Debugger vs Printeffer

 

Dave is back from vacation! Chris is leaving soon!

• We have had a range of great guests in the past few weeks (reverse chronologically)
  • Richard talking about LoRa and LoRaWAN
  • Tim talking about HDMI, FPGAs and the Tomu project
  • Clifford talking about RISC V and open source FPGA toolchains
• While Dave was gone he had a bunch of awesome guest videos!
• Dave unintentionally helped sponsor Chris's meetup with a BM235 multimeter The cost of doing business is real...but benefits others!
• There have been 121GW meter issues, though the first batch has shipped. They didn't think to make David the courier.
• Chris reminds that "manufacturing isn't glamorous"
• At first Chris thought Dave might be dealing with the worldwide capacitor shortage. Former guest Joe Bamberg mentioned that Yageo has been changing their sourcing strategy.
• PIC16c84 was an early reprogrammable chip
• Teardown of IBM PC junior
• PKware zip
• Intel has been dealing with the fallout of Meltdown and Spectre, which was apparently discovered by a 22 year old.
• The amazing $1 micro
• Chris has been using adafruit's Trinket M0, which ships with Circuit Python. It's great for troubleshooting, especially since Dave and Chris aren't debuggers (using things like the Black Magic Probe made by former guest Piotr)...we're more "printeffers"
• Dave will be pulling out the network analyzer to try out his power supply. Power supplies rely heavily on control theory and inserting signals to see the resultant output is a useful analysis. Chris also recommends this animated GIF of a Fourier Transform to see what's going on inside a square wave signal (and why it can be used to approximate a network analyzer)
• Travis Goodspeed released the Goodwatch. Dave thought it was just a calculator watch retrofit, but it actually has RF capabilities!
• There are tons of good talks being released on YouTube from 34c3 (Chaos Computer Congress).  Chris liked this one about decoding LoRa using GNUradio (which was actually from last year, 33c3)
• Former guest Bil Herd narrated and many-time former guest Jeri Ellsworth produced this documentary on the Atari
• The 3H Meetup has franchised to Seattle!
• Chris will be in Amsterdam for The Things Conference and in Brussels for FOSDEM. Let him know if you'll be there!

Thanks to isipeoria for the printf picture