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You are here: Home / Radio Show / #484 – Man Behind The Curtain

#484 – Man Behind The Curtain

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This episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits. As discussed in the ad this week, Duane Benson has written about the importance of good footprints and avoiding via-in-pad on the Screaming Circuits blog.

  • Coronavirus has a lot of people working from home. Dave says Chris should have finalized the “portalab” project talked about many years ago.
  • Chris travels with his Analog Discovery 2 (which can be bundled with Contextual Electronics), the Aneng 8008 (recommended by Dave), and an assortment of dev boards.
  • Schools are telling students not to come back to Uni for Coronavirus.
  • Dave needs to refresh his $50 DMM shootout for people working at home.
  • Clint Cole from Digilent was on the show talking education
  • Chris finally got a 121GW and likes it! But he needs to update the firmware.
  • Hot air + soldering iron is a good buy if you’re going to be at home. If you’re moving around a lot, perhaps a TS100 or TS80.
  • Dave was tempted to buy an Electric Ute (pickup truck). It was a DIY project built with love (video)
  • Chevy Volt discontinued in the US, but the Chevy Bolt is an interesting replacement with a long range. It may end up in Australia, but many of the EVs are expensive there.
  • Dave doesn’t plan on building a DIY powerwall (battery storage for excess solar capacity) but Paul Kennett and Jehu Garcia (couldn’t remember his name) both have multiple videos about this topic.
  • 150K limits on business deductions in Australia
  • Dave’s workspace is up for lease! Work near Dave…with him as your landlord!
  • Boosted Boards laying off people, because of tariffs. Phil from adafruit wrote about this and also how adafruit has been dealing with the tariffs and the COVID-19 shutdowns in China.
  • Discussion on the forum
  • 10 day hospital build in China
  • Seeed Studio started the OPL a few years back. They since have introduced the “Shenzhen OPL“, which isn’t a method of making parts more genericized, but instead lists a lot of parts that might not be available outside of the China supply chain.
  • Dave thinks businesses will be so hard up for revenue, that the next EEVblog meetup will be at the Sydney Operahouse
  • The Open Hardware Summit was all virtual. You can watch the videos on their playlist of the event.
  • The CERN OHL v2 is now out. Watch Javier Serrano from CERN discuss it during his Open Hardware Summit talk.
  • Unsurprising headline: “Reclusive Engineer Stays In Lab”
  • Chris played “the man behind the curtain” when a last minute board incident meant that he needed to simulate parts of a system using an Analog Discovery 2 with some scripting.
  • A fun page of Bit Twiddling (bitwise operations) for writing tight C code.
  • Dave is a recursion fanboy, he used it in his formula solver program back in the day.
  • Check out this visualization of Moore’s Law and how processors have tracked it pretty well.

Comments

  1. T-Rowe says

    March 19, 2020 at 10:27 am

    To add to the resistor discussion. Mission critical hardware requires components with extremely low failure rates. The example for chip resistors is MIL-PRF-55342. When manufactures build to this standard they are doing a screen to verify that the resistors meet the failure rate. This verification requires large samples sizes to be consumed and a lot of test effort and test time. It get exponentially more expensive for parts rated with lower failure rates. You can shop these parts on digi-key and it is typical to see a 0705 chip resistor prices at $0.50 to $10.00.

  2. 0x6d72 says

    April 11, 2020 at 12:41 am

    Regarding the bit twiddling. There is a whole book on the topic called Hacker’s Delight by Henry S. Warren published by Addison-Wesley Professional. It’s a fun but tough read.

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