablet. So they have less reason to shrink stuff down the
circuit board. Yeah. And come to think about it. Gee, the GPS module, you probably have to have a couple GPIO because it's going to be doing some extra
talking. Yeah, like interrupt or hardware interrupt flags and stuff like that. Well, and
yeah, things you know, establishing communications and you know, just a whole bunch of flags and things like that. I bet you it has. Because I mean, yeah, last time I looked at a bunch of GPS modules, they were rarely like four pin guys, you know,
now wonder if you can get um, so I actually have a couple like these like standalone our Android boards that have GPS on them. Yeah, and they are separate modules. Okay, I wonder if you can get Pokemon I don't know if pokemon go like limits itself, what hardware it runs on. Like it has to be a Nexus seven phone or it has to be like phone, phone or tablet. It can't just be like generic hardware. If it's just, you know, like it like actually looks for what device you're on.
I, it probably cares more about the iOS, if your phone or your tablet or whatever device is running that iOS, then that means it's compatible with
Yeah, I got to give it a shot. I got some old, you still running the latest Android or blade ish Android. And I wonder if I console Pokemon Go. Yeah, give it a shot. And that way, because that was actually the oldest modules. I have all the dash sheets for.
So you could hack it. You could hack it. Sounds like we got a project.
Yep. Sounds like we got it. Or someone would be just to the punch. Yeah, right. Please, please. Yeah.
Someone else do this.
Well, cool. I'm, are we're at the bottom of our sheet. No,
I think that I think that's good.
And this sock is. Ah, it's not smelly. That's good.
I told you. It's all right. Well, good.
Well, that was the McWrap engineering podcasts. We were your host Parker Dolan and Steven Greg. Catch on next time. Take it easy.
Parker's pinball controller has gone gold! Revision 3 is being fabricated! Stephen then explores the softness factor of diodes and the SSPS returns?
Parker gets test results from his APA-102C experiments and Stephen wraps up REV2 of the MacroAmp!
Josh Rozier starts his design of a power transformer, the DOOM SAO gets more code, and the MacroAmp is 90% done!