• Chris has been troubleshooting a PCB with a dead short on inner layers (put in by board house by mistake)
• Don’t Touch My Gerbers shirt
• “Is there an AI tool that will fix this for me?” … No
• Chris dumped a bunch of current in the board and looked at it with this thermal camera
• 6.5 digit DMM to track down shorts
• Etching problems in the old days
• 100% etest
• Adding rails to PCBs for production
• Reddit discussion thread: why not work on a product? That is, Dave, the wise one.
• Videos
• Live stream issues
• Post from Twitter: Is 2 layers all you really need? This person thinks so, or is trying to convince themselves as much.
• Armchair quarterbacking
• Ian Johnston replacing the display on an 8.5 digit DMM
• Jack Ganssle has posted his final newsletter (The Embedded Muse)…happy retirement! Jack has been on the show twice:
  • Episode 54 (!)
  • Episode 489
• Ward Christensen, Inventor of BBS and XModem, (and former listener of the show!) has passed away
• Dave is interviewing Lee Felstenstein for our next episode

Welcome Lukas Henkel of OV Tech GmbH, a product design firm based in Nuremburg Germany!

• Miniturization and the limits of miniturization
• Price is a constraint
• Using standard PCB tech (off the shelf)
• Open source SIP
• Steps
  • Conventional pcbs / components
  • Silicon inductors embedded in boards
  • Bonded Bare dies / stacked
• Need volume to make it work
• Requirements to fit into ______
• iMX8 ULP – 0.4mm CSP
• SIP Footprint
• Module abstraction layer talk
• Framework laptop
• Software support / BSP
• SIP will be different than PiMX8
• Crowdsupply campaign launching 2-3 weeks and delivery in Dec/Jan
• OpenSource laptop
• CM4 vs PiMX8
• SPI Flash with backup partition
• Secure element SE050
• Footprint for coral tpu and Halo 8
• Trying to solve the problem of vision use cases
• Marketing using layout / products but also making money on it
• Katerina show
• Visualizing simulations
• Developing intuition
• OpenEMS
• Usability is based on python scripting
• Using Blender for heat map
• BVTKNodes uses .vtk file output
• Multiphysics solvers
• Things that drive Lukas
• For HDI, Thinking in 3D / 2.5D and being able to visualize
• Layers ranging from 4 to 18
• Any layer design for SIP
• Wurth electroncis for high density “any layer stackup”
• Article series on altium for the open laptop
• Follow Lukas on LinkedIn

Lukas also was a co-founder of PCB Arts. We had his cofounder Saber on the show in the past.

• Starship 5 landed on chopsticks! (you know, in case you have been offline for 2 weeks)
• Dave’s EV had a stuck cable
• Portable charger is surprisingly good
• CCS Charging standard
• Fast charge 36/50 kW
• MKBHD Chevy Silverado review
• JLC is now offering silkscreen QR codes to have individually marked boards
  
  That’s the board that Chris has been designing on a livestream each week
• 1 wire UID (pioneered by Dallas, then Maxim, now Analog…le sigh)
• Dave is selling a new Bryman multimeter, the BM2257 (teardown photos)
• Chris just returned from Embedded World North America, doing a demo at the Joulescope booth
• Chris also gave a talk at the Zephyr meetup which will be released in a few weeks
• Hackaday article about their comment section and project/article feedback
• References
• Musk Sticks
• NC floods might impact the supply chain due to Spruce Pine NC being a source for quartz. We didn’t read this article, but it was a better explainer than we had at the time.
• Meshtastic objects to the proposed FCC changes

Dan Esparon from Inovor Technologies in South Australia joins Dave to discuss all about the engineering of designing and launching satellites!

Dan works for Inovor Technologies, an Australian company that designs and builds satellites entirely in-house!

Recently they designed and launched the aussie Kanyini satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
https://www.inovor.com.au/missions/

They design and build their own Flight computers, ADCS systems, UHF radios, Battery modules and Solar Arrays in Australia.

Welcome Katerina Galitskaya!

• Chris started following Katerina’s antenna posts on LinkedIn
• Monopole vs dipole
• Lower frequences are harder bc longer wavelength
• PCB size half of frequency
• Place antenta on the shorter side
• How to ruin your PCB
• When to go to a antenna engineer?
• Where will the device be?
• Antenna environment
• Start from vacuum, start adding elements
• Dummies in the lab. The one in the episode photo is a dummy head filled with liquid (?!)
• SAR – Specific Absorption rate
• Simulation vs lab work (dimensions)
• Anechoic chamber
• When to go with custom antenna?
• Buying off the shelf antenna?
• New Airpods with fancy 3D antenna
• Ben’s video about laser sintered antennas
• MIMO / Beamforming
• the failed promises of 5G
• When to simulate
• Some open source programs out there (“EMSee”?)
• Simulating vs visualizing
• Most of the time it’s not about vizualizing fields
• What is the iteration elements of the antenna?
• Satellite antenna design
• Good to go external
• Thinking about the dielectric const of case
• Follow Katerina on LinkedIn!

• Spam calls
• Keysight released the HD3, a 14 bit ADC oscilloscope (teardown video)
• Chris will be at Embedded World North America, please let him know if you’ll be there!
• Chris will be at the Joulescope stand along with former guest Matt Liberty
• This is one of the only tradeshows for general electronics in the US, Embedded Systems Conference went away many years ago. Chris, Dave, and Jeff (yesssah!) recorded at ESC in episode 41!
• Bootstrapping new conferences
• Cellular power modes
• Dave old GSM video
• PSM / eDRX
• ALT1350
• Dave got a smart meter on his home setup
• EDMI 
• EEVblog forum post about leaky power bill
• Maybe a trickle
• Chris has been trying out Meshtastic, which is based on LoRa. Check out Jeff Geerling’s video for a good overview.
• meshtastic subreddit
• People posting about airplanes flying overhead (example post) like ham radio contacts
• Meshmap

• Chris has been moving house, which partially explains the terrible audio problems the past few episodes…
• For a lab, Chris believes in
  • Lots of wire shelving (with epoxy coating)
  • Everything on wheels (including shelving and workbenches)
  • As much storage as you can get
• Chris has been doing livestreams of hardware design for Golioth.
• The module he is designing is called the Drachm (“dram”)
• The hardware Chris has been working on for the past 2 years is now open source
• Flox video with machine learning on a camera also featured Chris
• Altium finalized their acquisition by Renesas. The price already went up (discussed previously)
• Raspberry Pi released the RP2350 while we were away
• Inductor polarity on the RPi Pico 2
• RP2350 Datasheet
• You can choose the processors you want (Dual m33, dual RISC V)
• Microchip was offline due to …. HACKERS
• Dave has been trying out a new home battery storage system
• NMC vs LFP
• Reverse cycle
• There have been lots of layoffs in tech, including 15K (!) at Intel
• Layoffs.fyi
• Being sued for a battery review? Say it aint so

Welcome Shawn Hymel!

• Shawn will be transitioning out Developer Relations at Edge Impulse. He will now be building courses full time. (this was recorded before Shawn announced his departure)
• He want’s to be like a Professor, which partially explains his signature bowtie
• Should people go into content? What about Developer Relations more specifically?
• New courses will include FreeCAD and 3D printing and will be published by Digikey
• Part design in FreeCAD
• 0.22 in Mango Jelly
• Learning modeling vs learning an actual program
• Scoffolding
• Making a Zephyr course
• Zephyr / Golioth training
• Ecosystem vs RTOS
• Workshop at Harvard
• Trying to train on hardware
• What should engineers know about ML
• Andrew Ng’s course on Coursera
• Updated for NumPy / Python
• Understand Neural Networks
• Can treat them as a black box
• More important to understand statistics and data science
• Hot dog / not hot dog (silicon valley)
• Model zoos
• Hugging Face
• Coprocessing on U55 – U85
• ToorCamp
• Michael Cheich
• Robert Ferenec
• Marketing courses
• Running
• You can find Shawn as ShawnHymel on most social
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Mastodon
  • Bluesky
  • TikTok
  • Instagram
• You can also check out his site, shawnhymel.com

• Murphy
• More efficient with cooled panels
• Battery storage solution
• Server rack batteries
• Chris has been doing hardware Livestreams
• Geofence
• n8n, Similar to Zapier, IFTTT
• Home assistant
• EE Grad wants some insight on new tech
• https://4dsystems.com.au/
• Scott Williams of Xentronix recorded with Dave and then Chris
• Saw at Electronex
• My Cousin Vinny
• Embedded World North America is happening in Austin in October. There is a vendor map now.
• Voltnuts
• Open source book
• Tiny Tapeout
• Tantalum Caps from AliExpress
• What’s next for ASML
• Ben Krasnow printing PCB traces again

Welcome, Matthias Balwierz / Bitluni / Luni!

• Midi pedals
• Old projects
• LED walls
• Dunning kruger
• Sonar scanner 
• Aliens
• Romulus
• Lifelong learning
• Beamforming
• Previously had worked on something similar in the medical field but didn’t realize it was the same tech
• ESP32
• Gowin FPGA
• Video generation / crt control
• R2R 
• cnlohr videos for making PCBs
• ESP32 VGA
• PCB mill 
• Failing
• Tiny Tapeout bringing down costs like PCBs
• Jeri doing “home etching” (making silicon at home)
• Building the meme project  on TT02
• GIF construction set
• Almost like a ROM on board, on each clock it exposes the next byte on paralell output
• Luni hasn’t submitted to each tiny tapeout but is building a new project
• Browser assembler that runs in the handheld gaming: “Luni-Asm”
• cpu + gpu to get vector output
• Bitluni live youtube / Bitluni – twitch happens Weds at 8 pm CEST
• Community helps
• Writing memory controllers
• Bus master because internal SRAM is so expensive
• Expense of flash/ram is in IP
• People running test structures the tiles
• FPGAs, Gowin – 9K standard up to 25k
• Gabriel / Lushay Labs – Tutorials for FPGAs
• HDMI connector
• Some IP blocks from Gowin
• Yosys support
• VS code tools and simulation
• Gowin FPGA designer
• Learning clock domains
• Moving back to art
• Demoscene came from the cracker scene
• Different categories / limits
• 4K category only allows 4K of memory for images and sound (generated)
• White demo competitions
• Contact
  • bitluni
  • github
  • twitch

Welcome back, Matt Venn of the Zero to Asic Course and Tiny Tapeout!

(Due to illness and some life stuff happening, my recording setup was crap. Apologies. I also leaned heavily on Matt’s notes, so some of the following links will be out of order. Think of it like an ad hoc scavenger hunt…fun!)

• Matt was last on the show on episode 616, about 18 months ago
• Tiny Tapeout has continued, now working on it’s 8th run. the 5th run is shipping soon.
• Uri Shaked made Wokwi compatible with making chip designs and then compiling them to verilog for later processing by open source tools
• 12 bit SAR ADC on TT07
• linux capable riscv
• Analog ASIC design with digital standard cells!
• We had previously posted Matt’s review of 2023 and aims for 2024 
• Siliwiz
• ASIC inside synchrotron 
• Touring IHP (Germany) facilities
• Interview with Nordic Semi designer
• People are building analog structures on Tiny Tapeout
• There’s a new course on Zero to Asic that will be about Analog (sign up for the waitlist)
• There are some new tools being developed
  • surfer  – browser based waveform
  • moosic – logic locking plugin for yosys
  • eqy – formal equivalence checking
• Matt will be doing a TT workshop at supercon 2024
• TT08 will have a demoscene competition – VGA and sound output – what’s the coolest thing you can fit in 1 tile? You have until Sept 6th 2024 to submit!
• Not discussed, but on the list and interesting!
  • Silicon Supply Chains with Ed Conway
  • An early analog design (temp sensor) on TT03
  • Get TT quality stickers