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Pulled From A Working Environment

Episode Ep 449 July 1, 2019 1 hr 11 min

Pulled From A Working Environment

From The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

Chris just got back from Teardown 2019. Shows next week will be with guests that he interviewed during the conference, while Dave is away.
While there, Chris did two workshops, both with FPGAs and the open toolchains.
The first was a workshop with our sometimes co-host Piotr Esden-Tempski. The workshop involved the 1bitsquared iCEBreaker.
This used the Yosys toolchain by past guest Clifford Wolf (holy moly that interview was two and a half hours!)
It also uses NextPNR, which was discussed by Piotr, Clifford and Dave at Chaos Communication Camp
Altera is now Intel FPGA, if you didn't remember.
Git paper
VHDL vs Verilog
"Cross platform code" works between two separate chipsets meant for USB C
- Richtek RC1716
- TI TUSB422
USB C PD
Dave was actually discussing cross VENDOR code, because of the standard register format between the chips.
Chris also took a workshop with Sean "Xobs" Cross that involved 3 levels:
- Micropython
- C written for a RISC V processor (soft IP core)
- Writing hard logic for the FPGA
Xobs is co-creator of the Novena laptop and the creator of the Fomu project.
The Fomu was inspired by the Tomu, a project of past guest Tim Ansell
Raspberry Pi 4 announced with new specs. Dave not impressed.
The new Sparkfun Artemis Module puts TensorFlow lite onto a Cortex M4 processor with Bluetooth.
This is similar to the Audeme project (in a much smaller form factor) by Gerald and Bertrand.
Dave has made a video about how voice recognition was done in the 80s.
Udemy is moving to a model where creators must be exclusive. The video is by past guest of the show Robert Ferenec.
Chris is looking at buying a simple VNA.
The "Buy/Sell section" of the EEVblog forum links to auctions. Dave recommends finding labs that are shutting down.
Past guest Derek Kozel suggested to look at the HP 8753, based on this wonderful reference site.
Beware the phrase "Pulled from (a) working environment"
One last thing from Teardown, Kate Tempkin did an amazing talk about USB analyzers and software around decoding USB traffic.
Building a STM32 open source multimeter.
Simone Giertz (yep, also a past guest!) built a "Truckla" and showed how she did it!

Thanks to Billie Ward for the image of the "fantastically overpriced junk"

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