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#554 – PLEASE be a die shrink
- After using it for his move, Chris realized he was co-dependent with label printer (QL-1050)
- USB A (was wrong, Chris was actually talking about USB Type B recepticles)
- Barnaclues broke off a USB connection and Dave cheered him on to try out soldering it back on
- Chris has been trying out putting M.2 modules and connectors and posting about his learnings on Twitter. The discussion was inspired by work from @timonsku, who was a guest on The Contextual Electronics podcast.
- Some companies like Blues Wireless and Sparkfun’s MicroMod don’t use the actual standard, they just use the low cost connector.
- This is commonly done with re-using low cost cables (DB9, ethernet, etc)
- Andy Weir has a new book out called Project Hail Mary
- Firefox movie
- M.2 on Wiki
- PCIe is meant to be 85 ohm characteristic impedance. This is different than USB (90 ohms) and many ethernet connections (100 ohms)
- Error rate
- Dave showed that the BM786 multimeter can be factory reprogrammed and viewers got upset
- Is 121GW is the most open DMM?
- Humans are the problem
- Past guest Nash Reilly wrote about why he might not be releasing a v2 of the bFunc. It’s a good discussion of the economics of hardware (which Dave has made a video about in the past) and how the test equipment market has special considerations.
- Saleae does a lot of value-add in terms of software. We had Mark and Joe on the show when they were moving towards the Logic Pro line.
- Dave’s 10 MHz DDS function generator
- AD9837
- Some test companies get better results by binning. There is a maker who measures LTZ1000 and bins/trims them as a business, selling the output.
- Sometimes their competitive advantage is scale: buy more parts (especially fancy custom parts) and you can get more margin.
- Vishay is removing the laser markings from precision resistors
- Getting Product Change Notifications can be stressful. We find ourselves opening emails uttering, “PLEASE be a die shrink”
- AOI – Automated Optical Inspection
- ESP32-H2 will have support for 802.15.4, thread, ZigBee. The ESP32-C3 is out now and has a single core RISC V processor. Chris thinks this is the first RISC V many people will get.
- Former guest Bil Herd released a book about his time at Commodore
- Former guest Chris Denney does a podcast for Worthington Assembly (with Circuit Hub). They just did an episode about “Small PCB layout decisions that have a significant impact on assembly”, which was really great!
Thanks to Gene Han for the photo of the wafers