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You are here: Home / Radio Show / #713 – Rubber Duck Incarnate

#713 – Rubber Duck Incarnate

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  • Dave is back from vacation. He should have bought a Starlink mini (not as cheap as we thought) because his coverage was very poor throughout the trip.
  • Space twitter
  • Artemis II is going up soon (early Feb 2026)
  • Billy makes artemis go up 
  • Sparkfun and Adafruit are on the outs
  • PJRC (and Paul Stoffregen) makes the Teensy and it is now produced exclusively by Sparfkun
  • The pinout is open but the bootloader is proprietary and sold as the magic black box.
  • Paul’s wrote about what was happening on the EEVblog forum
  • Tim Lamb (Trash80) talked about teensy in his devices on episode 292 
  • Chris modified a Tag Connect 10 pin footprint for an upcoming design
  • RAM prices are wild right now!
  • After following a tutorial on “Doom Coding”, Chris picked up using Claude Code
  • A friend pointed out that more horizontal, open source programs like KiCad (version 10 coming soon) will have an advantage with LLMs/coding assistants over more vertically integrated tools. The vertical tools won’t be able to move as fast.
  • Also in the Doom Coding exercise, Chris found an app called Terminus that allows connecting an Android device (and maybe iOS?) and getting a terminal interface from the phone using a USB-C cable in OTG mode.
  • Zephyr builds in lots of capabilities
  • Chris loves using Zephyr shells to build interfaces (even custom ones) to standard functions in Zephyr
  • CES wrapped a week or two before this recording. The Donut lab solid state battery proposed impossible specs.
  • Some engineers modified a Rivian to try and make the Cannonball Run. It was an interesting look into battery packs and what it takes to charge them fast.
  • Dave and Chris took a long roadtrip to the Deep Space Network back in 2017.
  • Piers Rocks has a great video about how PIOs work on the RP2xxx chips from Raspberry Pi
  • The Raspberry Pi should always be viewed from the perspective of “what is cheapest”. The RP team mentioned that drove the decisions of external flash on the RP2xxx boards
  • Past guest Jeff Geerling talked about some of the pricing challenges with RAM prices increasing

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