#482 – Shine A Light

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released March 1st, 2020. Episode 482, sponsored by Screaming Circuits. Shine a light.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. We're back. Hey, what's up, man? What's up? You know, usual stuff.

Chris Gammell: You're going canyoning tonight. That's different.

Dave Jones: I am. I'm going night canyoning. Thanks for sharing that on an electronics podcast. It's totally on topic.

Chris Gammell: Well, you know, there'll be LED lighting, I'm sure. There will be. And also, no, actually, we did talk about this a couple of weeks ago where I said, you go canyoning still. And you're like, yeah, sometimes. And I was like, when's the last time you went? You said like last year. And now you're going.

Dave Jones: True. Well, you know, I mean, I've got a wife and kids, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: Speaking of LED lighting and stuff, I did get myself product review time. I did get myself a new headlamp for canyoning tonight. Yeah. And it's the Black Diamond Spot. And geez, I'm impressed.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. How big is it?

Dave Jones: It's like, how big is it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's usually the impressive thing about, like, what is there to a headlamp? It's like, there's like size and weight.

Dave Jones: It's one of the single headband ones. So it's not one of the ones that goes over the top and has the battery pack at the back. You're usually your larger, more powerful ones for like, you know, caving and real. Yeah. Like a true torch, right? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's a massive, like, you know, indoor lamp kind of, you know, thing that lights up a whole space. So you'd need that for say, caving or something like that. But for stuff I do, no, just, you know, either canyoning, climbing, bushwalking, you just need your single headband, which just goes around your head and not over the top. And the batteries are on the front, inside the enclosure. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So it's like a rechargeable and just, just in there. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And they run on three AAA batteries. You can either use, so they've designed it properly that you can either use lithium, you can use alkaline, or you can use nickel metal hydride rechargeables. So, you know, it's, it's super flexible like that. A lot of people forget that when you're actually designing a product, you know, does it support the high voltage lithiums, for example? Because they are higher voltage than your regular alkalines. They can be up to 1.8 volts a cell.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Okay. So that could really mess some stuff up, huh?

Dave Jones: That could, that could, that could ruin your day, especially if you've got like some sort of, you know, over voltage diode clamping protection or something on your rail, on your voltage rail. You install the lithiums and boom, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I actually, I didn't realize they went that high.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. Yes, they do. That's open circuit voltage. Yep. That's like brand new out of the pack kind of thing. They will drain relatively, like the voltage will drop relatively quickly, but still your device has to handle that. And that is a not uncommon problem in the industry is, you know, designing for lithium ion. Lithium primary battery is not lithium ion. That's a different technology.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right, right.

Dave Jones: Yes. Lithium primary battery technology. Then I'm impressed by the fact that the thought about, well, what happens if this thing's in your, I'm talking about usability design now. And, you know, we can, you have to pull up a picture to have a look at this thing. And anyway, so what happens if it's in your pack and, you know, it's rattling around in your pack as you're walking, you're climbing, you're scrambling over things, abseiling, doing whatever. And it accidentally turns on, for example. And then you go to use it at nighttime after your big walk. And it's like, oh, my batteries are dead because it accidentally switched on in my pack. So it's got to have like a soft lock mode. So you can put it into a soft lock mode where you have to like depress two buttons at the same time for like three seconds in order to unlock it. So that, you know, it doesn't automatically discharge the batteries. Very nice touch in my humble opinion.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's great. I think that's like, is it, usually my problem is I'm like scraping the bottom, like, especially for that kind of like commodity type thing. I'm like, well, I'll just get the cheapest one with like decent reviews on Amazon.

Dave Jones: Oh, no, no, don't get a cheap headlamp. No, please don't. No, no.

Chris Gammell: You're going in for a world of hurt. Literally in Australia when you're, you know, walking around with spiders and blizzards and whatever else you guys got there.

Dave Jones: Should I extol the other design features I thought were quite nice?

Chris Gammell: I mean, this is a lot for an LED lamp, but I mean, yeah, go for it, man.

Dave Jones: This is why I'm thoroughly impressed by it. And the other one is, is that it has a sort of like a touch button on the side. It's like a touch sensor on the side that can override any of the modes that you set because it's got like three different LEDs on it. It's got a red LED for a night, night vision type thing. It's got a main LED, then a secondary LED with different angles. Right. So it's got all these different light modes you can do. You can just like a touch, capacitive touch sensor on the side. You just touch that and it'll instantly override any mode. So you don't have to dick around with the button. So if you're in trouble, you can just tap the side of it and it'll instantly go full power regardless of the mode that you're in.

Chris Gammell: Right. Because you don't want to be like clicking through.

Dave Jones: No, you don't want to be, you know, you're hanging off the side of a cliff near death and you need more light. Yeah. You don't want to be going through the different modes and stuff. So that's very nice.

Chris Gammell: Mm hmm.

Dave Jones: Then it's got a little tiny little three LED bar graph on the side for the battery indicator. And you might think, oh, well, three is not very good. It's like, OK, full, half dead and then dead, almost dead kind of indication. But no, it actually uses a binary sequence on there. Right. So the three LEDs can show you the eight different levels of the battery. It's great. And it automatically lights those up for a couple of seconds after you either turn it on or press any button. So that hardly uses any power at all to, you know, turn on a couple of really low power LEDs on the side for a few seconds. And that, so it always gives you a battery indication without draining too much power. I think that's terrific.

Chris Gammell: That's not bad.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Fantastic design mode. And then the only thing I don't like about it, though, downsides, OK, is they claim it's waterproof. I actually love this part. It's kind of like it's IP68 waterproof. Right. So which means it can survive immersion in one meter of water for like an hour or something like that. But there's a little asterisk next to that requirement, which says, oh, the battery compartment isn't. So water can, so the electronics will be fine, but water can get in. There's no battery seal. There's no seal around the battery compartment. So I think that's kind of fun. But, you know, it will still work. Batteries, it waters in your battery compartment. Replaceable.

Chris Gammell: Replaceable batteries.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I think there you go. That's product of the week. The Black Diamond Spot 325 is the new model for those playing along at home. And there you go. Where did that come from?

Chris Gammell: Well, you're going canyoning. So and you didn't want to talk. You didn't want to talk about it, but then you did want to talk about headlamps.

Dave Jones: And then you brought up lead lighting. So yeah, there you go. Anyway, very impressed. And then the different beam patterns. I love that. You know, so you want the spot for, oh, you're not really getting excited, are you?

Chris Gammell: No. I mean, that's more on like the user side of things. And like, I don't really go outside, Dave. So there's the. Yeah, right. Yeah. There's that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, like little things when you're designing products like that can make a heck of a difference. Just really small stuff.

Chris Gammell: You know, I think that's a good point too. Like electronics internally, like probably aren't all that complicated. And yet it is that like, what makes a product is like, is that other stuff like you're talking about?

Dave Jones: And it's the other stuff. It's the user interface design, the experience. It's the whole Apple thing. You know, that's what Jobs was into. Oh, it's all about the experience and all that sort of stuff. You know? Yeah. Anyone can actually design a phone, but you know, to make it polished and well, you can argue that until the cows come home. But anyway, that was, that was the whole point. Yeah. Small things in the user experience matter. That's, that's why I like this thing. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, and you know, you got to pay premiums for that kind of thing usually too. So.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. It's a bit more expensive than your cheapies, but not by a huge margin. It's not Apple prices. Percentage wise, you know, percentage wise. Oh, of course. Yep. Oh, all those things add up on your bomb cost.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's for sure. You know? So yeah. Anyway, I would love to do a teardown, but sorry. It's like, I think it's like potted or something.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway, speaking of Apple.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of Apple, I saw a report today that, you know, like there's lots of, obviously a lot of COVID-19 or coronavirus. A lot of people talking about that stuff. Oh yeah. Coronavirus.

Dave Jones: It's got some other official name now. Sorry. It's like the COVID-19 is the.

Chris Gammell: I think it's like the CDC, the CDC name or something like that. Maybe. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Something like that. I don't know. Whatever. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Coronavirus. Yep. But yeah. Tim Cook is, was calling that it's, you know, it is on the other side. It's hard to tell, you know, like when it's someone like at his level, who's like not just saying it for the investors versus actual like the reality of the situation. But he did say that things have been getting better on their supply side. It's interesting. I don't know. But if you've been ordering stuff from China, but I've been, I finally jumped back in. I was like, oh, well, the PCBs are fine. And I have.

Dave Jones: Well, they are back. Depends on who the manufacturer is though. That's right. Yeah. Okay. JLC is back and delivering again. That's all on the forum. There's a huge forum thread of how this is impacting manufacturing and stuff like that. And everyone's keeping tabs. Oh yeah. I use PCB way. I use JLC and they're summer back. Some aren't. Oh, I can't get manufacturing. They're telling me eight weeks.

Chris Gammell: I got a little bit of a beaten switch. I had a four to five day. And then I was like, looking at it again today. I was like, oh, that, that went to 10 days. Like, okay. Well. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So what do you, you know, they're still doing really good. Yeah. I mean, you know. They're open. So that's good.

Chris Gammell: But.

Dave Jones: They are. But a lot of, I've heard a lot of the support people are working from home. Like, you know, the people who like check your files and stuff like that. But when you upload them, for example, you know, they do like the QC check to make sure there's no errors in your Gerbers or whatever. And yeah, a lot of those people are working from home. So yeah, they're not actually in the factory. It's only the essential factory people that are in there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hmm. So yeah, but they're, they're doing like fantastically to try and keep this on track. I mean, South Korea is being hit huge now and they're like so many companies over there are now shutting down and quarantine and cities shut. And it's just, wow. They're really in full panic mode in South Korea. So yeah. And several of my YouTubers who I watch, they're like, you know, bunkered down, for example. And yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There was a good episode of the Macrofab engineering podcast. The former, the founder and former CEO, now COO, Chris Church was on there talking about kind of how this stuff affects supply chain as well. I'll have a link for that as well. Yep. Yeah. It's kind of weird. I mean, like, I agree. I mean, I agree that they are coming back in force and like that. No, they're not. No. I mean like that people are pushing for opening back up and stuff like that. Maybe not on force. That's probably the wrong term. But they, you know, they're, they're making strides towards it and they're, they're pushing to open up, but still it's just amazing how this stuff has affected the supply chain. I haven't seen anything on like the parts side of things yet, but I, I'm sure that that's kind of like latent in the, you know, it's like kind of where things hit. Like, is it like a leading edge or is it like trailing edge kind of thing? And like, you know, if people aren't making parts at the, you know, the capacitor factory, that's not going to hit for a couple of weeks yet, but that could end up hitting later on that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: It'll go on for a long time. If you think this thing is getting better or over, you're kidding yourself.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: No way. This is, it's going to get worse. Trust me. And I'm, I'm not surprised at all of, of the impact of this thing. Like we had to come a gutter eventually. And, and people are shocked. Well, when you have something like this, that's pretty much an unknown and has a massive incubation period like this thing, it's, it's absolutely no surprise to anyone who understands this sort of stuff that it's kind of caused those huge impacts. I mean, it, it's just everything centralized in China, right? All of our supply and all of our manufacturing and everything else is centralized there. And, you know, people are surprised when there's a shutdown due to a pandemic like this. I mean, come on. I'm not the least bit surprised. It had to happen eventually.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I guess, I mean, I guess the centralization of, I mean, the centralization is maybe, but I, I mean, that doesn't really have to do with the, the, like the incubation time and stuff like that. Like, I, yeah, I mean, I guess I agree about the centralization. Yeah. We definitely are very dependent on China. That was another thing that Chris Church brought up too, is like, you know, like a lot of people when they're, you know, when the prices are low and everything's rolling, flowing fine, it's like, if you come to me and you say, Hey, this board's gonna be 10, five times more because it's, you know, made in the U S or made, you know, in Germany or something like that. It's like, uh, no, I don't want to do that. But like, that's what actually is going to support the future boards and drive the volumes that would end up lowering costs domestically anyway. So yeah, it might, it might be a shakeup in that way, but I don't know if it was obvious that this was going to happen. That's what I heard you say. It was like that it's obvious.

Dave Jones: Well, no, it was obvious of the effects of if something like this did happen, it's obvious what the effects would have been. That's what I'm saying. Got it. Got it. And you know, it's like, and, and you can have anything, you can have an asteroid impact in, in bloody China or something, right? You could have a massive countrywide power outage for weeks, right? You can like, there's all sorts of things that can, you know, go wrong. And, and a virus is just one of them. Haven't you ever watched any of the pandemic virus, Hollywood movies? I mean, you know.

Chris Gammell: Well, those are usually more focused on like, uh, bleeding from various, uh.

Dave Jones: Zombies, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Zombies and bleeding, bleeding from various orifices and.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That kind of thing. So no, I don't actually watch those, Dave. I don't, I'm not that kind of.

Dave Jones: They're pretty great.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. No, like I am not surprised of the effects of this thing. And, uh, and no, if you've been listening to anyone in the last 10 years, like Bill Gates famously said it in a documentary last year. It's on Netflix, I think. I think I watched a couple of episodes of it. And, uh, he, he said on there that these, you know, a virus is going to start and it's going to spread from the food markets in China. He almost called it like a year ago.

Chris Gammell: And what was the documentary about though?

Dave Jones: It was actually about viruses in some respect. I haven't actually watched that episode, but, uh, it's not like people haven't been warning that something like this could happen.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: They, they have. It's just that you've, you've never heard of it.

Chris Gammell: Why don't I watch those kinds of movies?

Dave Jones: Right. So, you know, it, it just, yeah, it's absolutely no, you know, because we've had like the SARS before we've had bird flu and things like that. Yeah. And unfortunately they didn't reach the sort of, you know, panic level that we're seeing now, you know, shelves, you know, clearing in South, you know, things like that. People are just panicking and, and, uh, you know, stocking up. So huge impact on manufacturing and will continue to be so. So, but, but the long, long tail effects, we just have no clue about like, I don't know. Yeah. Six months down the track.

Chris Gammell: Interesting is like, if things will kind of come back and, you know, stops, fits and starts and kind of things too.

Dave Jones: It'll be interesting to see how it changes various countries policies. It's like, Oh yeah, we are pretty centralized to China. Maybe we should think about, you know, onshoring a bit more. Will this result in more onshoring? Maybe.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: We've talked about that over the last, like maybe five years, you know, this onshoring thing is a thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Companies are actually bringing back manufacturing from China and doing it locally because it's almost, you know, the cost is almost the same and there's good benefits to doing that.

Chris Gammell: I disagree with that. Usually, at least in the States, when they say, well, Hey, we're going to do an unshoring or reshoring, whatever. They're like, yeah, we're bringing it back. And then they go to Mexico.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. Right. Yeah. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Or they've gone to India or yep. Somewhere else. Yeah. I mean, that is not onshoring, right? That's not true. Onshore.

Chris Gammell: That's yeah. That's not true.

Dave Jones: There has been quite a significant amount of onshoring.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, I think there is a focus on multiple supply chains at least, but sometimes like what if there's raw material? Like there was a thing I was reading about. Raw materials is a thing. Yeah. Yeah. That's like for medicines, even like a lot of raw materials for medicines are in China.

Dave Jones: We do make a lot of medicine here in Australia, but a lot of the raw materials, they come from China. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. I mean, it's just, everything's kind of interconnected like that. And I don't know. I don't know what happens then.

Dave Jones: I think there will be quite a significant change. This has really a boot up the pants to a lot of countries, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So yeah. And companies too, I think, I mean, well, as we record this, there's been some bad days in the market. I think there's maybe more to come. We'll see, but we're not, we don't, we don't time the stock market around here, but, uh, but I think what, what, what has ended up happening is a lot of like Microsoft and Apple and a big, big companies are like, yeah, look, we're not just going to impact us. Yeah. Yeah. It's impacting not just their supply like Apple, but it's also like, Hey, this is a lot of our customers too. The only one I've seen that's been doing well has been a zoom, which is like the video conferencing site. They have had more subscriptions in the past, like a couple of weeks than they had in all of last year.

Dave Jones: They're an online service. So everyone's stuck at home. So they have to find an online service to do their, to continue their work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And they like in the past couple of weeks, they've had as much business in the whole, as the whole previous year or something like that.

Dave Jones: Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah. So, I mean, but that's kind of just how it goes. Some winners. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's right. I'm sure the mask manufacturers are doing fantastically. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The people who sell on Amazon.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I've watched prices double and triple and go up 10 times, you know, pay a hundred dollars for one mask.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, wow. Unbelievable. So anyway, yeah, it's a, it's a huge deal. So I'm sure we'll be talking about that ad nauseum for the next, you know, six months.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like if, if you think there still won't be impacts in six months time, I think you're kidding yourself. I think there's, there's a big long tail to this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That'll be, we'll have to have like a check-in segment or something like that. You know, I don't know. I don't know what it'll play out like, but it'll be interesting.

Dave Jones: All right. Let's move on from the, from the coronavirus and its huge impacts. Can we do an anti chip of the week? Anti chip of the week.

Chris Gammell: Like do not, do not use this chip. Do not use this chip.

Dave Jones: I'm sorry. I just threw this on Chris. He seems like, like he's, he's like a deer in headlights. He's going, well, what is the chip?

Chris Gammell: I'm worried. I'm worried. I'm already using this chip, Dave.

Dave Jones: I just released this video like moments before. We went live here.

Chris Gammell: Oh, this is the, uh, the thing you found in the trash.

Dave Jones: The dumpster, the, uh, the NAS. I found a Synology, uh, NAS, a four by Synology NAS brand new in, in the dumpster. Turns out it didn't work. The reason it didn't work is because of a, this is not new, new news, by the way, is because the Intel, it uses an Intel C2000 atom processor. And that processor famously has a, it's not a bug, but it's a silicon degradation defect.

Chris Gammell: It's not, not a bug.

Dave Jones: It's not, not a bug. Well, it's a, it's my, you could maybe say it's a fault in the masking or something like that, but it's not a bug because the chip, when it was sent from the factory, it did work. Right.

Chris Gammell: Interesting.

Dave Jones: It did work, but then it degrades very quickly. So it's a silicon degradation.

Chris Gammell: They're like, what, what is, what is the degradation happening from?

Dave Jones: It's actually an output. What's happening is there's an output driver clock, right? So it's, it's one of the, um, it's called a, um, it's called the LPC clock for those play LPC clock zero for those playing along at home. Um, that, that pin is a, is a 25 megahertz clock output that's designed to drive external boot flash ROMs and external, uh, you know, bus type stuff. And that output driver, it'd just be like a standard CMOS, uh, totem pole output driver, right? You know, it's got a MOSFET on top, MOSFET on the bottom drives it, drives the output high and low, right? Very incredibly simple, basic stuff. Been doing this for 50 years. Right. And, uh, well, haven't been doing CMOS for 50 years, but you know what I mean? And it, one, it looks like potentially from my, uh, testing one, like the upper transistor might've failed. So it can't pull up. Right. So, so it actually, actually the chip actually degrades over time. That, that transistor, that particular transistor actually degrades in some aspect and it can't pull high. And that's not good because your totem pole output, you rely on it pulling high. You don't have a pull up resistor. So you might think, well, what's the fix? The fix is to actually add a pull up resistor to add a low value pull up red bit because it's 25 megahertz, which is really fast. And there's lots of capacitance on the bus. You have to add a low value, a hundred ohm, a hundred ohm pull up. So I was driving like 33 milliamps or whatever, you know, but it kind of works. And the waveform is horrible. I show it in the video. The waveform has this weird little step in it, in the undetermined region. And you don't want that. For those who don't know that when you're designing digital stuff, you want to transition through, like you want to transition as fast as humanly possible. Right. So there will be maximum specs, for example, there will be maximum slew rate specs for inputs on chips, like, you know, CMOS digital inputs. And if you exceed, like for regular 7.4 HC or something, it's like 500 nanoseconds, I think. So if you see exceed, so if the slew rate of your input signal is too slow, i.e. it's, you know, it's slower than 500 nanoseconds or whatever your spec is for that, then your chip is not guaranteed to perform. It can go into a metastable state. If it's a clock input, the clock will just go and start metastably oscillating and doing all sorts of things. And yeah, it's not good. So, and the clock in this thing looks horrible. So it's not, especially when it's rising, it doesn't transition straight up. It's sort of like goes up and then goes up to about a volt and then just stays there for 10 nanoseconds or something. And then goes up again. It's got this little step porch thing and oh, it just looks, but, but it works. I, I did the mod. I added the pull-up resistor to this NAS box, this clock line, and it worked. And apparently that was the factory fix.

Chris Gammell: And that's why you think it was in the trash too?

Dave Jones: I believe that's why it was in the trash. Cause it was practically brand new. Like this is like a seven, $800 NAS.

Chris Gammell: And that's network attached storage for people who don't know that.

Dave Jones: Network attached storage, a RAID type, you know? Right. Yeah. Multiple drive by, yeah. Network storage thing. And yeah, so it's very expensive and it was tossed because it famously, nothing to do with Synology. It wasn't their fault. Tons of manufacturers that use this Intel C2000 processor were impacted by this and they all have to either scrap their products or figure out a workaround like this, which is the pull-up resistor.

Chris Gammell: Would you actually use it? You wouldn't actually use this as a drive thing though. Would you trust it or no?

Dave Jones: Technically you can trust it because all it's doing is doing the boot thing, right? All, all, all, all this clock does is loads the boot flash ROM when you power it up. So as soon as you've done that. So in theory, like it's got nothing to do with saving the data on the hard drive. So actually saving the data, like actually having secure data on there, it doesn't impact that at all. So from that aspect, it's completely safe to use. But the fact is, no, it could actually degrade even further and somehow, and it just won't boot anymore. But then you could still recover the data from your hard drives. You can put those drives in another thing and actually recover the data.

Chris Gammell: So the C2000, all these people have to either put a fix in, like this seems like a really big deal. Like I didn't actually hear anything about it.

Dave Jones: This was in February, 2017. It was huge.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I missed as well. Cause I don't, you know, I'm not using Intel C2000s, but yeah, no, this is enormous impacted, you know, probably hundreds of manufacturers, huge names.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's crazy.

Dave Jones: Cisco and all sorts of companies. And they all had to come out with all these responses and fixes and all sorts of things.

Chris Gammell: And they're like quasi embedded. I actually, I never really got like, when I think of Adam, I always think of like, they were in like low cost laptops. That's all I really remember. But it was a pretty broad line, wasn't it?

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. Yeah. It was huge. It was using tons of embedded things like these NAS drives and network servers and, you know, all sorts of, all sorts of, you know, stuff where we just don't use daily. Yeah. So yeah, huge deal. And it doesn't, wasn't guaranteed, depends on the design of your product, wasn't guaranteed this would cause a problem. If you didn't use that pin to power like a boot ROM, you could do boot ROMs in other ways. Right. But that was just like one of the easiest methods to do your boot ROM. And of course, a boot ROM is pretty important when you're powering up your product.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: So yeah.

Chris Gammell: I have heard, I've heard, I've heard this. I've heard this. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And yeah, a huge problem. So yeah, that was an oopsie. Um, I don't know what impact that had on Intel, like on their share price or their reputation or whatever, but yeah, that's, that's pretty bad. And it's not a bug. Like you get bugs all the time. You go to the e-rata for the C2000. It's just like any micro. Go and look them up. Look it up all the issues and bugs that will be in the chip. And they'll either go, oh, it's fixed in this stepping of the process of the stepping as the version of the silicon. But a lot of them, a ton of them, especially in the C2000, let's go, there's no fix, no fix, no fix. Sorry. No fix, no fix. You know, we, we advertise this feature, but sorry, just doesn't work. So, you know, tough tits.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I was surprised by that with, uh, I think it was, so I was on embedded a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about some of this stuff and I think it was Chris, uh, white was saying like, well, and like, sometimes it's just like the manual's wrong or this thing doesn't work. I'm like, that, that can't be right. And then, then it happened to me where I was like, yeah, this is just like an undocumented, like, yeah, it just happens, you know?

Dave Jones: I know you do not believe it until it happens to you. It's very jarring.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's like, you just expect that this is like a perfect thing that you're using, you know, maybe quirky or whatever, but it's like, you don't expect it to be like, just not fixable, not, not working, you know? Like that's.

Dave Jones: Yep. And sometimes I'll come up with fix arounds. I can remember, you know, various pick, uh, processes I'm using over the years and it's like, oh yeah, there's this bug in the, you know, the, this, uh, timer or whatever. So we came up with a software fix. So you have to do these instructions, write these instructions first. And that kind of sort of fixes it. And if you don't write those first and we won't tell you why, but if you write those first, then it'll suddenly magically work, you know? Yeah. And, and, and I, I've had entire serial ports not working. I've had, uh, you know, pins swapped on the chip. It's like, I, you know, I couldn't figure out why my, like, it's just. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Maybe it was you saying this. Maybe it wasn't Chris White. Maybe it was you saying this or it's just someone was saying it to me recently.

Dave Jones: I've mentioned this before over the years. Yeah. Maybe that's somewhere. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: For me, it was like, I was, uh, I was using a timer. I had it hooked into like a low frequency oscillator and like, there was like a divide by eight. Like I wanted a really, really slow clock. Yeah. Right. And, and so I'm like doing all these tests and I'm like, this, this isn't working. You know, like the, the clock, you know, I expected to be 10 seconds long or something like that before it ticks over 10 seconds long. And I'm, and I'm just like, this, it's never firing. It's never happening. What's going on here? And it turns out just like the divide by eight just doesn't work. It just.

Dave Jones: It just doesn't work. Which, uh, which, uh, chip was this name and shame?

Chris Gammell: Oh, this is on the EFM eight, which I, I like otherwise, you know, I've been, I talked about on that, that episode, but like, otherwise I like it.

Dave Jones: This is the, uh, Gecko, is it? The EFM eight?

Chris Gammell: No, no, the smaller one. The eight, it's a Gecko is the EFM 32. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. I'm not sure if it has like a brand like that, but, um, maybe, maybe, but like I said, I like the chip otherwise, but it was just like, Ooh, I don't know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, and it's not like, and yeah, it happens to every manufacturer. You're going, Oh, your picks famous for it. Or, or, you know, these EFMs are famous for it or at mills are famous for it. And then you move to some other chip. No, it's, you know, there's no point trying to avoid it. It's going to happen.

Chris Gammell: Well, the thing to think about is like, these are even, even small systems. Like an EFM eight has a ton of transistors and a ton of circuits going in there. And then they're, they're onto the next thing.

Dave Jones: They're massively complex.

Chris Gammell: Uh, what people will hear is I'm going to tease next week. Uh, I interview a chip designer next week and hearing him talk about like the amount of designs that they do where he works. Yep. Like, Oh my God. Like, it's just like, you know, like the, the speed that they work at, like, I'm sure that they're very talented and they, they get a lot of stuff, right. But it's just like, it's gotta be physically impossible to get everything. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No. And they, they, they, they have to reuse modules from previous chips. You know, asking what, what percentage of stuff they reuse from the previous, previous design. It's probably 99%.

Chris Gammell: I did ask that actually. And it was very surprisingly not the case. Really? Okay. Yeah. This is a real weird one. Well, I'll, I'll, I'll tease, tease something else for this episode. I told Dave, I sent Dave a message after I finished interviewing this person and I was so out of my element. I have never felt so confused and yet wanted to be so confused. So really exciting episode coming out next week.

Dave Jones: But, but, but that is not, um, like micros and stuff. This is like ultra high. Exactly. Yeah. Extreme high frequency, like hundreds of gigs.

Chris Gammell: 500 gigahertz. Yeah.

Dave Jones: 500 gigahertz. It's just like, holy shit. So, so to him, like a, uh, like several gigs is DC, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's what he said. He said three gigahertz is low, low, low, low frequency. Yeah. I'm like, what?

Dave Jones: Low frequency stuff. What? What? Exactly.

Chris Gammell: But then, but then they have micros on board and a bunch of other stuff too.

Dave Jones: So like, yeah, that's, um, so this is even a level above, uh, Sharia who works on like 80, 80 gig or something, doesn't he?

Chris Gammell: Uh, yeah, I think they're kind of in, I would put them in the same realm. I think probably in the same category. I think, I think I would love to watch those two. So this is Adrian who will be on the show next week. I would love to watch Sharia and Adrian. Right. Maybe we can hook that up. We'll just put them in a room and film them and see what happens.

Dave Jones: Lock the door. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You just slip some food under the door and, you know, like. That's great. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And, and if you wonder why there's so many like errors in data sheets and things like that is because when they come out with a new micro, they don't just, somebody doesn't just sit down and write the data sheet. All they do is copy the data sheet from the previous nearest chip and then go through and modify it and make changes. Right. And, and you're just going to miss stuff. So there'll be in stuff in there. That's just completely and utterly wrong. Cause they churn out like, you know, hundreds of chips a year. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I'm sure there's a lot of people checking it, but like, you know, there's small things that sneak through, you know, that's.

Dave Jones: Guaranteed things are going to sneak through. That's why. Yeah. Um, always download, make sure you have the latest data sheet. Like that is great advice.

Chris Gammell: That is great advice. It's easier if you're on old silicon, right? I think that a lot of it's been sussed out.

Dave Jones: Old mature silicon. You know, it's like a lot of people love using the 8051, you know, it's just so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ironed out.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's what I, that's what the chip I'm talking about is. So we're excited to continue to bring you sponsors that are interested in educating our audience. Today, we're going to hear again from Dwayne from Screaming Circuits, who you may remember talked about a through hole pick and place machine last time. Today, he's going to talk about the setup of a low volume manufacturing solution so that you can get prototype boards made quickly through Screaming Circuits.

Screaming Circuits: We, we can, uh, manufacture and machine manufacturer from cut tapes. We've created a system of, uh, plates that allow us to, uh, to set the cut tapes down in precision. So, you know, say you order from DigiKey and, uh, and you need 20 parts and they give you a strip of five. We can put that on a fixture that will then be precision enough for our machines to, uh, to pick and place. It really doesn't slow anything down because when we're, we're putting the components on the plates there, we also have, uh, um, our machine programmers going through and double checking the designs, uh, checking footprints, checking polarities and getting, uh, getting our machines programmed up. So there really isn't any delay. It's happening in parallel with other, other services. And then when it comes time to put the solder paste on the PC board, uh, we save a little more time there also because we don't have to order a stencil in most cases. We have these big paste jet printers. Uh, they're kind of like inkjet printers except putting down solder paste.

Chris Gammell: I've actually run a prototype board through Screaming Circuits before, and it had some really tiny pitch parts. But more broadly, I'm curious about what happens when you want a fast circuit board, but it also has these crazy small pitch parts that are available these days.

Screaming Circuits: Well, the, the machines that we have now can go down to a 0.4 millimeter pitch. Um, and then below that today, we need to use a stencil. We won't very shortly, probably by the time this goes live, we will have, um, we're buying a set of new machines that can go down to a 0.24 millimeter pitch, uh, BGAs. And that allows us to, uh, to use those paste jets for any component we get in here. And that's one of the interesting, one of the other interesting things about Screaming Circuits is that we have so many different jobs so frequently from so many different industries that we tend to see the new components before most other companies do.

Chris Gammell: So of course I had to ask what's coming down the pipe. What do we expect to see if we're working on the leading edge of packaging for electronics?

Screaming Circuits: Well, certainly the, the super small pitch BGAs, they just keep getting smaller and smaller, um, and larger in terms of number of balls. The, uh, LGA or land grid array, that's basically like a BGA except without the balls on it. Those are becoming pretty common in small components themselves. These kinds of tiny dimensions, things that, uh, a few years ago weren't precision, you know, precision wasn't required. Now it absolutely is.

Chris Gammell: Ultimately, this is why I chose to go to Screaming Circuits instead of trying to solder it myself. The pitch on the component I was using was just too small. So if you have a build coming up with a bunch of small components on it, or you want your designs fast, check out Screaming Circuits.com slash the amp hour, and you can learn more about getting your boards made. Now we're back to the show. Um, so this whole space, uh, I wanted to bring up a chip, maybe a chip of the week this week. I don't know, but this is a new one. Uh, the plus one. Did you see this link on our subreddit?

Dave Jones: Oh, I have, I have the link, but I have not.

Chris Gammell: So basically this is kind of filling that space of like the BeagleBone Black and the Raspberry Pi and custom solutions that are out there. And basically I was really surprised that this is a, so it's called the plus one. It's from a group called Tibbo, T-I-B-B-O. And it's got a whole bunch of, uh, high, like it's a quad core A7, quad A7 processor. It's also got 8051 to do low level stuff.

Dave Jones: It's got an 8051 on the outside. And what does the 8051 do? Just supervisory stuff?

Chris Gammell: I think that's for low level, high, high speed stuff, you know? Like, so, so that's kind of like a, more like a BeagleBone where a BeagleBone has internal microcontrollers that interact. They have shared memory with the actual A53, whatever, whatever it is. I forget what's in it. Oh, BeagleBone.

Dave Jones: Okay. I didn't know that.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if people go back and listen to the episode with, uh, Jason Kreidner and, uh, Robert, uh, I can't remember Robert's last name, Robert Nelson from DigiKey. They, that was like an amazing chat with them. Cause they kind of, I didn't realize that all that stuff was how it was working. I had no idea when we were writing to that episode. And it's great though, because like, that is like a, you know, it's kind of a good mix of high level. You're, you want to like talk to a network. You want to have actual Linux running on there. You want to run, you know, node JS, or you want to, you know, run Python or something. And then it can talk down to these modules that are watching a process and just acting based on input. Right. So it's watching when a bit comes in high, it goes and does a spy command or something like that. It's fine. Good, whatever. Right. And then it dumps it into memory and then you can read that memory later. Uh, I'm working on a project right now. That's like this, where I actually have discrete boards that are kind of all talking to one another because I wanted to do something like this. And I wanted to actually have some supply chain stability of like, I'd rather make a system that has, you know, small microcontrollers that talk over serial in this case up to a larger Linux system. Um, but like this is now shrinking all this stuff down. And I think this is a, going to be a more and more common thing is you want to have a system that has memory internal, has all the drivers internal. So this thing has processing. So it has integrated memory. It has integrated power. So you only have to give it three.

Dave Jones: So it's got integrated, uh, 128 meg or 512 meg DDR3 integrated.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. It's five volt tolerant. It's five volt tolerant for you five volt fanboys.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. And yeah, exactly. So like this, and so like they're kind of targeting the industrial space. It's, you know, it's actually minus four to 80 minus four to 85 C for temperature rating and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Yep. One of the most interesting things is that they know one of the pain points to acceptance of these new devices is, well, will they be around in a couple of years? If I design this into my product, will, will I still be able to get in five years time? That's why one of their key highlights is a 10 year supply guarantee.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: It's right there, right in the main features, 10 year supply guarantee.

Chris Gammell: To me, that's always like, Hey, we are targeting industrial, right? Or we're targeting automotive, probably industrial though, because I don't think automotive would use something like this, but yeah. And it's got like a huge, so I was a little surprised. It's actually a quad flat pack, which is kind of surprising.

Dave Jones: It's a quad flat pack.

Speaker ?: Woo.

Chris Gammell: You prefer that actually?

Dave Jones: That is BGA rubbish. Of course.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Who wouldn't prefer a quad flat pack over a bloody BGA?

Chris Gammell: I, you know, you can have more bridging, I suppose. I don't know. I mean, but you'd see it then. Really? So then that's nice. I mean, for rework, totally. It's better. You know, like that kind of thing. It's, it's pretty fine pitch though, isn't it?

Dave Jones: I don't know about the pitch. Yeah. It's probably like half a millimeter or something like that perhaps, but still.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, come on. That's a huge plus. I mean, that's absolutely amazing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And then, and then the other interesting thing is something I really like about the NRF 52 series, sorry, the 840, the 52 840. It's got like completely every pin or almost every pin is reconfigurable. And they're kind of promoting that too. They basically, they have a different chipset in here that does like the actual routing. So every pin is kind of wired to this, what do they call it? The flexible peripheral multiplexing. But boy, that has saved my bacon a couple of times, Dave. Oh yeah. It's very nice.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. And at least on the NRF.

Dave Jones: It makes your layer, it makes your board layouts easier too, because you're, you know, you can just like swap it later. You know, you've got flexibility in your pin swapping. Does KeyCat have that? Does KeyCat have a pin swapping?

Chris Gammell: It does not yet. That's in version six. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay. All right. Yeah. And version six is what they're working on at the moment, is it?

Chris Gammell: That's the one. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep. Right. Okay. Yeah. That's one, that's one thing they've been pushing for a while. And then the other one that's, they're working on the DRC engine right now. And I ran into that with some of the board. We can talk about that in a little bit here after this chip, but I ran into that with some, some of the boards that I was working on. And I have some interesting stuff from that, but let's finish up this thing. I mean, so it's got Yocto, which is what we talked to. That's not what we talked to Jason. That's what used to run on the BeagleBone Black. Now BeagleBone Black runs Debian. So Yocto is like a custom build. And so you can kind of build it up based on what's in your system. I'm guessing that's why they use it here. I have never used it other than what's been like, I think on my original BeagleBone, maybe not the BeagleBone Black, but I assume it works fine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, like I'm working with software people. I'm making hardware for software people and I need to be able to give them, you know, a lot of them are like, Hey, look, I just need to be able to run Python. I need to be able to run JavaScript. I don't want to run embedded stuff. And it's like something like this is actually really, really interesting. So I'm going to be looking into this.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, I think this is fantastic. Wow. I'm just looking at this and I thought they've hit a home run here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's got built-in Ethernet Max. It's got dual Ethernet Max built-in. It's got four console UART plus one console UART. It's got four UARTs plus one console UART.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Incredible.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So on our subreddit, someone wrote in too that the Swedish Hat took a trip to Taiwan last year and met the Tibbo guys. They're a cool group. It is expensive. So not in this comment, but it is $20 for a single unit, but you can get a single unit, which is nice.

Dave Jones: Can you buy it on DigiKey?

Chris Gammell: I don't think so. I don't know about that. But I think the contrasting thing is like, so...

Dave Jones: Furmax Australia. My God, I've never heard of Furmax. Furmax is the Australian distributor. What?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's got all these oddball distributors. Oh my goodness.

Chris Gammell: So I think you're comparing it to like a Raspberry Pi though, right? So that's kind of like what it is. It's like, this is like a Raspberry. If you stuck this thing onto a board going out to a 40 pin header, this is effectively Raspberry Pi.

Dave Jones: Has anyone done boards with this yet?

Chris Gammell: There are a couple out there on Twitter. I saw one. I'll try and link it in. But the idea is like, if you want to go and take a Broadcom chip and put it on your product, you can't. You have to go and get, you know, a Pi Zero or a variant or whatever. You can't. You literally can't get the chip that's there. This is something that is like possible to take there. Now, to be fair, the BeagleBone stuff, that's what the Octavo project is doing. So the Pocket Beagle, which is like a SOM, SIP, I forget what the thing is, but basically it's the same kind of thing where it's all packaged into a polyamide BGA, you know, wide pitch BGA, like a 0.8 millimeter pitch BGA package. That's the same kind of idea. And I think that now we have two. I think that's actually pretty compelling, especially if you're trying to put Linux down onto a system and you don't want to put all your memory down yourself. You don't want to do your controlled impedance stuff. Now it's like, it's all there. It's all good to go. You're going to pay through the nose for it. I think the Octavo chip is like, I think you can get a Pocket Beagle for 25 bucks. And I think the Octavo chip is 30 bucks. So yeah, but this is 20 bucks as well. So like, but if you want Linux on a board with a single thing soldered down, that's pretty sweet, especially in the industrial space. It's like, yeah, whatever, you know.

Dave Jones: Wow. I'm thoroughly impressed by this. I might look into this potentially for my computing cluster project, which is always on the backbone, you know? Sure, sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah, that's definitely chip of the week. That is, I'm thoroughly impressed by that. Wow.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It was on Twitter and I had forgotten who it was now. I'm sorry. Arturo. It was Arturo who then linked it from someone else.

Dave Jones: Okay. Yes. And they sell programmable modules like DIP modules that you can just plug in as well. They're 27 Yankee bucks for the module that you can just plug in. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's interesting. This company is kind of interesting too. It feels like they're kind of in this space in general. So it seems like they might be a cool one to poke around on their site otherwise. So I'll be doing that. And I'm sure Dave is too.

Dave Jones: Wow. Yeah. No, I'm actually really rather excited by this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Wow.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Awesome.

Chris Gammell: So on the circuit board, I'm actually curious for you because you're a long time Altium user. And I think Kaikad is moving towards copying some more of the Altium style DRC stuff. But what I ran into this week is like, I was panelizing boards and I'm doing V cuts and like I had traces near the edge of the board. And what I realized is the traces, you know, the DRC is listed in terms of like the clearance around the trace. So in this case, it was like a five millimeter clearance, but then it got near the edge of the board and it's like, all right, well, you can go up to five millimeters away from the edge of the board. And that's not good because a lot of.

Dave Jones: Well, you would normally set a zone for that. You'd set like a board clearance zone.

Chris Gammell: So you would have to do that manually. Yeah. So I could do that too.

Dave Jones: You would do that manually. Like I can't speak for the latest version of Altium because I don't use the absolute bleeding edge of Altium. I don't keep up to date. You know, I'm not doing that advanced stuff anymore. So yeah. Yeah. And so it may have things like that, but you've always been able to do this. Yes. You do it manually. You would have a board level DRC zone, right? So that if it goes outside that, yeah, you'll, you'll get flagged. So, you know, okay, your V, so you just need to like manually sort of know that your V card is going to encroach on your board by half a millimeter or a millimeter. And you need to keep everything within that. And then you allow for some tolerance as well. So you might add it on another millimeter, you know, just as a safety.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And so what I ended up doing is I just, I, I had flexibility on like the size of the board. So I just bumped it out. I bumped out the V cut like a half millimeter to the right. And that gave me enough clearance and I was fine. But yeah, it was a little, that was a little frustrating. And then, cause like that wasn't really published. Oh, because you had already routed your board. So you didn't want to. Oh yeah. This is, this is at the end. Oh yeah. Yeah. And it was tight. This is a, this is one of the tighter boards that I've done recently.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, you got to think about this stuff before you start your layout.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: These things should be in place. It's like, like seriously PCB design is 90% placement and set up. And this is part of your setup. You're setting up all your rules, setting up your clearances, your outlines and all sorts of, once you've got that, then you can route.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. You can do anything you want except, you know, you got to tell yourself what not to do, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's a, yeah. So there's that one. And then the other one was, um, I'm sorry, the space and trace. So I'll just say it was JLC. It was space and trace to three and a half millimeters or sorry, three and a half mil.

Dave Jones: And you're complaining that wasn't, are you complaining that's not good enough? That's insane.

Chris Gammell: No, that's great. No, that's really great. I was, I needed it.

Dave Jones: I mean, for standard, geez, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, no. That's, that's great. Fine. But the thing that was different that I was, that I got tripped up by was the, uh, trace to via. So because of the clearance around, uh, you know, as a standard via, not like laser cut, not anything like that. It was, it was larger. It was based on, it was five mils for that. So the problem is that my, I can't set a clearance zone on a via. I can only do it based on the trace itself.

Dave Jones: You can't do an individual.

Chris Gammell: So I could go in and I could click every via and say, okay, actually the clearance on this via is five mil, but I don't want to do that. You know?

Dave Jones: All right. Okay. Yeah, of course.

Chris Gammell: So like the, the workaround that I had was upsize every via and then, right. Cause I usually only use one. I usually use the smallest one I have available to me anyways. So upsize everyone. So it's that larger size.

Dave Jones: Don't push your vias unless you absolutely have to. Don't go small. Just be, just because the manufacturer can do 0.3 millimeter hole or whatever. And like, just don't.

Chris Gammell: Actually, it's 0.2 day.

Dave Jones: Unless you absolutely have to.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I know. But I, I actually had to like, like I was like really, I was really, really struggling on this board as tiny in this case. Like I, I can't. So I, that's another thing I was wondering though, is, is in Altium, is there a via level clearance versus just a track level clearance? Yes, there is. There is. Okay. So I'm kind of hoping that kind of overhaul is something that Kaiket's coming out with, but I'm not, I haven't, I haven't actually seen that, that new stuff yet, but there's something coming with DRC. So, and it's going to be more Altium like, I guess.

Dave Jones: Well, that's who they're competing against. I mean, you know. Yeah, I think so. You know, you may as well not bother competing against anyone else. I mean, it's Altium and everyone else, you know, that's, that's, they own the market. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I don't know the whole market, but I think the broad market. But they're the broad market. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They are the ones to beat. Do a lot worse than copy, you know, Altium's features. That's for sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I wouldn't do all of them, but yeah, there's some, there's some cool things in there. All right. So we've got chips, we've got layout. We talked about a little bit of firmware. We talked about a coronavirus. What else should we talk about, Dave? Product of the week. I don't know.

Dave Jones: I'm going, I'm just going through the Reddit list.

Chris Gammell: Well, there is another Kaiket based thing. There was a really cool plugin where you can see a time-lapse. So it's like kind of silly, but like it's.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's a plugin. I wondered how they, I saw that on Twitter and I wondered how they did that. Oh, it's a plugin. Right. Yeah. Okay. Got it. And it just wants snapshots at every 10 minutes or something. I think so.

Chris Gammell: I'm actually not sure.

Dave Jones: So a snapshot, does a snapshot an image and then it converts it in and then you have to manually convert the images into a video or.

Chris Gammell: It ends up as an image and then it has to get like compiled like FFmpeg or whatever. So it's not like, you know, it's.

Dave Jones: Right. It's not completely automatic, but it at least saves the images. That's, that's a great thing.

Chris Gammell: And it looks cool, right? I mean, like to see how, see how people progress. I think that's a really cool.

Dave Jones: And it automatically did all the different layers, right? Yeah. And it automatically, it didn't just screen capture. It seemed to have like the board outline and it stayed as the outline. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's right.

Dave Jones: Which was like, I wondered how they did that. Like, because, you know, I've, I've done time-lapse of the board layouts before, but you just see me zooming in and out and panning around it. But this actually stayed on the actual.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So this isn't like a video capture of your screen, which is like.

Dave Jones: No, no. It's a, yeah, no, it's, it's totally different. This is why it needs to be a plugin. It needs to plug into the software and extract that information and then render, essentially render that, render the screen again in a fixed size, you know, so that the board all just fits and then boom, boom. Yeah. That's, that's absolutely brilliant.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Love that. Wow. That, that's a feature that no one would have added because people want it.

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Dave Jones: Like it is something it's like somebody, there's just one person who wanted the person who wrote it wanted this capability just for kicks and they did it. Yeah. It's like no PCB company in the world. You know, you don't, there's no fear of Altium copy in that feature. That's right. No professional design engineer wants, you know, to screen, you know, do that sort of thing. Um, but it's cool.

Chris Gammell: On that same, uh, thread of like something that nobody would ever think you need. So there's a, uh, there's a tool for Kaiket. I know I'm very Kaiket focused, so please forgive me on that. But, um, there's a tool called Skittle, right? So it's by Dave Vandenbaum, former guest of the show. And it's basically like a net list based thing. So instead of like drawing a schematic, you can type out the net list. Right. So you say like, so you had to talk about it. Yeah. I knew you wouldn't like it. I, nobody is surprised by that. It's so 1990s. I know. But, but when you think about it, like when you think about like actually scaling this stuff up or you're doing parts that have, say you want to descript all your checking that your signals are all hooked together. Right. So like data line one is from your FPGA is going to data line one of your DRAM or whatever it is. You know, you can start to do scripting and interesting things like that. Well, a silly thing that happened is, uh, someone who's doing contextual electronic stuff, you know, I show people how to make Blinky, but he took it and he basically used Skittle to make a Morse code thing. And you, there's a, there's a webpage you can go to and have it so that it, it auto generates different Morse code Blinkies using 555 timers and Skittle. Right. And so you can basically spell out with multiple circuits using multiple 555s and you can like basically have it say anything. And it's like really silly, but it's the idea. It's like this scalable circuit idea, which is kind of cool. Right. I mean, it's kind of like that same idea of like in FPJs, you can replicate circuits and, and build up, you know, small blocks and build bigger blocks than that. But I'd never seen it like on a web, on a web front before. So I thought that was kind of, that was kind of cool. You know, that's kind of like the idea of having that Skittle thing. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Is that feature of the week, plugin of the week? Yeah, I guess so. I don't know. Script of the week? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. We're almost up. Last, last dibs. Dregs. It's a newbie's guide to JTAG. I've, I've done a video on JTAGs.

Chris Gammell: Oh, you have? I was going to ask you about that actually.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got a.

Chris Gammell: So what did you, what did you do in your video on?

Dave Jones: I've done a video on JTAGs. Hang on. E-E-V-Long.

Chris Gammell: Dave is Googling himself.

Dave Jones: I am Googling myself. What is JTAG and Boundary Scan? It's got 287,000 views and I did it six years ago. Holy crap. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Yeah. No, that's, that's very popular. I think if you just search JTAG, I might be number one. Yep. I'm yep. Search result. Number one.

Chris Gammell: The reason I was going to bring this, this specific one up is because like, you know, we've, we've had Peter as in Tempski on the show before and he's does a black magic probe, which is like a hardware, you know, debugger stuff like that. And there's like, there's JTAG chain tools that are doing similar things. And I guess one thing I wanted to say is because I was, you know, even up till recently, I was very, very confused about what's happening there, but it's actually just like reading and writing registers in order to program a chip. Well, I don't know. I, for some reason, this was always very confusing to me. Like the, the idea of JTAG. Well, it's not just for programming a chip. Right. You realize that. Doing debug and.

Dave Jones: It's for testing as well. Boundary, that's what boundary scan is. Boundary scan allows you to actually read the, directly read all the IO pins. Allows you to directly read all the pins.

Chris Gammell: So you would use that like on a, that was like when you were doing your testing days and stuff like that. I'm sorry.

Dave Jones: When, when you would do automated testing and stuff like that. Yeah. So that you can test the assembled board that, oh, that pin can toggle and it's not shorted to ground, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That kind of stuff. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So you would, so you would like write a script that would basically go through each pin and test it to do different things or what?

Dave Jones: You can, you can toggle pins. You can make them do stuff or you can read them just to check if they're shorted or not, or, you know, if they're actually connected.

Chris Gammell: That's cool. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Things like that. Yeah. No, you can actually check the physical functionality on your board.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah, no, it's really handy. Not, not, not everyone does that. It's like, you know, boundary scans are a thing that you can do, but you know, it's not, it's not hugely popular, I guess. It, it depends on the product, but it is possible. That's all part of the JTAG interface. You know, you can make sure it's connected. If you want to make sure if you don't have x-ray gear available and other stuff, you can make sure that your thousand pin BGA, that every one of those pins is actually connected to the ball by, by doing a boundary scan, make sure it's not shorted to the pins next to it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: For example, by, by actually boundary scanning this thing. Yeah. So that's great. Yeah. So just like, it's, it's, it's not fast. So it's not like you can, you know, read out all the data from the pins in real time. And that's, that's simply not possible.

Chris Gammell: You can't slave the whole device and like take it over from there or something.

Dave Jones: No, it's where, you know, where you can at extremely low frequency. Yes. You can actually take over the physical chip, disable all the stuff inside and then write your own stuff to the pins. Right. So yeah, that, that's possible, but it's the, you know, it's a serial, it's a low speed, low ish speed serial interface. You know, it might be tens of megahertz or something, but if you've got a thousand pin BGA and you need to write one bit at a time. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You're not going to control a DDR3 memory bus or something like that. Right. No, that's right.

Dave Jones: So yeah, but it's possible and it's very cool. And it's all through the JTAG interface. Yeah. Um, because of the, hence, hence the name joint test and action group. That's right. Joint test and action group. I think T is test. Yeah. You know, that's, that's part of it. It's not program. It's not joint programming group. Yeah. It's joint test. You know.

Chris Gammell: It's not JPEG.

Dave Jones: No. What? Is there a joke in there that?

Chris Gammell: No, that would be programming instead of test. JPEG instead of JTAG.

Dave Jones: JPEG. I thought the JPEG might've meant something else.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no.

Dave Jones: No. Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, so what I was getting at is like, you know, I use JTAG mostly for programming and debugging and similar kinds of things. And, you know, usually there is singleware debug, which is, you know, it's usually a subset of the pins that are in JTAG as well. But I never really like understood what was going on there, I guess. You know, like, and. Watch my video. I will. I will, Dave. Maybe I should have done that six years ago, but I don't know. You should have, yeah. I think like, even if I would have watched it, I didn't quite get it in the context of like doing the firmware like I've been doing lately. And that's kind of like what I'm getting at. It's like, it's sending back.

Dave Jones: Or you just didn't care until you needed it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think that's probably the most accurate. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like, you don't really care about it because I got other things to worry about, you know? Yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: No, it's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But I think that there's like, I don't think there's a use case where I'm going to go and like write some of the, write to the registers and like handle all the stuff that does all the debugging and things like that. But I think that understanding what's going on there might, you know, like, so even like selected your JTAG speed, you might be more or less willing to slow it down because you know, you need to get throughput, that kind of thing. So yeah, that's all. That's all.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, JTAG is cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: What's not cool is the non-standardness of the pinouts and stuff like that. You can often be, yeah, there are sort of de facto standards and things, but yeah.

Chris Gammell: Like a 20 pin header versus like a something else?

Dave Jones: A 10 pin header versus a single in line one or, you know, various pitches and they all change and yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: So. Into buying a $60 cable from a TAC Connect. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I've been doing that lately. A lot of people say to me like, so I've been using TAC Connects lately, which is like a cabling solution that, you know, you see a trade shows and stuff like that. And it's nice. It's small, whatever. A lot of people are like, well, make your own. Why don't you just make your own? It's like, yeah, I could do that. But the feature that I want is actually that I don't have to make one for, if me and Dave are working together, I don't want to buy Dave a cable. I don't want to make him a cable. I don't want to be the cable maker. I want to be the person who's like, here's a part number, go buy this thing. And I don't care if it's TAC Connect or anything else. Someone wants to go make a replacement for it. Great. I would love to, I would love for someone to write in the comments, here's a cheaper, better solution. Great. Awesome. Bring it on. But right now I just use TAC Connect.

Dave Jones: You aren't in the cable business and you're not very protective of your market there. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say like, well, you should just go, you could go wind your own resistor and wind your own inductors. You should go do that. It's like, yeah, I could do that. I don't want to do that a thousand times though. I don't know. This is, yeah. We might all be there soon though. If we got to make our own parts, if we can't get parts, we got to make parts. That would be an interesting project, Dave. That desperate. Make our own, make your own resistors, make your own inductors, you know, make a hundred of them, you know. All the RF people are like, we do that. We do that. You whipper snapper.

Dave Jones: I grind my own crystals. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Isn't there someone who does that? Like they, they make everything. There's like a YouTube channel that does that where they like make everything from scratch. They had to like make a toaster. I thought there was. Really? Yeah. I'll just see. I'll link it in if I could find it. I thought there was one where they had like source and make a toaster and it was like a ton of work. Okay. Even for a pretty simple thing like a toaster.

Dave Jones: Yeah. A toaster is pretty simple. Right. Wow. Terrific. All right. Well, that's our amp hour, our capacities. Fully and truly up.

Chris Gammell: That's what he says. It's there.

Dave Jones: So we've got a, we've got an interview next week and then I've got another one lined up potentially. So I'll be doing that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Great interview last week, by the way. It was really good. I liked it.

Dave Jones: Yep. And I've been, I was, cause I met somebody on the weekend, met by pure, pure coincidence. And he happened to be like, it's weird. Like even here in a certain might, might not be, you know, like this in Silicon Valley probably happens every day. Right. But you know, here in like Australia, right. I went to a friend's farewell. Right. He's moving. Former Altium guy, by the way. And anyway, so he's moving up the coast. So yeah, I had a farewell, you know, pub thing. So I went there, turns up, you know, oh, hi, who are you? I'll work at, I won't spoil it, but anyway. And it's what, oh, I've been meaning to contact you guys about getting a tour. It's like, oh, well, let me tell you, you know. And yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think when you go to farewell parties, Dave, you are getting what most of us get when we go to meetups, which is serendipity based on actually not that much serendipity. It's just, you go hang out with nerds, you're going to find some people that you like talking to. Yeah, exactly. You know.

Dave Jones: But this is just randomly like, yeah, I've been wanting to contact this company for ages and get a tour. And he said, yeah, we'll do a tour. And then it's, yeah. So it'll be both a video tour and also we'll do an Ampere as well, because we were discussing that. And it's like, well, I can't, they're really different things. When you interview someone for a podcast like this, it's a different thing to like, it's not like I could go shoot my video and then take the audio from that and turn it into a Ampere podcast. It doesn't really work. It's not.

Chris Gammell: That worked in certain situations. Like the Shariar show you did about 5G. No, that was a call. You did another interview with Shariar that was really good. That was.

Dave Jones: I did. That was different. But I did some sit down videos. Yeah. It was just that you were sitting there. We were sitting. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I agree with that. But we didn't release that one as a podcast, I don't think.

Chris Gammell: No, we did.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, we did? Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, we ripped the audio for that. But yeah.

Dave Jones: But yeah, it usually doesn't. Yeah. They are very different mediums and you need to approach them differently when you're recording those. For those who want to start their own podcast, which we highly recommend, we don't mind the competition.

Chris Gammell: We don't. Yeah. Bring it on. We have a video about it too. We get asked that once in a while. I have a video from five years ago now, but it's still kind of valid. So I can link that in too.

Dave Jones: A video of how to do podcasting.

Chris Gammell: It's changed a little bit, but not that much.

Dave Jones: So yeah. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Well, we'll look forward to hearing all of your podcasts as well.

Dave Jones: All right. Catch you next time.

Chris Gammell: See ya.