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- Dave had a protracted battle with GitHub/Lab but found a way to upload files with drag and drop
- IoT Devices that have IP addresses
- eInk doesn’t seem super prevalent these days in products but has advanced a long way
- Repurposing grocery store displays
- If you’ll be at Embedded World, Saber from PCB Arts (episode 608) will be holding an event on Wednesday 3/15 (free to attend, need to register)
- Calipers
- Capliper videos
- Jimmie Rogers tattoo
- Sam Zeloof is starting a company to fab chip fabs with Jim Keller. They have raised $15M, from OpenAI(?)
- Former guests Matt Venn and Uri Shaked recently released SiliWiz. It helps students to learn how silicon transistors work (and therefore how ASICs are built)
- Mike Englehardt is no longer at ADI (who acquired LT) working on LTSpice. His website says he is working on a new simulator to be released in May of this year.
- Chris often defaults to Falstad simulator for easy circuits.
- Dave is having ChatGPT write a program for him
- Botsplaining
- Past guest Andreas Spiess did a recent video about OpenMQTTGateway which helps you to listen to 433 devices with an ESP32.
- KiCad 7.0 was released
- The Mother of all Demos (Doug Engelbart)
You guys have *got* to get dial calipers!
I’m a bit ADHD, but a dead battery in digital calipers basically kills my workflow for 30 minutes minimum while I look around for a replacement. And I just don’t have that kinda time. Not to mention dial calipers just physically feel better to use (personal opinion), and honestly, having used digital calipers for about 8 years, After about 1 week of use, dial calipers just felt more “intuitive” (not exactly sure how to describe it).
I’ve used digital ones for years due to low cost. Then a few years back I got a job that involved working alongside a bunch of grey-bearded ME technicians, who were generous enough to pretty freely share their tools amongst the shop, including *really* nice calipers.
I don’t need a $600 set for my desk, but I did get this set, which I’d highly recommend (they have both imperial and metric on the dial): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QQTDC1S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I mostly use them for PCB work, so I don’t need imperial fractions, but iGaging does make a set with the commonly used fractional measurements on it (imperial only): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005FRGF1Q/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
FYI, ChatGPT is really bad at hardware haha. I asked it to generate some gerber files (which are really just text files!) and it actually generated proper syntax, but anything beyond that it really did not understand. I assume it’s because there is really little to no human-written documentation online that translates gerber files into the more abstract concept of a circuit. It *was* able to give me the footprint of an 0805 resistor, but copper pads only. (I asked for other footprints too, but it was unsuccessful). It didn’t really know what to do with the silk layer (I think it did put a ref-des on the silk layer at some point). I asked it to put 2 resistors in series and it just generated a single rectangle copper pad haha. I also asked it to generate a circuit as a spice netlist (also just a text file!) and same story; it got the syntax of the file right, and could implement a component or two, but ask it to put 2 resistors in parallel, and it just does not know what that means. Often just resulted in dangling nets. :/
HOWEVER, ChatGPT has been **phenomenal** in writing bash scripts for me haha! I was having trouble with an ALSA config file (linux stuff), and I asked it for an example ALSA config file that would set a particular channel of a particular sound card as the default output device, and it nailed it first try. This was after probably an hour of trying to find the answer myself with google.
Instead of using 74 series logic for Dave’s countdown device I wonder if it would easier with 4000 series – that family has some nifty counter/decoder/driver chips like 4026 ?