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- Dave has been reverse engineering 10 pin connector from the ultrasonic gas detector he got in a recent mailbag
- Intrinsically safe
- Executive Decision
- Dave is deciding between discrete logic vs micro
- Chris recommends the RP2040 and utilizing the PIO (kind of doing both)
- Die shots of the RP2040 W
- 74HC164 datasheet
- “Richer than Bill Gates’
- Back to school – Triple Lindy
- Chris is currently reading Accelerando
- Dutch town installs secondary traffic lights on the ground for texters
- Tour from temporary labor workers inside of the Digikey fulfillment center
- LCSC “wireless antistatic wristbands”
- JayCar warehouse video
- Stacey Higgenbotham reported on how Helium isn’t making much money. Are any of you being targeted to utilizing the connectivity from the Helium network?
- Nordic Semiconductor is recruiting a RISC-V designer. Interesting what this implies about other chip companies hiring RISC-V designers. Espressif’s new chip line are mostly RISC-V.
- We have been talking about RISC-V for a few years now, but the project started in 2010.
- Google and Skywater announced they’re moving down to a 90 nm node. Chris recently found out Skywater is a former Cypress Semi fab.
- Semtech (owners of the LoRa IP and makers of chips) are buying Sierra Wireless (a cellular module maker). Uh…why?
- Google starts testing AR glasses
- Meta lost 2.8B on the metaverse last quarter…
Thanks to Kate Ter Haar for the photo of the matches
Hey Dave,
I did such a project about 10 years ago. I wanted to put some constrains on my project to see what I could achieve with low cost parts. I mean, it’s easy to make a timer with a STM32 or some arduino stuff, but making it low cost as if you would need to run and sell batches and batches of your project is where the creativity in circuit design appears. So I got the cheapest 8bit PIC i could find at the my city. It was a 16F DIP-8 with barely any Flash and RAM, and I did a board game count down timer in Assembly (as a way to learn it), inside a transparent travel soap container to make the “bomb” visible. I used a pre-perfurated PCB board and colorful jumpers everywhere just for fun. I bit banged the “SPI” to two cascaded shift registers with latches, driving 2 seven segments displays counting in HEX, because, why not? 2 digits can count up to 255secs… So I had used the 8 pins for: VCC, GND, “CLK”, “MOSI”, Latch, Buzzer, Button, aaaand… Reset, that could not be used as GPIO.
The time was configured at the PIC power up, each segment would slowly count up until the button was pressed, and the total time was calculated. Then every press at the button would restart the count down to the saved time, and if the timer expired, the buzzer would go “bzzz”. It was a nice little project, mixing a MCU and Digital to “expand” my pins, all running from two AA bateries.
have fun with your idea!