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- Co-Podcast with Parker and Stephen from the Macrofab Engineering Podcast (MEP)
- Parker finds new ICs through the subreddit /r/nicechips and subscribing to manufactures mailing lists.
- Chip manufactures should just advertise the specifications of new chips and link direct to the datasheets.
- Other sources for new parts and information are EEweb and Electronics Weekly.
- Parker and Stephen do a really bad job explaining what MacroFab does. MacroFab does end-to-end electronics manufacturing and operations for low volume companies. Everything can be done via API end point which can enable your webstore to automatically drop ship inventory to your customers.
- Last time MacroFab talked with Chris Gammell it was only four people. Now MacroFab has over 20 employees and is moving to a 11k sq ft warehouse space.
- Renesas to Buy Intersil for $3.2 Billion. Everyone agrees that competition is good and these mergers go against that.
- How to defend against the USB Killer Thumb Drive. Best solution is to just not give users access to a USB ports.
- Samsung Note 7 exploding. Samsung says it is a mechanical issue but it sounds more like a failure of the Battery Management System.
- Parker has used the BQ24075RGTT for lithium battery management.
- Cycle life of Lithium batteries is around 500-600 recharge cycles.
- GM creates Elon Musk’s dream car first. GM will be using LG Tech’s batteries.
- Chris went to IMTS, International Manufacturing Technology Show a couple days ago. See Figure 1. Has lots of huge machines that Chris enjoyed looking at. How does electronic trade shows compete with this?
- Sword fighting robot arm by ABB.
- Stephen has been to Turbomachinery & Pump Symposia which is held in Houston, Texas.
- The ESP32 wifi module has been released. It is the successor to the popular ESP8266. If the price for the modules drop then the ESP32 will probably be as successful as the ESP8266.
- Stephen and Chris gotta go fast with SPI over I2C.
- Power will be the limiting factor going forward for IoT and other small devices as chips like the ESP32 drive the price of silicon down.
- Parker and Stephen are working on the SSPS (Super Simple Power Supply) and it is up on the MacroFab’s github account. It is a 700W water cooled beast of a powersupply that runs a couple OPA541 opamps. See Figure 2 for the Analog test board for the SSPS.
- For EDA/CAD tools, Parker likes Eagle, Stephen likes DipTrace, and Chris is KiCad.
- MacroFab has seen lots of different EDA tools; Altium, Eagle, DipTrace, KiCad, PADS, Cadence, Ultiboard, Fritzing, EasyEDA, and MeowCad.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro mashup!
To be fair, the ESP8266 never needed a host MCU, it was just popularly used as a UART to wifi module with the stock AT command firmware.
It’s integrated mcu is fully programmable and can be used standalone with all standard peripherals, programmed either from it’s officially released SDK or via arduino software. It’s comparable to any of the mcus out there with integrated radio/rf like the ones from texas instruments, nordic semi, silabs and so on.