Macrofab Engineering Podcast

Hungry Hungry Op Amps Parker PinHeck Update The Pinotaur? Is that a good name? Draw up what you think a Pinotaur will look like! Raspberry Pi 3 Compute module works well PinHeck EOTL (End Of The Line) REV 8 will be ready for its first prototype in 2 weeks Jeep Electronics Update Satellite RockBLOCK Module GPS Temperature Various sensor data Stephen Synth is done TriTrix Speakers from Parts Express NuTube Amp New Production vacuum tube Design is done, just need to order parts and assemble Ultimate hipster wank Cellphone case, like otterbox NuTube tube in it Tube powered headphone amp with your phone Purest of tone Trü DC powered signal SSPS (Super Simple Power Supple) Get another board spin, and fix it within the next 3-36 months LED Clock One prototype segment compelte Need to design a control board Resistor Resistor PCB arrived Will take 4 hours of continuous run time on our My200 PNP Can the pick and place handle 40,000 line items? Parker wrote custom Eagle Scripts Check them out

The One Man Entertainment Machine We would like to thank everyone that emailed us here at MacroFab with your concerns over our safety as we faced Hurricane Harvey. We are happy and grateful to report that our team members are safe, and MacroFab is safe and dry. John Adams Security researcher, investor, and technologist from San Francisco, CA, USA Previous early employee at Twitter One man entertainment machine IoT Security Software Updates. Force users to update? Change default passwords! A device will only be as secure as the default settings Bad IoT Devices Internet of Shit You should not be running Linux on your faucet Garden Hose The Ides of DEFCON John learned a lot of his first large hardware project Microcontrollers can be precariou WS2812B can't handle lead free reflow process Stephens Game - IoT device that you would actually like John: Fix automation. Make a device that can interconnect all the other protocols. IoT Glue. Stephen: Beer can with sensors. Can notify waitress or bartender

Make electrons flow right? August Hardware & Electronics Engineering Meetup by MacroFab & Mouser Electronics event is live! Wednesday August 30th in Houston, Texas This month's topic is Lean Manufacturing and Product Design Stephen will be giving a talk on "How to Design Electronics with Lean Manufacturing in Mind" Guests Scott Hansen and Eric Benzenhoefer of The Idea Tank will be there as well We did a podcast with them a couple weeks ago on MEP EP#77  Come grab some food, beer, and socializing if you’re in the Houston area Parker New EFM8 Article Covers Simplicity Studio and how to get a blinking LED to work! Will be out on August 30th Stephen Synth Red Letter Day! First MEP project complete Parker made the enclosure out of curly maple Mullet Synth: Business in front, Party in the back Ramp pulse, linear wave, needs to be super fast, super accurate Stephen just dead bugged it Other MEP episodes that feature the Synth #68 - Sonic Massage  #70 - Bits Flying In #71 - Wrong Variants #7

Eddie Samuels and Comma.ai August Hardware & Electronics Engineering Meetup by MacroFab & Mouser Electronics event is live! Come grab some food, beer, and socializing if you’re in the Houston area. Eddie Samuels Been soldering and dremeling since the 7th grad The first thing he built was a simple 7805 mp3 battery charger, guided by one of the original hackaday.com projects Went on to get his EE degree at the University of Rochester and work for a year in the defense industry before moving to San Francisco to work at comma.ai Underwater Rover Project Project while in college Sealing the unit was the hardest part Moisture sensor built with strips of aluminum tape EV Jetta Built while in high school Need a custom coupler between engine and transmission Who Killed the Electric Car? Revenge of the Electric Car Comma.ai Open source self driving cars Panda The nicest universal car interface ever ARM M4 - STM32F413 ESP8266 WiFi Transceivers for CAN BUS, LIN BUS, and GM LAN Can listen without th

The Brick That Shall Not Be Named: A Joe Broms Story August Hardware & Electronics Engineering Meetup by MacroFab & Mouser Electronics event is live! Come grab some food, beer, and socializing if you’re in the Houston area. Joseph Broms Joe received his B.S. at the University of Illinois in Computer Science He has worked in numerous industries including, medical device, security, professional audio, broadcast, and education One central theme to Joe’s career is successfully turning ideas into sellable products Has worked on many projects ranging from a FDA approved cardiac simulator to a critically acclaimed instrument tuner, APTuner Joseph is about to release a product called ProtoBricks on Indiegogo Protobricks are LEGO compatible building blocks to lower the entry level of how electronics work Purpose is to remove how much ancillary gunk is needed to understand how it works It has been Joesph's hobby for the past seven years with many different revisions Mold design and plastics LEGO stud

Dueling OpAmp Inputs Parker Article is lagging behind. Will be done on Friday, promise! Rewiring the Jeep Turn signals. The old wiring was interesting. The side marker bulb socket is isolated from ground. One bulb lead goes to the front marker parking lamp positive circuit. The other lead of the side marker is tied into the front marker turn signal positive circuit. When the parking lights are on and the turn signal off, the side marker grounds through the front marker turn signal filament and illuminates the marker lamp. When the turn signal flashes, it interrupts the ground and the marker will flash by dimming. The front marker gets brighter. So they alternate. When the parking lights are off, the filament which the side marker grounds through is reversed. Thus they blink at the same time. This works cause the wattage difference in the side marker and front marker. 4W for the side marker and 24W for the front. High wattage filament looks like a low resistance path to ground and the side marker doesn’t se

No Guru Here Parker Gave a presentation at the MacroFab Engineering meetup about how to turn on your Electronics Project. Removal of power source Physical Power Switch Soft Power Switch Details about MCU sleep modes Will be an article soon. Stephen Science Museum project part 2 - Logger project will be *done* tonight and delivered tomorrow. Sure Step stepper motor driver STP-DRV-80100. RJ11 port for programming the driver. The RS-232 to USB converter Stephen bought from Fry's was counterfeit. The matched transistor IC ladder filter chips FINALLY arrived. Shipped from Germany. Pick Of the Week (POW) ElectroCard Designed by Michael Teeuw OLED business card Used a ATTiny84 but used a SOIC-8 footprint instead of a SOIC-8 Wide Rapid Fire Opinion (RFO) Roomba’s Next Big Thing - Selling your house layout to the highest bidder - Gizmodo Data mining your house. Cute robot is now a sinister spy machine Furniture positioning/Home automation The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market - Hack

The IdeaFab Podcast July Hardware & Electronics Engineering Meetup by MacroFab & Mouser Electronics event is live! Come grab some food, beer, and socializing if you’re in the Houston area. Everyone gets Zimas! Idea Tank Idea's Scooterfy Last mile transportation is the hardest problem to solve for mass transit Scooterfy is a way to convert electric skateboards to a scooter so it takes less skill to ride Casey Neistat makes riding electric skateboards look easy What about a scooter cooler but with a brief case? It would be the business trim package Patent of the inflatable motorcycle helmet MEP Idea's Stephen wants to be the first actual Space Pirate....Radio Show Went as far as testing out solid rocket fuel Hardest part is getting a satellite in orbit without anyone knowing Sealand: Bates seized it from a group of pirate radio broadcasters in 1967 with the intention of setting up his own station at the site Maybe they are interested in becoming space pirate radio operators? Space Elev

The Greek Tragedy of ADCs Parker With the success of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module LVDS test board. I started putting together the PinHeck REV8 board More Python and OpenCV work (fun!) Have the webcam taking pictures Auto Crops and records all the images of parts Looking into a higher resolution camera, more info on that later Stephen Parts for the filter finally shipped! Started putting together the boards Like the multi colored jumpers Veroboard - Strip Board Mouser Part Number 854-ST2 80 x 100 mm with mounting holes Use a 7/32" drill bit and a jeweler's drill to cut traces and brillow pad to clean up Going to add a tube preamp to the synth output Already have the preamp built. Just need to connect it.   Schematic Tritrix speakers and the nutube amp. Kicking up the nutube amp again The speakers are almost built just need to paint and finish 3d printed a plate for soldering the crossover to Pick Of the Week (POW) Nuvoton NAU7802 - found on the Nice Chips Subreddit Precision low-po

Does the Simulation Match the Reality? Ben Heckendorn Runs "The Ben Heck Show" Programs, designs, directs, and imagines at Spooky Pinball Is the Castlevania expert Chris Kraft Color Destruction Algorithm Program to convert HiRez images to LowRez for pinball displays Built his first 3D printer from scratch in 2009 Was a pioneer in the DIY 3D printer space Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!Tags: 3D printer, Ben Heck, Chris Kraft, MacroFab, macrofab engineering podcast, MEP, Pinball, Podcast

Reverse Biasing Opamps Parker Been learning Python and OpenCV OpenCV is an open source computer vision library PyImageSearch Setup PyCharm Using Requests to use and get information from the MacroFab API Built a 3D printed chassis for holding a 5MP USB camera Taking pictures of PCBs and removing lens distortion RPI3 CM PCB done Will be testing over the weekend 6 Pack of beer riding on this board! Board does power up correctly. COMPIOT board Opamp blew up :( Symbol on Schematic unlabeled for the power inputs of the opamp Stephen Still Making the three synth modules (two envelops and one filter) Waiting on the CA3146 transistor IC This is an obsolete part Stephen wants to use it for legacy reasons Making some power supplies for tube mics (the same one that we made for JOSH). Have to figure out how to make a 6.3V or 12.6V high current rail along with a 200V to 300V low current rail. Stephen is going to use transformers that I have at my shop. One drops 120VAC to 10VAC and the other raises the

Joe Grand: The Origin Story Joe Grand Also known as Kingpin Computer engineer, hardware hacker, product designer, teacher, advisor, runner, daddy, honorary doctor, TV host, member of legendary hacker group L0pht Heavy Industries Proprietor of Grand Idea Studio. Our first guest to have a Wikipedia page Has been creating, exploring, and manipulating electronic systems since the 1980s. Parker and Joe meet each other at the unofficial propeller expo in Sacramento. This what right around the time MacroFab was starting in 2013. Joe "flew" Ken's brand new quadcopter  IRC channel #tymkrs on afternet Joe first discovered the hacker world at 7 years old in 1983. First online name was "black ninja" then went to fbi agent, astro zombie, autovahn, the youth, before settling on Kingpin. Joe's first hardware hack he remembers was the Ring Busy Device - you can still use the phone, but if someone called, it would give a busy signal. Built with circuit board from Radio Shack kit. Came with switch so he could turn it

Fire Sticks The next Hardware and Electronics Engineering Meetup page is live and will be on June 28th. Please RSVP if you plan on attending! The Stanford ValBal launched again with avionics components from MacroFab! You can see a live video on our Facebook page from earlier today and as always, track it with this site. Also check out episode 64 of the MEP where we have Sasha Maldonado and Paige Brown of the Standford Student Space Initiative! Parker Tested a new serial LED board for the pinball platform CLP6C-FKB LED WS2801 Draws 60mA LED 8mA standby current Laser the V-scored PCBs apart Finishing up writing the last of the EFM8 articles that Parker started last October Stephen Synth works but doesn’t. Not getting ACF, something isn’t biased just right Stephen will rip out some strip board and create an off board filter Final version will have two envelopes The current envelope works but Stephen doesn’t like it Mutable Instruments Shruthi 1 Pick Of the Week (POW) PD Buddy Sink : USB Power Del

Wrong Variants Derrick from The Current Source sent in his stomp box as some "reverse" swag. Recommend putting an LED in the Bass' eyeball for power notification. Parker Finished and ordered the Raspberry Pi Compute Module LVDS test board. Started researching more about I2S Audio. Inter-IC Sound Standardized by Philips Semiconductor which is now NXP One way to represent PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) Audio TAS5731 Stephen Synthesizer Update Got the envelope working. Envelope controls the volume and signal amplitude. There was a hardware bug in that the envelope turned on before the frequency changed to the next note. Stephen fixed it in software by adding a small 10ms delay before opening the envelope. Pick Of the Week (POW) Kinda unusual this week but DRAGONLOCK 3D printer files for dungeons and stuff. MonoPrice is having a sale on 3D printers. Rapid Fire Opinion (RFO) Heads up – WS2812B NeoPixels are about to change! - By Particle.io 1. “RGB port refresh rate increased from 400Hz t

Bits Flying In Parker Ordered Compressor IoT Board. Will start on the Software side. Wrote an article about PCB board outlines and what to watch out for. It is waiting for Stephen to look over it and make sure it is not missing anything. Defining planes in DipTrace with board outlines vs Eagle. Parker has Vias that haunt him. Bad pinout designs for ICs can cause unnecessary vias in board layout. The LSM9DS1TR is an example of one. Stephen Synthesizer Update MIDI code problems and triumphs Audio clip of before tuning and after tuning. Frequency doubles for every ½ volt you put in for the VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator). Zener diode - Zener diodes leak - caused huge calibration issues with synth. The Zener diode was installed to prevent over voltage of the ADC. Lower frequencies were really sharp, higher frequencies were flat. Plot of IV curve now matches with data sheet. Basically Stephen characterized the Zener Diode leakage current! Article series for the synth - on modules and theory of operatio

Incognito Mode HyR0n Mathematician, Computer Scientist, & Systems Engineer making the world a better place with homebrew booze and electronic bling. Zapp Has been writing software since age 8. Eventually making a career in developing for Java systems. He has since been promoted away from they keyboard and his life is now MS Office and meetings. Didn’t know how to solder before DC23 . Arduino was his gateway drug - all 15 projects of the starter kit in a few days. Defcon Badges Official badge has a deep puzzle - other badges filled with goo and mechanical. Becomes part of the culture. And!xor - is unique - most people are hacking badges. Way more to their badges. Ways to hack between badges.  Taco Town Defcon Event Hack everything from cryptography, cars, voting machines, bluetooth, lock picking villages, people will teach you if you’re willing to learn. Social engineering is a big village Villages - way bigger than booths 2k sf each, have their own badges, demos, hands on events, IoT village 2

Sonic Massage Parker IoT Compressor Update with part list! LSM9DS1 IMU for vibration sensing iNEMO inertial module: 3D accelerometer, 3D gyroscope, 3D magnetometer 3.3V, I2C SPU0410HR5H-PB MEMS Microphone 3.3V Analog signal, will be boosted with an opamp TMP102 Board Mount Temperature Sensors Low Power Digital Temp Sensor 3.3V, I2C PX3AN2BS250PAAAX Pressure Transducer 1/8" NPT Male fitting 5.0V Analog output 0.5V - 4.5V over pressure range 6225AXXSZS-DC3 SSR to control the compressor switch 3VDC to 32VDC control signal Place 10ohm in series from pin from particle photon for protection. Stephen Voltage Standard Calibrated complete! Used the Keithley DMM7510 to dial in the voltage standard. Synth Update: Now with sound effects!   Stephen played a bunch of warbles Only one section is working at the moment - VCO - voltage controlled oscillator Space Echo is now working Mechanical adjustments are calibration to! Break the tape in to let it run, the sound gets better. Pick

Don't get Analyticized Parker Space Echo Facebook live Calibration. Tuesday at 4PM CST. Particle Photon IoT work. There needs to be an IoT for Hardware Engineers. If anyone has suggestions send us a tip! Stephen Pat Hensley who is the Mainstream Sales Manager over at Tektronics/Keithley and a listener of the podcast has let us borrow a Keithley DMM7510 multimeter.   DMM7510 multimeter Specs: Voltage Sensitivity: 7.5 digit sampling (10nV min) Current Sensitivity: 1pA Resistance sensitivity: 0.1u OHM 14 ppm 1-year DC volt accuracy 60 ppm 1-year DC current acccuracy 24 ppm 1-year resistance accuracy Calibration of the Electronic Development Corporation (now Krohn-Hite) 501J DC voltage standard:   Repair: Bought the unit dead and found two bad power supply regulators Raytheon RC4194TK ST Micro L7806C-T Rapid Fire Opinion (RFO) Reverse Engineering Space Invaders Sound Chip - HackADay Ken Shirriff 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip  SiFive raises $8.5 million for licensable custom micr

Podcast Notes Parker  We are excited to announce that our first meetup was a great success! We hosted over 90 guests last Wednesday (April 26 2017) . Some of them shared projects they are working on and everyone had a good time. Thank you to our guest speakers!  Damien Garza – President at ESU, Inc. & President at Greater Houston Manufacturers Association Rick Pettys – Owner and Engineer at SparX Engineering Ray Simar – Professor at Rice Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept., IEEE Fellow Next meet up is this month on  May 31. Topic is “Innovating the Energy Industry”! Stephen Design Challenge! Click names to see the submissions!  Thomas Ives from Salem, OR LM3914 - Dot Bar Display Driver Brett Smith DM74ALS163BM - Counter CD4514BM96 - Demux Dave Sandl CoolRunner II CPLD ADC over I2C Shawn Swift ATTINY88 driving LEDs: Drive LEDs directly with the 28 IO pins Multiplex them and drive 144 LEDs RFO  IuT ! IoT - HackADay  Internet of USEFUL Things, not just the Internet of Things. Hack

 Podcast Notes Our Guests this week is Josh Hartung of PolySync. Josh is the CEO and Co-Founder of PolySync; a startup that is changing the way that companies develop self-driving car technology. PolySync has two products.  PolySync Core  Provides a runtime infrastructure and development framework that turns algorithms, sensors, and actuators into plug-and-play apps. Creates and abstract layer that enables car designers  to essentially make a software defined car. OSCC (Open Source Car Control)  A by-wire control kit for autonomous vehicle development. Using preexisting drive by wire cars and the OSCC designers and engineers can quickly develop and implement their self driving cars. PolySync Links of interest! Twitter PolySync Main Website OSCC.io GitHub for the OSCC  Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!