general-chat

[tardy badger]

And yeah, it diffuses well while keeping it nice and bright

It’s bright without feeling direct

[static flare]

I need to design a shop light/camera light like that

How much are the LEDs? are they Neopixels?

[tardy badger]

These are neopixel yeah

If you buy from Adafruit, they are ~$0.50 a piece

If you buy 1500 of the 3535 size, they are about $0.10 a piece

Last reel I bought was $120

From Aliexpress

[static flare]

Oof, probably a lil out of my price range sadly

[tardy badger]

I’ve made boards that use a lot so I was buying a lot pretty often it felt

I used over 2000 neopixel last year

But they are the sk6812 generically

[umbral phoenix]

skerr6812

[tardy badger]

Yes, exactly

So I calculated, if I run this led board on 50% color intensity for each channel and a brightness of 30%, it will use roughly 2.2W of power

Or around 8.8-9W for the 4 panels the system will have

Using roughly 1.77A for 200 LEDs

Or 8-9mA per LED

Which technically 1.77A is kind of pushing it for JST PH connectors but it should be okay

People power 100s of neopixel off batteries with JST-PH connectors safely so it should be fine

[edgy apex]

I've been making good progress on my nerf project. I am testing everything as I go. this video is a test of my killcam feature with stock footage, I have realized this project is going to take more time than I thought to do it at the level I want.

I am multithreading everything I can because I can

[late fulcrum]

NeoPixels are generally overkill for a camera/shop light, ordinary RGB LEDs or even variable-white ones are likely entirely sufficient.

[static flare]

Yeah, that's fair, I have a set of ones I can dim using pots I might use at least for a proof of concept for what I want? But I also like the idea of having it all controlled by a microcontroller, idk

[gusty pilot]

You could put a servo on the potentiometer and then control the servo with a microcontroller. Or replace it with a digipot, but I've never used one so don't know how hard it would be.

[crystal ore]

Digipots are pretty easy I2C devices, but they're generally low-current, so not good for power dimming sorts of applications without an extra amplifier stage.

[late fulcrum]

You can use (non-addressable) RGB strands with a microcontroller (the usual way is PWM, but for video you may want to use a linear solution). You can also use a linear solution with pots and no microcontroller. The essence of the idea is you drive each channel (R, G, and B) with a power transistor (bipolar or MOSFET both work) and control those transistors with pots, microcontroller, or DAC outputs.

[static flare]

I could use both pots and a microcontroller

[late fulcrum]

Yes, that too!

[static flare]

Use the ADC on the microcontroller to read in the potentiometer values, and then use PWM to change the brightness

[late fulcrum]

That's a pretty versatile approach

[static flare]

(with a transistor to save the microcontroller's brains from frying)

more than one, but you know what i mean :p

[late fulcrum]

Yup!

[lusty fossil]

Anyone use Inkscape? I'm setting up a new install on Windows and can't remember what I did last time. Do you folks add Inkscape to the system PATH?

[late fulcrum]

I use Inkscape, but I don't use windows, so I'm not much help.

[static flare]

Just uploaded part 2 of my teardown

[lusty fossil]

no worries

[gusty pilot]

What exactly are you running into/what's not working? Windows does have a buried path string in the system info area, but I've only seen it a couple times with esoteric CRM-type applications that malformed it.

[lusty fossil]

Nothing that's not working, I'm just trying to avoid headaches later if I choose the wrong option

[honest moth]

〔Day two since the SWAP fixes. I feel like I am running a brand new machine!〕

[wooden schooner]

Windows has a PATH?

[lusty fossil]

IDK OS stuff ha

[wooden schooner]

I always assumed the way to run a shell command in Windows was to mail Microsoft a check with the command name in the memo

[lusty fossil]

I think you have to personally compliment Bill Gates

[wooden schooner]

Wow, the new CEO still left that mechanism in place, eh

[lusty fossil]

It's a holdover, but Satya found that he liked it too

something about "synergy"

[wooden schooner]

Probably also too much legacy code to change the name, it ultimately tunnels through an old version of Excel that they lost the source code for

[lusty fossil]

you mean Lotus 1-2-3, they were sneakily poaching off a competitor at the time, and it became baked it 😛

On the excel beat, there was a place in Europe where one city was undercounting its covid numbers simply because someone there accidentally saved as .XLS instead of .XLSX (1000 rows max vs 1 million)

oops!

[wooden schooner]

Yeah, we had a thread about this a few months ago

There was also that econ paper that influenced European policy with a result that came from an Excel error rather than reality

[lusty fossil]

yup! oops again!

[gusty pilot]

Looks like it has to do with how other programs call it:
https://inkscape.org/forums/questions/during-installation-what-does-add-to-system-path-mean/

Might affect ability to natively open Inkscape documents with right-click or double-click if you choose "do not".

All Users is usually my default for options like this, even though I'm the only user

[lusty fossil]

Thanks! I'm also the only user

[gusty pilot]

Yep.
https://www.java.com/en/download/help/path.html

[wooden schooner]

Oh, is the default value C:\Windows\{System,System32} or whatever

[gusty pilot]

those are included along with a bunch of other IIRC, program files, etc

This article appears a bit more comprehensive:
https://www.maketecheasier.com/what-is-the-windows-path/?amp

[drowsy zephyr]

guys, question, is there a way to measure the total power draw of an arduino based system and its components?

is it have to be done manually or is there a simple way of doing it?

[crystal ore]

I mean, the simple way is to use a multimeter on the power input.

[drowsy zephyr]

so basically on the Vin and the ground?

[crystal ore]

When you're measuring current, you'd put the multimeter in series with one of those, typically Vin.

[drowsy zephyr]

and it'll tell the total current draw of the whole thing?

or just the current draw of the arduino?

[crystal ore]

It'll tell you the current flowing through that Vin wire, so if all the power is coming from that, it'd indeed be the total current.

[drowsy zephyr]

ah, yeah, that makes sense i suppose, ahahaha

i thought i have to measure every single current draw from every breakout board

[crystal ore]

It's kind of like how the electricity meter on your house can measure what every appliance inside uses, because it's tapping into the main power input to the whole house.

[drowsy zephyr]

oh yeah, hahahaha, man im dumb

[crystal ore]

But you can measure the breakout boards separately if you want. People will often do that to figure out what the best thing to optimize is to save power, etc.

[drowsy zephyr]

hmm, okay

[lusty fossil]

Lightbulbs usually take only two signals, hot and neutral, right?

[late fulcrum]

Ordinary single-filament ones just have two current carrying contacts, yes. They generally don't specify hot and neutral in particular, but for mains use the convention (and in many localities, the requirement) is that the hot lead is the smallest/most recessed contact.

[lusty fossil]

That makes sense based on what I've read. I think these cheapo bulb fixtures just used a 3 prong cable to what? make people feel safer? I have definitely come across real, sold to the public products that have a fake ground connection.

I will buy something else

[late fulcrum]

Fixtures with exposed conductive materials are generally required to ground them or use double insulation (common for power tools but not for lighting). I generally both examine and test the ground connection for mains equipment I'm installing.

[lusty fossil]

Yeah I'm not happy with the lights that have the fake grounding, but I've made it clear they are unsafe. I wasn't involved in buying them.

[late fulcrum]

I'll often add my own grounding to fixtures like that.

[lusty fossil]

I attempted to, but didn't have the tools

It would have been easy to do with the right tools, but I suspect would have added 6.5 cents per unit to do it right, so they just half way did it

[dusty citrus]

why is it -10?

[lusty fossil]

350 = -10

[crystal ore]

(Since there are 360 degrees in a circle, you can either go +350 in one direction or -10 in the other direction to get to the same angle.)

[lusty fossil]

*A better way of putting it

[crisp lantern]

My friend just moved a dryer into her apartment but doesn't have a 240v socket for it. Doh! I am looking around and I've found these 110v combiner cables. Will those work?

[dusty citrus]

thanks, so it means the same thing
I only notice now that it was also written or ...

[late fulcrum]

If they're plugged into outlets of different phases, and the outlets have sufficient current capability (unlikely) and the cord has sufficient current capability. Even if everything is right, it's a pretty sketchy approach.

[crisp lantern]

Alright

We also found this

This way the dryer and stove could be plugged in at same time but if she accidentally uses both simultaneously RIP

Also nice to hear from you madboger hope all is well, happy easter

[late fulcrum]

After a week of warm sunny days, I'm back to sleet and snow today

[burnt tendon]

Well that snow fun

[stray wind]

Snowed all day here. So bad there was limited visibility for most of the day. No idea how much it dumped in total.

[late fulcrum]

You too, huh? I'm glad I got some yard work done over the weekend, as I'm pretty much staying indoors today.

[glad plover]

Yo

How are you? 😀

[lusty fossil]

I feel bad being mad it was 60 degrees today.

[blissful roost]

"MSI Breaks Its Own CPU Frequency World Record, Pushes Intel Core i9-12900KS CPU To 7.5 GHz on MEG Z690 Unify-X" https://wccftech.com/intel-core-i9-12900ks-7-5-ghz-overclock-msi-meg-z690-unify-x-motherboard-record/amp/

Dayum

[tardy badger]

Loool

[blissful roost]

I still recall when Intel claimed the P4 Prescott design would be able to hit 10GHz...

Everyone: LOL! No.

[lusty fossil]

Is that a cooling block on top?

[burnt tendon]

I remember when extreme overclocks were like a new thing

[lusty fossil]

I do too

Or when they were super popular at least, everyone was trying to get the highest Hz

[blissful roost]

I'd reasonably assume it's a tank for liquid LN2

[tardy badger]

Getting the inspiration to assemble this

I’ve had the PCB for a while

[burnt tendon]

It's been so hard getting the inspiration to assemble a bunch of my PCBs because if I screw up, I can't get any replacements.

[tardy badger]

Yeah, I’m terrified of wasting parts

[lusty fossil]

heh

*chuckles in mutual terror*

[late fulcrum]

Hmm, still seem to have plenty of parts. The problem with these is that the existing supply is probably going to be all there ever is.

[lusty fossil]

My sis was quoted 1600 for a teeth cleaning of a single dog. This is in SF. Does that seem high?

[edgy apex]

I'm working on an abstract for a new hope, wish me luck 🤞

The title is "Covid Making: from cyber pantries to cyber glasses"

I was unaware of hope until Greg commented on my PiGlass v2 post in the 2600 Facebook group

[dusk oracle]

i think i have retroitis

[blissful roost]

Are you buying old games consoles, even though it would be cheaper to buy an emulation handheld?

[dusk oracle]

a disease where you rekindle your love for retro hardware and software, this is a incurable illness that can only be subdue'd by the smell of transistors dated back to the 80's and solder, in some cases staring at large pixels for hours till your screen has burn in.

usually accompanied by chiptunes

and a severe lust for mating with a 8080 cpu

[blissful roost]

Well.. nearly on the theme of retro...

I found my old game dev documents, from 2002.

[dusk oracle]

nice

i found the pico-8

then i found 50 attempts at open source clones

some very good

[blissful roost]

👍

[dusk oracle]

someone over at fantasy consoles discord

sent me a key

i wrote a bsp engine in 5 min

i knew i wanted a copy on everything for the rest of my life

i'm now working on porting this majestic beast to the esp32

[blissful roost]

I need to start getting a Dev team for this game. Lol

[dusk oracle]

dm me

[blissful roost]

Huh?

[cerulean wind]

came to this discord server because im trying to reconnect the speed controller to my treadmill and im not sure which wires correlate to which prong. I have 3 prongs labeled H,S and L on the circuit board inside of lower treadmill casing and 3 wires connected to controller on one end and awaiting this answer on the other that are red, white and gray. gray is larger middle wire and red and white appear to be standard smaller circuit wiring

[static flare]

I meant to reply to a different message, whoops!

[static flare]

Inflammation of the retro? 😋

Missed out on a sweet bundle of vintage equipment including a oscilloscope, still need to pick one up some time, seller went with someone closer

I wish I could score a scope within my budget, but new ones in my budget are basically nonexistent, and most people price vintage scopes outside of my budget

[blissful roost]

Yeah, that was a tad confusing. Lol

[dusk oracle]

you have no idea the 8080 calls out and wants me to mold it into a console

[blissful roost]

You need this...

[tardy badger]

If your internet is down this morning, clap your hands

👏

[blissful roost]

👐

[arctic peak]

How are you posting? 🤣

[blissful roost]

Because mobile internet and such... Perhaps?

...or
Skerr has secret mind powers!! 🤔

[edgy apex]

It was/is really windy, the food pantry lost power or internet or both. I have a program that notifies me when such things happen by checking the last timestamp in io

[glad plover]

So the program notifies the outage?

[edgy apex]

Yes, It's run on my vps in NYC checking io server so it's completely external to the pantry

[glad plover]

Are you from New York City?

[edgy apex]

No I'm from cape cod in MA.

[glad plover]

Massachusetts.

I am from Izmir, Turkey.

[edgy apex]

Nice

Makers are everywhere

[late fulcrum]

I must have it worse (see previous picture of vacuum tubes), and the 8080 is far too modern, I'm thinking of breadboarding this:

[dusk oracle]

ohhh

[tardy badger]

Cellphone networks are still up

Home network is down thanks to something with xfinity

[late fulcrum]

I have unreliable internet via xfinity and unreliable backup internet via Verizon. Usually at least one of them is up.

[dusk oracle]

hahaha

[edgy apex]

turns out we lost power based on the temps going up, power is back everything is good and going back down, I measure the air temperature which changes more than the temperates of the frozen stuff.

[fair summit]

I got an 8008 in 1972 while in HS, but the ancillary logic necessary esp for the 1103 dynamic RAM was a lot of work, and I never did anything with it.

I have it here somewhere

I have some appropriate datasheets with sample configs if you do not

[blissful roost]

I need to get back to the project I started with a colleague in 2019, to build a multiprocessor Z80/Z180.

[tardy badger]

so sad pet news. Today i'm taking my cat Marshal to the vet for a quality of life checkup because he's been rapidly deteriorating in health over the last few months, very much so over the last few weeks. Poor guy is struggling to get around, groom himself, eat, and whatnot.. it also appears that recently he's become incontinent which is often a sign coupled with old age and mobility issues that his time on earth is ending.

[blissful roost]

So sorry. 😔

[tardy badger]

dang it just breaks my heart. I'm frustrated because i don't know the abuse he went through before I got him last year

the shelter that took him in didn't get any information on him, estimated he was only 5 or 6.. but the vet late last year said he looked very much older than 10

[lusty fossil]

I'm sorry.

[tardy badger]

but he had a good year here I think

other than a month from heck where we had to give him medication which he very much resented

when he was able to get around better he did give great cuddles. he always wanted to be laying on someone's lap

I just wish I could have had more time with him

[lusty fossil]

All you can do is give them a good home

I am only going to adopt older dogs, and I'm just resigned to the inevitable fact that I get less time with them.

E.g. my girl has pancreatitis. Vet is optimistic though, it seems, so I am too.

[stray wind]

I'm really sorry to hear that. It's always rough. It does sound like you gave him a good home and made him comfortable. Kitties can't ask for more (though they certainly think they can). I also wish you could have had more time. But you're doing the right thing. Deterioration that quickly is often old age or something not so treatable.... But getting him checked out is important.

[tardy badger]

yeah it's hard. my dog is getting up in age too so he's got a solid 2-3 years left. we got him as a puppy so he's been there for all my kids coming home from the hospital

[stray wind]

My 17 year old cat has kidney disease, and it presented itself as seriously increased water intake and output. Switching her to kidney-specific food made a world of difference. But her tiny kidneys are already smaller than they should be. She acts like she's still 2 years old sometimes. I treasure every day I have with her, because I don't really have any idea how much more time she has. She is healthy and happy (except when she's complaining about who knows what). It's the best I can hope for at this point.

[tardy badger]

yeah, disease in cats can be particularly brutal because they're so small

[stray wind]

Exactly.

[tardy badger]

Marshal is just exhausted all the time, doesn't play, hardly moves around anymore, and trying to do medication with him is a nightmare because he resents it so much

[stray wind]

And she's super tiny. Weights 6.7 pounds.

Yeah, that's time to find out if anything can be done, and regardless of the answer, make him comfortable for as long as he needs.

[tardy badger]

he slid off the cushion of the couch into the window sill this afternoon and was struggling just to right himself

[stray wind]

Aww. 😦

[tardy badger]

at this point, the best but hardest thing to do would be to end his suffering and pain. as much as I would love for him to be here longer.. he's already gone through so much and I don't want him to spend his days in fear because of medication

[stray wind]

I understand. That wouldn't be right.

I'm sorry you're going through this.

[tardy badger]

it took a solid month for him to be okay around me after we treated him for kitty herpies

[stray wind]

I'm glad you had a wonderful time with him while you had the chance.

[tardy badger]

or okay around anyone in the house

[stray wind]

That's not good.

[tardy badger]

yeah, i'm pretty sure he was badly abused before we got him

which is sad because he's such a loving cat

[stray wind]

Ugh. Terrible.

[tardy badger]

my goal is after he crosses the rainbow bridge, wait a few months and maybe get another cat this summer. hopefully give them a good life too

[stray wind]

That's an excellent goal. I know I'll get another cat quickly when it's time. Though I hope it's never time, but that's unreasonable.

[tardy badger]

yeah, just do what we can to give the lost cats in this world enough love to pass through peacefully

well, all the lost pets

[stray wind]

For sure.

[burnt tendon]

Yeah, I'm worried about one of my team member's cats. He's really really old and the clock is ticking for him too. We all know him because he vocalizes into the videoconferences.

[tardy badger]

Update on Marshal:

Good news: vet said he didn’t think it would be good to put him down, did an evaluation and figured a few tests and some dental operations could turn him around.

Bad news: I can’t afford the cost of care.

Sad but good news: I had to make the difficult choice of turning him over to a rescue that helps cats like Marshal. It was hard and I honestly cried a lot on the drive home and after getting home. I know he’s in good hands and will get the care he needs to be happy. And while it breaks my heart to give him up, i would rather him have a chance at a healthy life if he can have it. Even if it isn’t with me.

Here’s the last picture I got of him before I signed the papers

[wary sedge]

aw, I can’t imagine how difficult that must be

[late fulcrum]

I'm tempted to ask which rescue so I can donate some money

[tardy badger]

Celestial Zoo, it’s in Utah

[late fulcrum]

We adopted our cat Sammy from a similar outfit when he was 14. We figured we'd have a few good years, but he lived nearly 11 more years!

Here's Sammy knocking over a Christmas tree

[quartz wren]

I'm working towards bespoke tube manufacturing in my lab

so there will be a point at which I'll be able to replace something when the supply has dried up but I haven't gotten things to that point

[drowsy zephyr]

eyyo, is there a specific name for cylindrical shaped rechargeable LiPo batteries?

[lusty fossil]

Are you looking for like AA style terminals?

[drowsy zephyr]

both that and the battery

i was thinking of getting the square ones, but i'm scared of cutting the existing wires to connect it to a charge controller

also, is it really safe to solder battery connections? is there a better way to connect them?

[lusty fossil]

I think you can solder them

I don't know of a reason not to

[crystal ore]

You might consider LiIon cylindrical cells in a spring-loaded battery holder. The 18650s are the large size, but they also make 14500s in the AA form factor.

[lusty fossil]

I ALWAYS read LiIon as LiLon with a lowercase L.

Nothing has ever fixed it.

[crystal ore]

Yeah, really needs a capital I with crossbars... LiIon, heh heh.

[lusty fossil]

Yeah most web fonts have settled on no cross bars for I. It's a shame.

[static flare]

Note: make sure to get measurements of what you order, otherwise you might end up with 40 tiny BCD pushbutton inputs

Only now, after I have got them, do I see it said 18mm.

[quartz wren]

I had this issue once when trying to order a female header I thought would work for IDE but was the wrong pitch... Was very sad

But I learned to double check your dimensions lol

Thing is, I had one that was the right dimensions pulled up on digikey but I saw one that had a picture that looked the same but they were half the price so I added them to my cart without even looking at the dimensions

Correct number of pins on each axis? Picture looks right? Added to cart. I learned my lesson.

[quartz wren]

Not quite done sanding but I cleaned up a bit to make the work tomorrow easier

So tomorrow is more sanding then cleaning then caulking and primer

Cleanest this space has been since the inside had walls

[static flare]

I have 40 of these things now D:

[slim shard]

I don't like how easy they made a PID controller look :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WObG2LoSEwQ

[stoic mesa]

one thing i learned about pid is that it is rarely easy, and for unstable systems like inverted pendulum, they are quite hard

[late fulcrum]

No, it is NOT safe, especially with lithium cells.

[drowsy zephyr]

how do you connect them then

[late fulcrum]

The main ways are with battery holders or spot-welding connection tabs to them (you can solder to the tabs, just not directly to the cells)

[stray wind]

I'm glad to hear he'll have more time, but I'm sorry to hear it can't be with you. That was a difficult choice, but you made the right one.

[wooden schooner]

Lol is that what they call serifs these days?

[crystal ore]

Serifs are a little different. In a serif font, even the lowercase L would have them.

[wooden schooner]

Oh wow so the things on a styled I aren't serifs?

[crystal ore]

They can be, but you can also have a san-serif font with crossbars on the I, like our friend Comic Sans.

[wooden schooner]

Oh wow there's a whole world out there

[crystal ore]

Fun for all ages... https://type.method.ac/

[static flare]

Abby from NCIS is aesthetic goals

[stray wind]

A number of years ago I had someone ask me at a convention if I was cosplaying her. I was not. I was simply a nerd with the same hair.

[static flare]

I'd love to go as her to a convention or something, but I don't exactly have the same shape for it

[stray wind]

I certainly do not have that either. 😄

[burnt tendon]

Yeaaaah, I'd classify that as body shaming. Wear the costume you want.

Like, yeah, that's a problematic bit out of the present cosplay community.

But for a lot of those characters, literally nobody has the "right" body type. Anime princesses and Rob Liefield characters especially so.

[stray wind]

I genuinely appreciate folks who wear the costume they want. My struggle is personal.

[burnt tendon]

Yah!

[stray wind]

Thank you for your comments. 🙂

[burnt tendon]

I was more encouraging Z to wear Abby if they so desire too.

[stray wind]

Yeah, I took it as such. And really appreciate it.

[burnt tendon]

My wife was watching NCIS for a while and I have a lot of deep philosophical problems with the show in general but I really do like Abby as a character and at least for what I saw, her character was well treated, so I may be a little bit defensive of Abby in particular, LOL.

I can expound for hours on why Gadget from Rescue Rangers (and the character she was largely lifted from, Jordan from Real Genius) sent me on a very different path than most all of the other geek characters from my childhood, so positive not-male geeky-nerdy characters treated well by the writers are a thing for me.

[blissful roost]

I don't think you really can classify it as "body shaming" if it's self-referential??

I'd say it's down to Z to determine how they feel about their own body... No?

Personally, I hope I age as well as Pauley Perrette...
She looks amazing for 53. 😳

[wooden schooner]

Can't start a thread from mobile, but I would be quite interested to see some of this expounding

[drowsy zephyr]

oh i don't mean soldering batteries with one another, i meant soldering battery holders to a charge controller

or aka, how do you connect batteries to pcbs exactly?

[tardy badger]

Manchester encoding/decoding: easy in concept slightly difficult to implement in circuitpython

[burnt tendon]

Oh, yah, sorry if my language wasn't good there about body-shaming. Mostly I get peevish that people get body-shamed and eventually internalize it. I do a lot of photography and at some point I realized that I had a choice about what I was saying with my photography.

[blissful roost]

I understand.

My wife went from saying I was too fat, to saying I'm now too skinny. Lol

[wooden schooner]

Body shaming is such a huge problem, I appreciate you being authentic about it

[blissful roost]

I don't subscribe to the concept of the "fragile male ego", so I'm not bothered by it.

[burnt tendon]

And some of the cosplayers I know are actively annoyed because people give them "helpful" not-helpful comments about their body when they are cosplaying.

[blissful roost]

I went from 210lbs, to now at 140lbs... So I'm ok with that.

[burnt tendon]

So, yeah, Gadget and Jordan!

Real Genius has a lot of problematic aspects when viewed from the world of today and stuff but had a lot of details that a lot of the other geek-centric movies of the 80s did not.

Ironically, the section about how if you dangle a really interesting problem at the nerdly scientist-engineer personality that they will create a destructive weapon for you... well, didn't go far enough.

A bit after Real Genius came out, Rescue Rangers hit the TV and the creators took one of the characters, Jordan, and used her as the inspiration for Gadget (and apparently even mentioned this)

However, in this timeframe, in the early days of the PC, there was a clear marketing of the home computer as a toy for boys (even though the majority of programmers in that time period were female)

Ergo, all of the TV shows and movies followed suit. There was a wiz-kid, with his computer.

Also, this was before there were zillions of young dotcom figures, so your primary wiz-kid who made millions was Bill Gates, which mean that pretty much every kid who was a computer nerd and at least a little bit socially awkward everybody was like "Oh, he could be the next Bill Gates" but this still presented this as an aberration. Oh, you are hated and socially awkward but maybe you'll be a socially awkward billionare power player who people still make fun of.

You can compare-and-contrast that to the modern stereotype of the dotcom figure where it's less of an aberration because there's a bunch to pick from.

So, most of the movies with a nerd character focused on the nerd "winning" in a perverse sort of way. He gets to date the stereotypical cheerleader who is not a nerd at all, offering him social salvation from the nerdity.

[late fulcrum]

Either with battery holders, tabs soldered to PCBs, or wires soldered to tabs, basically.

[drowsy zephyr]

any examples?

[lusty fossil]

And it wasn't uncommon for the nerdy characters to behave really repugnantly, if not outright criminally, and it not be an issue in-universe.

[drowsy zephyr]

I've seen a lot of tutorials just solder their wires to the pcb

[wooden schooner]

Omg I freaking hate this

[late fulcrum]

Amusingly, one of the real people Jordan was modeled after is a friend of a friend.

[wooden schooner]

It's so misogynistic and people just accept it without a second thought because it's so in the culture

[late fulcrum]

That's totally valid. I like connectorizing things, but it's certainly not the only way.

[burnt tendon]

So, Real Genius comes to a finite conclusion and therefore, Jordan, a character who was odd but interesting and appealing, gets to get paired with the main character.

[wooden schooner]

Afk for the next hour but I will read with interest when I get back

@burnt tendon do i recall you saying you identify as male?

[burnt tendon]

And then Gadget kinda sidestepped that because kids media and long-running series but, again, they let her be nerdy and awesome.

Oh, yah, I identify as male.

[drowsy zephyr]

it just doesn't seem safe ya know

[wooden schooner]

Ok actually afk now (driving)

[late fulcrum]

What, soldering wires to PCBs? It's pretty common.

[burnt tendon]

So, if you consider that the sorts of media that were out there when I was a kid and impressionable, the ones that appealed to me that I remember the most featured some of the best female nerd characters that mysogonistic hollywood writing could produce. Which led me to think that, even though all of the other nerdly kids out there who I knew were also male, that this must at least somewhat be aberrant and maybe I just needed to stop being such a pain in the butt.

Obviously TV thinking.

[blissful roost]

Oops

[burnt tendon]

I mean, I have a nice collection of not-male nerdly friends who have at least a few aspects of Gadget/Jordan, so it's actually a case where the TV didn't like, LOL.

However, I can really feel how a lot of the other nerdly folks took Revenge of the Nerds and other movies of that time period as more of a guide and so they felt justified in being unpleasant.

tl;dr: While a common reason given for having well-written not-male nerdly characters in fiction is to give not-male individuals a role model, it's also good for breaking stereotypes in the eyes of the less-discriminated against generally male audience.

[edgy apex]

Makes sense, everyone needs a good role model

[burnt tendon]

Yeah, and at least in one series I remember reading as a kid, the author later wrote that they were explicitly told by their publisher that if they wanted to write for the juvenile science fiction market, the main characters had to be boys because none of the boys reading it would identify in any way with a female character.

[edgy apex]

My role model growing up was my great uncle, I didn't know much about him growing up other than he was a volunteer and a hero, he died in 1944. I didn't know how much of a hero until recently. He was part of the most effective oss team that operated in the falaise pocket in France.

[static flare]

Thank you for this 💜

[quartz wren]

https://youtu.be/RR1z-J2WkpY

https://tenor.com/view/its-happening-gif-23353691

[static flare]

Can't wait to get home :3

[blissful roost]

Just got on the train, heading home from work.

[static flare]

I... have no clue what to do now

[drowsy zephyr]

so uh, how do you connect batteries to a pcb exactly?

last time i connected it with a jst connector, it didn't go well

do you have to put a resistor at least series/parallel to the power source to prevent short circuiting through air?

[static flare]

If the batteries have a connector on them, you use that

if they dont, you put them in something that at least has wires

and you either terminate those wires with a connector, or you just solder them

[drowsy zephyr]

how do you prevent short circuiting then?

[static flare]

usually that's not an issue?

typically battery contacts are insulated from each other with air if not plastic

At the levels of charge a battery normally has, air isn't usually a factor with insulation

[tardy badger]

I tell ya, I’ve never had Aliexpress standard postage arrive so fast. Less than 2 weeks

Ordered some TFTs for a project and they’ll be here today

Fingers crossed they work

[static flare]

now to figure out how to set it up, and what to do with it

[spice moss]

hope it works

[static flare]

it looks like it works!

[burnt tendon]

Well, scope out that lab.

[quartz wren]

Speaking of labs

I was going to furnish today but I am toooo sore

[quartz wren]

I went from this to this in about a week mostly by myself 😄

[stoic mesa]

to have a short circuit through the air, you would need voltage in kiloVolts, so it shouldn't be an issue for a battery

Usually short circuits happen in much more prosaic way - like having two contacts accidentally touch. But it is easy to prevent these kinds of mistakes.

Adding a resistor in series with power source is generally a bad idea.

[quartz wren]

One other thing to note is that if you test your circuit on the same surface you soldered on without cleaning up either the surface or the board... You have a high chance of shorting between pins with splatter from the solder or trimmed pins

The bane of my projects is forgetting to clean up the surface I'm testing on and blowing the main component on the board

[stoic mesa]

you are not alone 🙂

Just out of curiosity, checked it.
Dielectric strength of air is 3kV/mm, so to have discharge between electrodes 1cm apart, you would need 30kV

[static flare]

I can't find any information on it, yet again

Why does Australian consumer products from the 70's and 80's have no documentation :(

All I can even find on this is an ad with a picture of a different model

[tardy badger]

Doing my first ever interview with Google in 10ish minutes

I’m excited but also incredibly anxious

[blissful roost]

Ohhhhhhh!

Good luck. 😁

[stray wind]

You'll be great!

[tardy badger]

Just have to not forget all the things lol

[orchid zephyr]

I’m trying to make an electret, I know you need to melt a dielectric while in the presence of an electric field and let it resolidify, my problem is getting a good electric field.

[tardy badger]

You know what produces an electric field when a magnet is passed through it, inductors 😄

[orchid zephyr]

I thought that was a magnetic field

[lusty fossil]

How does one contact a seller/website owner when their website's Contact Info section just has a bunch of rambling weirdness? It has their full name. Do you just google them?

Ah there it is, forcing google to navigate their pre-2001 style website was much easier.

[tardy badger]

Well, pass a magnet through an inductor to create an electric field in coil. Sorry, should have been specific 😛

[orchid zephyr]

I thought it made an electric current not an electric field

Obligatory magnetic monopoles aren’t real edit lol

[wooden schooner]

I was just about to sass you

@tardy badger isn't that usually called a generator?

[quartz wren]

I've got a friend who works at Google, best of luck with the interview

[orchid zephyr]

Yeah capacitors make electric fields inductors make magnetic fields

[tardy badger]

Yes

[orchid zephyr]

Oh wait I just had an idea

[tardy badger]

An electric field passed through an inductor inducing a magnetic field, yes that is correct. But you can induce an electric field through an inductor when you pass a magnet through or near the coil. It’s all magic lol

[wooden schooner]

"Magnetic monopoles are like unicorns: they're perfectly reasonable things, just no one has ever seen one yet"

[orchid zephyr]

No wait you’re mixing up electric current and electric field

[tardy badger]

Physics 2 wasn’t my strong suit so my description of what’s happening is not perfect

Current is merry measuring the direction/flow of an electric field

[orchid zephyr]

No current is the flow of electric charges, if that was the case, magnetic field would be the flow of magnetic charges (fake monopole lies)

[tardy badger]

Remember that magnetic and electric fields are orthogonal to each other

Anyway

Exiting before I lose my engineering degree

[wooden schooner]

There is a version of Maxwell's equations that have a term for magnetic current

But yes magnetic field and magnetic current are different

[tardy badger]

Anyway, this explains what @wooden schooner was saying and what I was trying to convey https://opentextbc.ca/universityphysicsv2openstax/chapter/induced-electric-fields/

[wooden schooner]

@orchid zephyr if you're ok with calculus, these forms of Ampere's law imply that if there is a circulating magnetic field around a surface, there must be either a changing electric field or a current through the surface (or both)

[tardy badger]

Thanks for the support @wooden schooner 🙏

Like Hercules, I also am not that great at articulating myself 😅

[wooden schooner]

I like to nerd out 😆 sorry if I wasted anyone's time by saying incorrect things

[tardy badger]

It’s tough, trying to piece together knowledge from a class I took 4 years ago

I’ve been out of school for almost 18 months now doing software engineering mostly so my physics 2 is rusty

Wow I just realized what their tagged handle is 😀

[burnt tendon]

Clearly it's ampere time for you to have forgotten everything

[tardy badger]

You’re 💯 right

Also, I wasn’t expecting to hear back so soon but I get to move on to the next round of interviews with Google 🥳

[lusty fossil]

yay!

Thanks Amazon for the reminder to never use you for anything I care about.

[wooden schooner]

Yeah, I guess it is a coincidence that Ampère's name sounds like amplitude/amplification/etc. So the pun is not circular.

His ancestors might have been named for having a profession that had to do with amplification, but did amplification really exist much before Ampère's time?

[burnt tendon]

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/amplify

[stoic mesa]

congratulations!!

[burnt tendon]

So, amplifier is in old french.

I guess more the "Amplify this point" sort of usage would be more prevalent before electronics.

[wooden schooner]

Yeah exactly

I mean don't get me wrong, that would be a great profession

[burnt tendon]

And I guess the hydraulic piston is 2 centuries before Ampere and the block-and-tackle dates back to ancient Egypt.

[orchid zephyr]

Yeah ik im a big monopole fan

I’m still learning about the integral over a closed loop thing

[late fulcrum]

Yup, and an electret is basically a capacitor with a built-in charge. So to apply a field, just use the existing leads

[wooden schooner]

Dryer blows a thermal fuse → call landlord → replaces entire unit without looking at the old one. 🇺🇸

(of a friend's apartment)

[edgy apex]

Oi

We got a brand new microwave from the dump as a kid, just fuses

[lapis bluff]

The last time I interviewed for a "real" job (1992), I spent most of the afternoon talking to various people and a little after 5, the last person I talked to (also the first, the group manager), walked me out of the building and I went back to the office I was leaving and a few minutes later the phone rang. It was the HR person calling to make an offer. Between the quality of the people I'd talked to, and the fact of the administraton being there at 5:30 to complete the process, I accepted almost immediately. From discussion with the HR person I got the distinct impression that everybody's report from the interview started with "Hire this person!" I guess I'd made a good impression.

[burnt tendon]

Yeah, that's funny because I got tired of interviewing at Google, mostly because they had a really bizarre process that didn't make me feel like there was any sort of fairness to the hiring decision, but also because they'd drag things out foooorreeever. Like, the last time I'd bothered, I'd responded to the Google interviewer figuring that I'd probably not want to work there but would appreciate some interviewing practice with a hostile panel before getting to places I'd like to work and they ended up scheduling their on-site for the day after I'd accepted a job offer because they were at least then incapable of moving quickly.

[wooden schooner]

What role were you interviewing for, if you want to say?

And around what year was this?

[burnt tendon]

2016-ish and it was an engineering manager role for SRE.

[wooden schooner]

How did you determine that it would be a hostile panel?

[burnt tendon]

Google's reputation is that it's always a hostile panel.

[wooden schooner]

Interesting. What does hostile mean?

They pass up a lot of people because they'd rather not hire in the first place than have to fire, is that what you mean?

[burnt tendon]

No, more like the interview questions frequently have no bearing on how you would actually perform while working there.

[wooden schooner]

Oh def. They got that one from Microsoft

Almost no one uses algorithms in their job

[lusty fossil]

IDK, I jam next to the fish tank on the daily

Oh ALGOrithms. I read that as algae rhythms. My fave thing

[wooden schooner]

Oh yeah the keys are like right next to each other

[lusty fossil]

😛

[burnt tendon]

Yeah, and, like, as a hiring manager for fiddly infrastructure positions, I'm big on systems thinking and their system thinking interview part wasn't so bad because they let me just say "Hash ring here" instead of actually articulating the theory from scratch.

But then they made me write some random algorithm, as valid code in an approved language not pseudocode, on a whiteboard.

And, for me, I know that some of my engineering friends with anxiety who part of under-represented groups get seriously traumatized by that, plus I don't feel like it's any way indicative of how a person will perform on the job, so I tend to get actively annoyed at something that feels basically like a fraternity hazing

[wooden schooner]

Yeah this is ridiculous

I usually request to write the code on paper rather than a board (I'm much better that way)

[lusty fossil]

I feel like an interview is a performance from both parties. They are supposed to be giving you a feel of what it's going to be like to be around them 60 hours a week.

If they fail that, I don't want to be involved.

[wooden schooner]

They typically tilt their head for a second and are like "sure, I don't see why not..."

(this does not address the stereotype threat issue you brought up, it's just a tangent)

[tardy badger]

I use algorithms on occasion in my job but my line of work currently is communications so it’s kind of a given. Like working with Dijkstra’s and whatnot

For a startup I’m working on, I’m implementing Manchester encoding/decoding on fairly high level in software which is cool

[burnt tendon]

Yah, like, that's kinda where I get annoyed because there's a world of useless skills in writing a correct implementation of manchester encoding/decoding on the whiteboard from memory with no references versus displaying a deep understanding of the implications of the principles involved in a way that cannot be memorized.

For some reason this storage infrastructure company made me whiteboard graphics algorithms completely unrelated to storage infrastructure one time. I think all of the computer graphics stuff fell off my resume, so it can't be because I took all of the undergrad graphics classes plus independent study coursework in a field I never ended up working in.

(One of my friends shares a brain with me in that she's about the same intelligence, thinks about the same way, has the same thing wrong with her brain and so on so it really drives the point home the sort of significant disadvantages I'd encounter were I to be not-male)

[tardy badger]

I tend to fall in the same line of thinking that technical interviews for the most part are absolutely broken. Most are unnecessarily vague or unrelated. And I dislike that they’ll ask you questions about something you list on your resume that is completely unrelated like you mentioned with graphics.

Things I think that are generally important/applicable for certain fields like embedded software development tend to be speed and storage runtime and complexity because they are highly constrained systems

And maybe graphics/game engine development

But computer hardware advancements have nearly negated the need for optimizing like that. Mostly because how most code core data structures tend to already be pretty optimized

It might be also important if you’re a kernel developer

[wooden schooner]

Also, if you're going to optimize, you can't really do that at a whiteboard. You need to profile.

[tardy badger]

Yeah, optimizations are usually a long process and difficult to flesh out over a 45min to 1hr interview

[wooden schooner]

And there, the improvements are usually not about big-O (unless you really messed up the first time around and code review didn't catch it), they're about cache locality and stuff like that.

[tardy badger]

Yeah exactly

[late fulcrum]

Or truly obvious stuff like bubble sort

[burnt tendon]

Oh yeah, the most recent Google interview was after their whole paper where they concluded, with data, that their interview had the same predictive power as random choice. I was a bit curious as to if they'd changed anything. They hadn't.

[wooden schooner]

I hear that over the past decade, the interview process for non-Google companies has shifted somewhat away from irrelevant whiteboard coding towards relevant things like pair programming and take-home assignments

[burnt tendon]

I guess the problem is that if there's too many xooglers in your company, they tend to start re-creating google.

[wooden schooner]

That seems so strange to me. I have a friend who currently works at Google and is applying to another company and they literally are telling her which Google level they would hire her at

[burnt tendon]

I mean for a lot of people they worked at Google for most of their career so far and so it comes to define normal and change is always done as offset from Google.

So... same interview process, but let's give the interviewee a text editor instead of a whiteboard without necessarily changing things.

[crystal ore]

Amusingly, one predictive element Google found in their analysis was that people who got one LOW interview score from the panel (but were still hired despite that) tended to perform better as employees.

[wooden schooner]

Ho boy. Statistically significant?

[crystal ore]

I believe so, but I didn't see the full analysis.

[wooden schooner]

Honestly, it's really strange to me how dogmatic software engineering culture is at both the stereotypical-individual level and the management level. Recently I realized that the phrase "best practices" (ubiquitous in software engineering management) is kind of crazy in that it kind of inherently rejects the notion of addressing each new situation with fresh eyes and creativity.

[crystal ore]

You can spin that a few ways. "People who had signs of extreme excellence sufficient to convince the hiring committee to overlook one low interview score tended to do well in their careers."

[burnt tendon]

Applying the mythos of intelligence to that which is achieved with luck.

[wooden schooner]

Can you elaborate that one level?

[burnt tendon]

A lot of that which makes a company successful comes down to luck. Catching a CEO at the right time that they'll license their content to you. Not being too early or too late to an opportunity but accidentally landing at the right time that people decide they really want that sort of a thing. A product is a very large multi-variable space and iterating through it with linear programming would be hard, throwing darts can be easy and quick.

[wooden schooner]

Oh yeah totally

[burnt tendon]

(Also relatedly, being born into a family that's OK with you spending a few years on a lark and being willing to bail you out if it blows up in your face)

But luck is hard to accept for folks, so they start to think it's because they timed it right, because they were the most persuasive, because they were just that darn smart.

[wooden schooner]

Huge dependence on timing, including some systemic negative feedback loops as The Innovator's Dilemma (which I haven't read) lays out

[burnt tendon]

So they think it's about intelligence, and you can go a lot of places with a sociopathic conviction besides.

[wooden schooner]

Yeppp

Lots of proxies for parental income, take your pick

[burnt tendon]

And eventually you end up like Netflix where you just hit the fiscal breaks because everybody realizes that any good show gets cancelled after two seasons and maybe they wanted a third or fourth season and now there's a bunch of streaming services out there to choose from that don't cancel the show after two seaons.

[wooden schooner]

Oh this sounds like a potentially positive thing? (I don't watch TV)

Screw big media corps full stop though

[burnt tendon]

And so the main thing wasn't because Netflix built some great infrastructure pieces nor that they actually were that smart and used data to determine that all shows should be axed after two seasons or even that their weird hiring and recruiting and firing strategies were good at gathering the right sort of people, it was just because they managed to catch the right CEOs in the right mood at the right time to get streaming rights and happened to be the first real streaming service.

[wooden schooner]

Geez. I didn't know about those bad things but wow

[burnt tendon]

They did some thing where they were all like "Oh, yeah, unless the show is a mega-hit, it makes fiscal sense to only give it X seasons" which I forget what that was.

They cancelled the only Netflix original I cared about after one season and I might have watched sense8 but they axed that after two seasons and screwed up the pacing for the end of the show so I never bothered getting into it.

All things that don't fit in a data-driven model.

[wooden schooner]

I think there is a category of person one might call "data scientist with a conscience" who behind closed doors will decry the unprincipled (in both the mathematical sense and the moral sense) things they have to do in their job to keep the company happy.

[wooden schooner]

Yeah. Data is not a steering wheel, it is a gas pedal. You need a good driver at the wheel to use it responsibly.

Execs tend to not be big fans of methodological subtlety.

[burnt tendon]

Yeah, like, I understand that I got lucky in a bunch of areas and am emotionally OK with that knowledge.

I don't understand why folks have to construct giant towers of ego over this.

[wooden schooner]

It's a really difficult social justice question

[tardy badger]

This was honestly probably the reason why I got the job I currently have. I argued that GPA was not completely indicative of how successful someone would be in a role. I walked away from that interview feeling kind of down because I was sure that comment would cost me the job given the comment that they typically liked to see higher GPAs than I had

[crystal ore]

Good for them in choosing to evaluate the whole person instead of just following a checklist. 👍

[dusk oracle]

my family is really starting to grind my gears

who calls you up at 2 in the morning to fix a printer driver issue

really

and then it's pebcam and id10t errors

what is so hard abou selecting the right printer from the start that made me waste 20 mins on a no existing problem

[crystal ore]

Geez. If my family calls me at 2:00am, someone better be in the hospital...

[dusk oracle]

why lord why... did i not pray enough?

[tardy badger]

Same

[dusk oracle]

i'm not allowed to get angry

if i get angry i'm "being like my father"

https://tenor.com/view/cry-crying-spider-man-peter-parker-tobey-maguire-gif-17446116

[crystal ore]

Heh heh, don't be angry. Just be reeeeeally sleepy and give troubleshooting advice which is mixed into whatever you were just dreaming about. 😉

[dusk oracle]

XD

[blissful roost]

Ggggrrrr

[dusk oracle]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/938158730246254643/966952263237124096/funtime.jpg

[static flare]

I am very much stuck not knowing what to do with setting up this scope :/ tried looking online for tips, but they talk about digital scopes with inbuilt settings

[late fulcrum]

Personally, I find analog scopes like that with real physical knobs the easiest to learn on. You can twiddle the settings and see just what they do. There are some good books on it, but they tend to live in libraries, vacuum tube collector sites, and bookshelves of people like me. But there is some useful information out there. Searches on things like "analog oscilloscope basics", manuals on older scopes (especially learning oriented ones like Heathkits), and electronics learning sites can be useful. Here's one I found: https://techexplorations.com/oscilloscope/

[late fulcrum]

Happily, analog scopes like that are all pretty similar, so even if you can't find a manual for that particular one (a very nice unit that was $699 new), a manual for an analog 5-20MHz scope will be useful, you just may have to mentally adjust to a different control layout. Note that your scope includes a "component analyzer", which is a very nice feature, but a generic scope manual probably won't cover that function (but I can probably find a component analyzer manual for something that works similarly if you're curious about it).

[static flare]

Tbh, right now, I just want to get this calibrated and known to be working

I didn't know this came with a probe so I ordered new ones

The calibration knob on the inside broke when I tried adjusting it on this one anyway

[late fulcrum]

That's a shame. However, as long as the new probes cover the input specs of your scope, they should be able to be calibrated to it.

[static flare]

What does the Z axis do?

[late fulcrum]

That lets a signal change the brightness of the beam on the fly.

[static flare]

I see a input jack on the back

next to a grounding point

I wonder if Altronics have any old manuals for them laying around

[late fulcrum]

If not, this seems like a fairly similar unit (even includes a component tester): https://bkpmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/manuals/en-us/21xxC_manual.pdf

[static flare]

It's funny, I have something else from BK Precision I wanted to test

a 2MHz function generator

[late fulcrum]

That's a nice companion for an oscilloscope

[static flare]

I also got a Lodestar 10MHz Audio Generator

(that came with the scope)

the guy who i bought the scope from was very generous

got a cable tester, a handheld RC oscillator, an insulation tester, and a lux meter

oh and a desoldering gun

[static flare]

(just googled the audio generator, and by itself it costs like, $200USD to buy nowadays, and I got it with the scope and everything else for $100AUD)

[late fulcrum]

That's a really good deal, and those are useful things to have

[dusty citrus]

I keep seeing debates about oscilloscopes like that old ones are much better quality than cheap digital one but on the other side you have someone who reply that it's very hard for the uniniated to tell the quantity that is being displayed on an old classic oscilloscope and the shape of the curve doesn't give much info vs a cheap digital one and that alledgedly digital>>>>analog for oscilloscopes

Which I kinda find hard to believe because digital immediately mean a loss of precision/accuracy assuming much of the cost will be in an ADC and cheaper ones lack bandwidth/accuracy

so I'm really confused about the whole thing

The only thing that make sense for me is that digital ones might be less good because afaik it's showing a voltage wave and right of the bat saying that between 0 and 2.5V is digital 0 and 2.5V to 5V is digital 1 is immediatly a huge loss of information

Kinda the same with soldering iron, just when I'm ready to make a purchase I see a guide that says that high-wattage ones aren't meant for fragile electronics like arduino but for large pieces/electricity and that Weller / Haiko company don't make things for hobbyists

[edgy apex]

Tomorrow I am going to both maker organizations I am a part of. One is just like a hangout type thing with pizza and the computer museum, the other makers group I am involved with is a nonprofit organization. The local radio club is coming by, I want to see what they have for toys as well as figure out the best way to get my ham radio license.

[static flare]

I actually bought a cheap portable digital one as well, hopefully the combination of the two should be perfect for my needs

But typically for my needs, I probably mostly only need the analogue one, cause I'm mostly working with analogue electronics

[dusty citrus]

Yeah but even then, with digital, how do you know their Voltage cutoff to says 0 or 1 in their ADC vs the one in the microcontroller ?

same for a digital probe vs an arduino or another microcontroller

I've never seen a spec where it says that for them 1 is 2.4V+ and 0 is less than 2.4V so if says arduino is 2.6V then the probe/oscilloscope would be incorrect between 2.4 and 2.6V

[static flare]

I'm not sure what you mean there

[dusty citrus]

do you know what digital/analog mean especially the loss of information part ? and the fact you have to pick a voltage to determine if you output 0 or 1 ?

what I mean is that this voltage they picked (cutoff voltage) I have no idea if it's the same cutoff as my microcontroller and it doesn't say anywhere

[static flare]

Are we still talking about an oscilloscope?

[dusty citrus]

about a digital one need to know which range of voltage it consider 0

[late fulcrum]

It seems to me you're conflating a logic analyzer (which only sees 1s and 0s) with a digital oscilloscope (which will show various voltages and waveforms, but quantized)

[dusty citrus]

well I just assumed a digital oscilloscope would be using an ADC before it does anything and there is a range of voltage which it just wouldn't see depending on the cutoff of the ADC

[late fulcrum]

Yes, that's the quantizing I was referring to, and it happens in both time and voltage.

[static flare]

An ADC on its own would be floating, and it would consider the ground connection as 0

[dapper hatch]

So as time goes on and I randomly look for chips to drive a 7" TFT. More and more I realise how the chip on the original RPi (as used on RPi Zero too) is how epic that chip is and how under valued it is. The GPU is still very strong and the CPU is very usable. Whilst most people hope for a RPi5 I dream of them selling the chip on it's own, so companies like Adafruit can build their own boards. One day....

[dusty citrus]

I use an RPi4 (or 3) as a fake VT-220 type terminal. ;)

I don't think it's the chip or the age of the chip or the size of the TFT just off-hand reaction after seeing that statement

I mean the basics of display is: height * lenght * bit per color

can you handle that much bits per second yes or no ^

It comes to only that I believe

Basically with or without a window manager; I use one window that gets instantiated to the serial port on bootup.

I've done it in Raspbian and in plan9 (9front.org).

so for 102876824 bits per color you need to handle 18 mb/s of data and a cpu that is above 18mhz

[tardy badger]

Well, memory is your biggest constraint

[dusty citrus]

yeah there is that too but I'm sure there are tons of tricks for memory so it's not so cut and dry

[tardy badger]

Have to have enough memory to drive a display, or figure out a way to buffer your display output in a way that you don’t overrun memory

[dapper hatch]

I tried getting the PIO cores on the 2040 to drive the 7" display that Adafruit sells. I go it working but it is not easy and it had some timing issues that meant the display was a bit wobbly. Also only four colours per pixel. Driving a TFT needs a lot.

[dusty citrus]

where as a 16mhz arduino cpu clearly can't handle data coming at 18mhz at the bare minimum

[tardy badger]

Yeeep

RP2040 more than has the clock speed to drive a 7” TFT

125MHz

But memory is where it bottlenecks

[dusty citrus]

I saw missiles teardown from the 1970 where they would have 24 bits words and 80mb of memory when they couldn't even handle 1mb in personal computers in 1979

I don't know how, but I know that memory have a lot of tricks

[dapper hatch]

The timing signals are not easy, have to be very precise. Easier said than done.

[tardy badger]

Only 268k of SRAM I believe

[dusty citrus]

where as you can't really trick cpu or bandwidth on i/o

[tardy badger]

Yeah, timing is very hard

I’m rusty on my RP2040 stats as it’s been a while since I built a board and looked at the data sheet

[dusty citrus]

Speaking of which

If I don't like the low amount of memory on say an arduino can't I just add eeproms chips unless I have gigabytes of them ?

Even if it's 200 eeproms

[dapper hatch]

Seems to be very few chips designed to drive a TFT display. And not cheap.

[dusty citrus]

and some trick to adress all of this memory on a llowly cpu like the one on an arduino ?

It's kinda hard for me to understand what actually limit memory and why they put so little memory/mhz on a typical microcontroller

[dapper hatch]

Lots of tricks to generate the data for the display. I got a AT Tiny, as in the original Trinket, to drive a VGA monitor. Was on show and tell many years ago. B

[dusty citrus]

does these tricks also involve precalculating frames like video cards do? (still need 32MB of memory for a 1024*768 display to do this though for 1 calculated frame + 1 displayed frame)

[tardy badger]

So generally you can add flash memory or an SD card to expand flash, but most chips don’t support PSRAM off chip

[dusty citrus]

That iss what is difficult to understand for me, what X MB of memory mean on a microcontroller and compare it to a computer memory

[dapper hatch]

Basilicy Look up tables. So 2bits for colour index.

[dusty citrus]

I mean ytou could compress the frame from 16MB of memory to probably 1MB but you still need to store the original data somewhere while you do this and it's going to be cpu intensive

even for a simple RLE compression

[dapper hatch]

Give you four pixels per byte

Some chips have a built in image encoding. The old Amiga GFX chip had a mode call HAM. Stored the RGB in a register and the image bytes modified that value as it was used to generate the video signal.

HAM = Hold And Modify.

So many other schemes. It's the signals that is hard and TFT displays need four, IIRC. Clock, VSync, HSync and data enable. The issue I had with the 2040 was the signal was poor at high clock rates.

[dusty citrus]

I thought the first formats of picture where netpbm and xpm (ie: ascii bit fields with 0 compression) and that basically low cost tft worked a bit like them

[blissful roost]

We also had PORK and BACON modes, but they were deprecated during early development... 😅

[dapper hatch]

Yes

[dusty citrus]

with a 1:1 match of bit stored and displayed

[blissful roost]

... sorry

[dusty citrus]

Do you guys know of tech like FLIR a bit ?

or UV/thermal imaging

[dapper hatch]

Don't know how it works, have seen it.

[dusty citrus]

The part that always screw up my brain is when they say it require a supercooled len

then I see kits for android phones with a 200x80 resolution for about 800-900$

am I supposed to carry a huge liquid nitrogen tank with me or something ?

How am I supposed to keep that len cold to like -112oF ?

[crystal ore]

They typically use solid-state Peltier coolers, I think.

But not all thermal sensors need to be cooled.

[dusty citrus]

.oO( rusty vs a technology unavailable a very short time ago ;)

that's movin'!

My dream is that before my life is over I can make something that detect / track and kill wasps 😄

And I think an high-resolution FLIR can do that

[blissful roost]

that's a-paddlin'

[dusty citrus]

It's that atm it's military technology that only the military can buy and over 1M$

[crystal ore]

Insects are cold-blooded, so a thermal camera probably won't help that much to detect them versus just a regular camera.

[dusty citrus]

but 10 years you couldn't even buy the lowest of the lowest version of that sort of camera as a civilian

afaik FLIR is a mix of UV/infrared and low-grade pesa (milimetric waves)

and everything alive emit milimetric

not sure on pesa but pretty sure flir is uv/infrared at least

even the most basic ones

[crystal ore]

FLIR is a company, not a technology, so they probably make several types of cameras. The same detector would generally not be used for both UV and thermal infrared, though.

[dusty citrus]

seems I'm wrong 😦 there goes my dream

Was probably confused because some of their products have 2 lens

[stoic mesa]

No problem!
Just build your own robotic wasp, equipped with autonomous navigation, computer vision, micro missile system, and train it to attack real wasps.
Now create a swarm of millions of them and let loose.

what can possibly go wrong?

[dusty citrus]

well for the destroy wasp part

I was hoping to use a magnifying lens or a laser 😄

the difficult part is aiming and telling between the ground and wasp and microrocks with a camera that can actually only see in 2D

[stoic mesa]

5W laser shoudl do it

[dusty citrus]

I mean I read somewhere that magnyfying lens can only heat something as far as the slice of temperature of the thing that is projecting in it

so half of the sun would be 3000oC seems enough for a wasp 😄

[static flare]

Let's just leave wasps alone

[dusty citrus]

I wish, but they keep attacking me for no reasons

even if there is a whole field of flower they'd rather harass me...

[tardy badger]

Wasps tend to prefer meats over pollen 😛

I saw some eating chicken wings someone left on the ground once

[dusty citrus]

I used to hire cats to bodyguard me but I'm allergic now

they can see small thing like wasps from far away and have zero fears

and I mean it was accidental, no animal cruelty involved

I'd run away in panic and my cat would handle it when a wasp entered my apartment

[edgy apex]

Today is the first really nice day we have had weather wise this year. The doors and windows are open and all I can hear is birds. 🙂

[dusty citrus]

I have asian ladybugs trying to enter my room...

Must get insect killer before I open the windows/doors because the screen is too big so they pass throught it

[tardy badger]

Asian lady beetles are incredibly annoying and carnivorous

[dusty citrus]

yeah they froze outside but apparently they can stay without moving for 2 years until the temperature is hot enough

so I have to wait for summer or make sure to season them generously with insect killer to make sure they don't slip inside my house metal gear solid style when I'm not looking 😦

[tardy badger]

Balcony garden is coming along nicely

Apple tree, blueberry bush, grape vine

Also seeds started for peas, cayenne peppers, corn, we have strawberry starts, also growing pumpkins, watermelons, green beans, squash, and cucumbers 🙂

[static flare]

New phone :3

I also am getting a smart watch, a set of earbuds and a phone case, plus another smart watch for tearing down (but that one was a cheap one my wife bought before I gave her my old Samsung one)

[dusk oracle]

i scored a Brother label printer

i'm tempted to see if there is serial pins hidden somewhere

[tardy badger]

Would a SPI TFT have a fast enough refresh rate to display a logic analysis graph?

I feel like it would

[dusty citrus]

from googling it seems you'd need the right lcd driver, one that would only update pixel that actually changed to get 60fps

[tardy badger]

I’m only sniffing short sample periods of sun 100kHz signals so I imagine I should be fine. I’m thinking of making a dual channel, pocket logic analyzer lol

[dusty citrus]

well, if I were analyzing a signal

and there was 100000 of it and I could only update every 60 fps and the phoenomena usually don't vary that much between small quanta of time

I'd group them to filter the values to make up better for noise in my sensors etc and display a more accurate analysis

ie: multisampling with average or moving average where the most recent measurement count for more in an average-pareto method

ex: temperature/humidity can take a measurement 600 times per second while I can only display 60 times a second. I'd group them by 10 and average them to multisample and reduce sensor noise impact by an average of 90% and display that average as one of the measure Im displaying because it's very likely the temperature hasn't changed in 1/60 of a second and the change can only be sensor noise

whereas if what you are measuring can vary quickly you'd use weighted average for the multisampling ie: tenth oldest measurement is given a weight of 0.5, most recent is 1.5 with a small step increase between each so the average will react faster to recent measurement

make sense or I lost you??

[tardy badger]

No I know how to implement it, I’m just doing some exploring of refresh optimization. If I’m not updating the whole display it theoretically could become faster. I think the TFTs I have are IPS so I might be able to get a little bit better overall resolution. But ideally what I plan to do is be able to set the sample window from say 1ms to 1 second, take the sample, and refresh the display with the collected sample

And it would have a button that was be for resampling

[thick wind]

Depends on SPI bus speed and resolution? What framerate are you looking to achieve?

[tardy badger]

I think doing a static update of a predetermined sample period with manual sampling (user presses a button to sample)

It’s just hand held so I think that would be okay

Or even just setting the sample period and updating at the end of each period

I’m going to use either an ESP32-s2 or an RP2040 given they have clock speeds over 100MHz and plenty of RAM

[thick wind]

As long as there's no auto-update, having a triggered capture is still not out of the question haha

In which case display refresh shouldn't matter for single captures

[edgy apex]

I kinda want to make a speech to text analyzer that has a big buzzer on it and a bell. If a statement is a valid logical syllogism it will ding, otherwise the buzzer goes off.

[honest jolt]

you could draw to a framebuffer, and then push all at once? because i'm pretty sure adafruit gfx lib will send a command every time you do something like drawPixel or drawLine (for ex, haven't worked with gfx in a while so i don't remember the commands)
although i'm not sure if gfx has methods to send a framebuffer (i know adafruit arcada has a method to allocate a framebuffer and send it, you just write to the pointer given)

but i think gfx has a method to at least draw a stream of pixels in an address window

[dusty citrus]

need an arduino cat tthat acts like the real thing or at least like the ones in catZ game from a long time 😦 because of allergy to cats 😢

at night you can put it in guard mode and it can stun intruder with a 50MW phaser out of its eyes. It's powered by a total mass conversion mini-power plant(as per e=mc2)

[edgy apex]

Hmmm, I got contacted at the food pantry by doordash which got me thinking so I am going to do the webinar and then report to my superiors on Wednesday. I'm skeptical that we could meet their average of 50 deliveries a week so I want to see what else they can offer.

https://doordash-21415521.hubspotpagebuilder.com/projectdash-interest-form

[dusty citrus]

nice, but why the url ?

[edgy apex]

In case anyone didn't know and wanted to sign up. I'm flipping to some other places I know of but I don't think any of us have the volume currently

Someday I want to redo the pantry, I kinda just digitized what we used to do, I eventually want to go further with it and change the way we operate. Ideally everyone could order with a smartphone and get it delivered the next day. When you give people choices they know you care.

[honest moth]

I want one.
https://petapixel.com/2020/12/26/fujifilm-created-a-magnetic-tape-that-can-store-580-terabytes/

[blissful roost]

https://tenor.com/view/rookie-numbers-matthew-mc-conaughey-wolf-of-wall-street-gif-6096185

[dusk oracle]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/380564412135768064/967318990852620288/unknown.png

[blissful roost]

Norway. 😂

[dusk oracle]

🤣

[tardy badger]

This weekend’s 3D printing project involves making a snap fit utensil holder to overcome the size limits of my 3D printer

[burnt tendon]

This is frequently a sizeable concern, yes.

I have my best-friend-besides-my-spouse over so she gets to play with a bunch of my 3D printed experiments.

[tardy badger]

Nice!

[honest moth]

mu-editor successfully installed!
...hopefully.

I missed this old thing.

[subtle fable]

I’ve come to share my computer setup

[tardy badger]

Doing some cooking today as well

[blissful roost]

Not tasty looking biscuits. 😔

[tardy badger]

My wife baked some muffins this morning

[spice moss]

PCB cooking

[stoic mesa]

I did some baking yesterday

[quartz wren]

Allllllrighty I've got internet in the lab

And it's ready to use, just needs organizing and reworking the space to make maximum use of it

[tardy badger]

So here I am, going through my files looking for things to delete and I happen upon the schematics for the TIA-1A from Atari lol

specifically the TIA-1A-2048

the first page for reference

these are readily available on the web with a quick google search

super cool to find this

[static flare]

How terrible of an idea would a resistor substitution box made with these numeric input displays I have?

[dapper hatch]

This maybe an old one, but I saw it this morning and made me laugh.

[edgy apex]

I flirted with the president of the radio club yesterday, They do test practice/testing. I'm going to go to one of their meetings to express my interest, they have a good number of members and decent infrastructure around here. I can get some old equipment for free to get started. I'm planning out what I'm going to do once I pass the test. I want to make a packet radio with a cheap handheld + pi. either wifi or bluetooth to connect to the pi from a smartphone to input text/maybe images to send.

[blissful roost]

I don't think you should express an interest in flirting... unless it's safe to do so. lol

[edgy apex]

Flirting as in a showed him what I do. Most people don't get that from me

[blissful roost]

hahaha

Sorry, that was very open to being purposely misconstrued. 😄

[edgy apex]

Lol

[blissful roost]

Especially with their... err.. "decent infrastructure".. Giggity!

[edgy apex]

Yea they have a repeater network around here. I want to step my game up and this seems like the way.

[blissful roost]

Dang it, bot!

But, yes.. in short, I am rather low-brow by default.
It doesn't go any further than that around here though.

Talking of infra.. I do need to chase up my buddy about that contractor role.

[edgy apex]

I want to see if I can help them with packet radio stuff, I have a lot of ideas idk if they are all practical but I guess I'll find out.

[blissful roost]

I'd love to explore packet radio myself, but I don't really have the space or money.

[edgy apex]

Like receive a text message, tts it then retransmission in Morse code

Or the other way around would work too

[blissful roost]

🙂

I'd like to build a weather station and get data via radio.

[edgy apex]

They do backup/emergency comms all over the area here so if I can do anything to assist that then it will be worth my time.

[blissful roost]

For sure.
A worthwhile cause.

[static flare]

Nice!

[edgy apex]

I like it when I have no idea what I'm doing because I'm learning as I go. Hopefully I can outfit their repeater network with pis. I'm gonna try to use pi zero w cuz I have at least 5 on hand.

[late fulcrum]

I wish I could find a diagram of the innards of the chip used in the Atari Video Music. I'm slowly working on re-creating it in an FPGA

[tardy badger]

Wasn’t it the TIA?

That’s at least what was used in the 2600

[late fulcrum]

No, custom chip for this application.

[tardy badger]

I’ve got all the schematics for the TIA-1A if you want lol

It’s 5 pages

[late fulcrum]

I think I have those too. I suspect the chip in the C240 shares some similarity, as they both generate video. The CTIA and GTIA, are, of course, more complex.

[tardy badger]

I’m not aware of all the custom ICs that Atari made

The 1A was just basic AV if I’m remembering right

[late fulcrum]

They made a lot of custom chips. My second computer was an Atari 800, so I became very familiar with their CTIA/GTIA (graphics) and PoKEY (sound, keyboard, and peripherals) chips

[tardy badger]

I wanted to implement it on an fpga

Thankfully chips from 1982 were pretty simple

[late fulcrum]

The Video Music came out in the late 1970s, so it couldn't have been terribly complex, but I'm guessing it was a clever hybrid digital/analog chip that used various ramp generators and comparators to build its functionality. Emulating it with an FPGA is proving somewhat intricate.

[tardy badger]

Yeah, Sounds like it

[late fulcrum]

There's a nice overview description in US patent 4,081,829

[tardy badger]

I’ll have to give it a look

I want to do more with fpga, I just need to buy a solid 10k+ sized board

[orchid zephyr]

http://www.gstube.com/data/1763/
I have this datasheet but it’s in Russian and I don’t know Russian

I know Cyrillic so I can get the symbols and units but besides that I’m clueless

[lusty fossil]

Do you like this method? I've heard mixed things about infrared PCB methods.

[stoic mesa]

certainly better than using a hotplate, as I can do temperature profile.
But probably not as good as a proper multizone pcb oven

[lusty fossil]

Mk thankjs

thanks

[stoic mesa]

I can translate it for you, but won't have time to do that today. Hopefully tomorrow

[stoic mesa]

I do not really have much choice. Either that or modified toaster oven. Proper multizone PCB oven is waaaay outside my budget

[tardy badger]

Me to my son: “we can’t go to that park because I don’t have money for gas right now”
My son: “well you’re just gonna have to go get some”

https://tenor.com/view/facepalm-really-stressed-mad-angry-gif-16109475

[lusty fossil]

Yeah, me too. I'm thinking next step is a DIY toaster oven solution

[tardy badger]

We technically do have gas money I just really don’t want to go buy gas lol…

But it’s the other kind of money, time

But good news is there are 3 parks in my community to walk to

[stoic mesa]

I' d probably get a toaster oven, but I got this one used from another maker, and it came to me fully modded for like $200

[lusty fossil]

ooh nice

[stoic mesa]

UnexpectedMaker has a very nice "Reflow Master" toaster mod kit, and he is working on a new version, "Reflow master Pro"

https://unexpectedmaker.com/shop/reflow-master

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joxvckHmedI

[orchid zephyr]

Oh thanks so much!

[stoic mesa]

do you need full text or are you looking for something specific?

[orchid zephyr]

Just the values

Like just what the numbers represent I don’t need the full translation

Oh wait nvm

I managed to use the Google translate photo thing

Thanks so much for your offer though!

One question though: this translated to “without core”, do they mean air core?

[stoic mesa]

it literally says "without core", google is correct

[orchid zephyr]

Oh lmao

[stoic mesa]

which, of course, is the same as air core, I do not think they put vacuum there 🙂

[orchid zephyr]

Ok thanks haha

Does vacuum have magnetic permeability?

[stoic mesa]

it should

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_permeability

[orchid zephyr]

Neat

Anyway thanks so much for your help!

[stoic mesa]

no problem

[orchid zephyr]

What does V(r) mean by the way

It looks like a Latin r so I’m confused

[stoic mesa]

It is Вт (Watt)

just poor typographic quality

[lusty fossil]

In a datasheet? I find that hard to believe.

[stoic mesa]

🙂

[lusty fossil]

(i kid)

[orchid zephyr]

Haha

You are a lifesaver thank you so much

[stoic mesa]

note that in the second document in the link you sent (the longer one), same resistor is described as
0.5 MOhm, 1 W

which is quite different from 500 Ohm, 100W

[orchid zephyr]

oh boy haha

[tardy badger]

Progress

Color of the display matches the color of the LEDs

Plus displays the current time updated every 5 or so seconds

[tropic radish]

This muppets video encases everything that is good on the internet. Reminds me of all the good things… 73(Best Wishes) https://youtu.be/zb47CstE7R4

[honest moth]

42-46 degrees Celsius for the whole time I've been using this thing after cpufreq decided to bug out on me. Lowered graphics, sure, response times taking a hit, definitely, but hey, at least this is keeping my paranoia of my CPU suddenly climbing from 70 to 100 degrees Celsius at bay.

this thing was not made to handle John the Ripper straight out of the box without any adjustments. I will be researching ways to tune it down a little and maximizing productivity while keeping CPU temps at a minimum.

Aside from that, I feel moderately accomplished. What did you all do today?

[crystal ore]

Ugh, I wrestled with a LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge to try to connect a vintage Mac with a deficit of useful data-transfer options.

[lusty fossil]

Today is a normal workday for me. I basically finished a CAD design and then started an EDA design

[orchid zephyr]

Ooo what’s this

[tardy badger]

An IoT hub I’m developing for controlling RGB strip lights

It’ll have other functionality but that’s what I am starting with

[edgy apex]

Nice, I made some of my own with wled/home assistant. I use them as accent lighting/night time lighting. This is the one on my nightstand

I put them on red at night and go to about 10% and I can see, triggered by taking my phone off the charger or the bedroom motion sensor

[tardy badger]

Oh neat

In breaking news, our electric space overlord is buying Twitter for realsies

[edgy apex]

I haven't been following our space overlord very much. Is this a good thing? Like he's thinking way ahead of the unsolved problems we currently have, gotta perfect earth before we look elsewhere

[static flare]

I mean, I can't say what I think about him here, but I'm... not a huge fan. He bullied and bought his way into Tesla, and it looks like he's buying his way into Twitter too, and I think his intelligence is overblown, and he's the same as any other billionaire

[edgy apex]

Lol the bot would get you?

[static flare]

Probably

[edgy apex]

Then I'll just use my imagination

I would rather see billionaires focused on fixing our terrestrial problems so we have a chance.

If someone gave me a billion dollars I wouldn't be a billionaire for more than a week, I would go on a rampage dishing out money to the problems we need solved. My opinion of billionaires decreases the longer they have had that money and haven't been fixing things.

[tardy badger]

I was a fan of musk at one point, but it’s shifted more towards a cautious curiosity. He has done good for the planet, but he’s a dangerous vagrant in most regards. I tend to think he has higher than normal intelligence for a billionaire but marginally. Either way, he’s human and acts very much in impulse which can be beneficial but also incredibly destructive

We will just have to see what happens with Twitter under his ownership

[blissful roost]

The whole hyperloop nonsense seriously damaged my opinion of him.

[tardy badger]

Yeah, agreed.

[blissful roost]

I mean, yeah.. it's totally viable for cargo, but humans?
Count me out.

[edgy apex]

Most of my ideas are grounded in practicality versus some moon shot type thing. If you don't have the ability to make things yourself, then you have unreasonable expectations about those who can

[blissful roost]

Rather.

[thick wind]

This is so true in so many different contexts.

[tardy badger]

For me, hyperloops only make sense in environments where traveling on the surface is dangerous, like mars lol…

As long as it’s safe to travel on the surface, I’ll stick to roads

[blissful roost]

Of course.. where the risk of using it is about equal to the risk of not using it.

[tardy badger]

Sure, accidents happen on the surface all the time. Only benefit of hyper loop is no weather driven conditions

[blissful roost]

Yeah..

But saying that.. it's definitely very high risk when you put earthquakes into the equation.

[tardy badger]

Yeah

[orchid zephyr]

hyperloops would make sense if the tube was a massive linear motor. elons hyperloop is a low pressure subway that winds up being higher pressure because of "muh toob"

like imagine if the tube had an embedded hvdc coil and the train was ferromagnetic

that would be sick

idk what you would do with your phone tho

[edgy apex]

I have some ideas that I will have to wait years for open source hardware to catch up, I could try them now but no one would get it cuz it would be lame.

[orchid zephyr]

like what?

[edgy apex]

It's top secret lol

Only exists as psuedocode and in my head

Years ago I was more interested in weaponry than being a good hacker

I changed my mind on that, I would rather contribute to good things than making more weapons for others, I will make them for myself eventually

[static flare]

Should I go for RGB or RGBW?

RGBW is like, 20c per more expensive

[edgy apex]

What's the use case?

[static flare]

and if I were to buy 100, it would be $35 vs $45

Camera lighting

and bench lighting and such

[thick wind]

W is a really efficient neutral light for camera lighting IMO, but that probably also makes some assumption regarding the photography you're trying to achieve?

[static flare]

I'm making YouTube videos and I need to light my face!

[edgy apex]

rgbw is probably the best option to get the lighting you want plus color temperature range, how will you control the light?

[static flare]

I'm thinking either passively, with a set of potentiometers, or actively with a microcontroller (not sure if I want to use a DAC or PWM)

[edgy apex]

So like 4 potentiometers? Rgbw?

Maybe you could do both?

[static flare]

Yee

Oh, I'd use the pots with the microcontroller, just if I want to get fancy and add preset buttons and such and all sorts of digital control

[edgy apex]

Sounds like you have a good plan.

If you fully customize it to be both effective and convenient I think other people would be interested in your design

[thick wind]

DAC or PWM isn't necessary for NeoPixels. That's something that you would use to control the brightness of a bare LED, which for NeoPixels is handled by the SK6812/WS2812 chip onboard.

[static flare]

I'm not looking for an addressable LED, cause I want them all to be the same brightness and colour, and just hooking them all up like this is easier and cheaper for what I want

The boards are going to be so pricy :(

I was thinking I could instead of using pots as an input, use the microcontroller to switch between PWM, DAC, or POT inputs to the LEDS

That would actually make them much more chainable, cause I can treat the 5 signals as a bus, and the MCU can just switch which signal is driving the bus, and just unpopulate or bypass the control circuitry on any other unit

would be a bit more expensive in terms of parts, but it could be much more flexible

[thick wind]

What kind of density are you looking for? Depending on the configuration you're looking to achieve, it might be more economical to use an existing RGB strip with all the current limiters instead?

Customizing would then just be a matter of replacing the controller with your own MCU.

[static flare]

It doesn't need to be too dense, but they're wired in the opposite way to what I want/need

They're all common cathode, and I want common anode

Or the other way around

I don't know

I want to be adjustable on the input, where they're all adjustable on the output

[thick wind]

Is there a particular reason for this? You should be able to use similar hardware for both, unless your controller has different current limits for source/sink?

[static flare]

tbh it's just easier to think about in my head

[thick wind]

Oh, direct pot-driving might be easier with common cathode.

But for most PWM-driven LEDs there's little difference in switching cathode or anode voltages.

[static flare]

I think it would be easier for the DACs as well?

[thick wind]

Nah, As long as your DAC output can match your supply voltage, it's not an issue.

The voltage to brightness function is inverted, but it still works. VCC to turn off, 0V for max brightness.

As long as your DAC pins can sink as much as it sources, which is true for most devices I know of?

Actually, I haven't looked at dedicated DAC hardware, those might be restricted to sourcing.

[static flare]

The cost is basically the same for the lights themselves

Buying the bare chips is cheaper if I buy 100 (which is the plan)

Cause buying a strip of 100 is more expensive, plus I don't have to worry about the fiddly wires between each strip

[crystal ore]

DACs often can't drive too much current directly, so if you want to use them in power applications, you'd generally send their output through an amplifier.

[static flare]

thank you :3

What type of amplification circuits would you recommend for this?

(wow yeah it only can source like, 1mA, which each LED at peak has a forward current of 100mA)

[crystal ore]

A power op-amp would be typical, for example.

[tardy badger]

I’d personally use an LED driver that could handle PWM/DAC signals

Maybe something like the ws2812 driver IC?

[crystal ore]

(skerr's suggestion is better, since you want to control current instead of voltage.)

[tardy badger]

Adafruit sells them and I think they can handle 4 channels?

There’s other similar variants that can drive RGBW but I’d have to look up specifics

[static flare]

ngl I'm a little overwhelmed :/

[thick wind]

The ws2811 driver chips adafruit offers are RGB, unfortunately. That one is good for converting bare LEDs to addressable, but isn't really suited to driving quantities of LEDs.

[static flare]

it seems every LED driver I've seen works like the strips I have, so I might just have to give up with making it easier to think about

:(

[thick wind]

Most LED driver circuits tend to be a moderately low-valued resistor for max brightness on each color channel, then each channel is driven with a PWM signal to a FET to control brightness.

The example here: https://learn.adafruit.com/all-about-leds/adjusting-brightness is great for dimming single LEDs, but may be a bit difficult to apply to large groups of them.

[static flare]

I'm trying to avoid PWM just so I don't ever run into the problem of flickering

or at least the option of avoiding PWM

oh

I found one

it's 14-wfbga so maybe not then

does this look any good to y'all? https://www.digikey.com.au/en/products/detail/diodes-incorporated/AL3065AS16-13/9608033

this looks like it would be good

but I could be missing something

[thick wind]

Sometimes you just gotta believe it checks off all the boxes and try it out...

[static flare]

turns out I won't need the DACs with this one, it can do PWM to analog dimming

The AL3065A can be dimmed by one of the following modes: direct PWM dimming, PWM-to-analog dimming, or DC-to-analog dimming.

I wonder if you could power the microcontroller from the LED driver's VCC pin

[thick wind]

The boost switching frequency is configurable as well, though with its 100kHz minimum it likely won't be a flickering concern.

[static flare]

honestly, part of it was that it took an analog input

I'm glad that my vision and expectations were able to be changed throughout the conversation, where I'm at a point where I'm fairly sure what I'm going to do with it is feasible and going to work

[dry belfry]

Testing (please ignore).

[versed iron]

Ok, I knew it, I have two Discord account and it is a mess...

[honest moth]

ouch. good for you @lusty fossil , but yeah, old machines are just that; old.

[lusty fossil]

me?

[honest moth]

sorry, tried responding to two people at once

[lusty fossil]

heheh

What's the etiquette on this? My boss gave me some uncooked packaged pasta that I was too passive to say no to. I want to give it to the food pantry but they aren't open during hours I can get to them. Is it rude to leave it on their doorstep?

It's not a kind of pasta I'm likely to eat soon, and it's also more than I will eat in any kind of reasonable time frame.

So it's gotta go

[stray wind]

I think as long as it's packaged in a way that weather won't damage it, leaving it for the pantry is fine. I mean, awful humans do that with animals at rescues.... This is pasta.

[lusty fossil]

Yeah it's not exactly like I'm leaving a breathing creature

OK, I'll not feel weird about it

[stray wind]

Also leave it as close to opening as possible... So maybe try to leave it in the morning early, rather than at night.

[lusty fossil]

Shoot

They open at noon!

They have really inhospitable hours for hungry people....maybe they need volunteers

[stray wind]

7am is still better than 9pm the previous day.

Yeah that's entirely possible.

COVID messed with a lot of those situations.

[lusty fossil]

When I have free time I'll try to remember to volunteer

Even if it's just sorting stuff

Whatever

I'll try to get the OMW to work this week

thx

[stray wind]

yw!

[wanton thistle]

USPS may also collect food. They do a food drive

I cant get the website to load but usually you may be able to leave stuff out
https://about.usps.com/what/corporate-social-responsibility/activities/nalc-food-drive.htm

[honest moth]

...

musk really did buy twitter didn't he?

[real falcon]

yep

[honest moth]

does anyone know of any good if not better alternatives to Twitter..?

[real falcon]

only know of one, and that sites what twitter will be like

[wooden schooner]

Does absence of a website count as an alternative?

[honest moth]

That depends. What do you have?

[honest moth]

shoot

[real falcon]

nah wont share name of that crapshow

[wooden schooner]

Lack of a Twitter account and very rare usage of Twitter

[honest moth]

blast.

[stray wind]

The only thing I know about is Mastodon. But it's not quite as straight forward as Twitter in that there's multiple instances of it... I don't quite understand it myself, so I can't really explain it. But I have a couple of friends who have used it for a while now. I signed up today for obvious reasons. I'll have to figure out how it works now.

[tardy badger]

I’ve seen a lot of people moving to mastodon

I jokingly told myself this morning that I was going to start my own social media site

[stray wind]

My one friend was super excited. He's been trying to get me to join since it started.

[lusty fossil]

I can't wait for my favorite podcast to have an episode with a reaction. It'll be fun

[dusty citrus]

is it true that you have to be careful with an adapter and not plug an adapter without looking ?Most adapters are 3.3 or 5 or 9V and most circuits in these ranges have regulators/etc in the 2 to 15V range so what's the problem ?

[honest moth]

Let me know how it goes. In the meantime, I will be checking it out as well.

[wooden schooner]

Centralization of social media platforms (and tech infrastructure in general, but especially social media) are at the core of a number of important moral issues of today. Mastodon attempts to be a decentralized social network, though it's not clear how well it will work ultimately if it garners wide adoption. In any case, I highly recommend that anyone interested in social responsibility who hasn't looked into the social ills coming from centralized tech and social media do so.

[lusty fossil]

You generally want to provide the specc'd voltage, but it is true that many devices have buck converters in them (or even an LDO). That said, you don't want to release the magic blue smoke if you can avoid it. It's completely legal to have bare power contacts for an MCU on the input line of a barrel jack

[wanton thistle]

This puts exactly how I feel into words (and toeing the line). I feel the same way though. Worried to say the least.

[tardy badger]

I’ve come to the conclusion that decentralization leads to more centralization. It’s inescapable.

The problem isn’t the idea of decentralization, it’s that a few people who manipulate systems towards centralization.

[wanton thistle]

I mean, in a way that seems correct. Open source projects come to mind. Those with the technical skill, manage such things, and so the group managing or making changes, becomes small. I have a theory that the only way out of it, is with AI smart enough to keep things balanced.

But then you run into the trolley problem, which is a fascinating thing to think about.

The trolley problem is one of my favorite philosophical problems.

[tardy badger]

The problem with the trolly problem is it only says there are two potential outcomes and you have to choose some sort of loss. But real world says that we can derail the trollly

[wanton thistle]

Ahh see theres a 3rd

😉

Its no so obvious either. Its...an act of selflessness.

I wont mention it here but your free to DM me to ask

[crystal ore]

Well, the trolly problem is a proxy for more constrained real-world scenarios like a self-driving car in the middle of a road accident. Its actions are limited to what it can do with the steering wheel, brake, etc. so sometimes physics disallows any win-win solution.

[tardy badger]

But in those scenarios you have no control over who the trolley hits so there’s no moral dilemma aside from should we have self driving cars

[crystal ore]

It's more of a "do you hit the pedestrian or do you drive into a concrete pillar and injure your driver", etc.

[wooden schooner]

Aiui it was originally intended to pose the question "does being an actor in the situation change your type and level of responsibility"

There were certainly no self-driving cars at the time

[tardy badger]

Idk, nature and the real world is unpredictable in how even those choices play out. Trying to find some moral equivalency in one action or the other when statistically there’s a marginal chance your decision has the intended outcome

And in most cases morality of an outcome is purely based on the perspective of the observer. There’s no indication that the one person or the group was even aware that a decision could be made that would harm others

[wooden schooner]

If all that matters is the outcome (consequentialism), then you should pull the lever in the original trolley problem. If having the blood of one on your hands is worse than abstaining from interfering in the situation even if several then die, then it may be worth reconsidering

Unforeseen consequences are indeed one of the big problems with consequentialism

[tardy badger]

It is just in reality a bad philosophical problem that seeks to define moral behavior based in a situation where there are invariably many potential outcomes and consequences.

[dusty citrus]

I looked into how electric power really transfers from the power station to the home.

What it really means when we speak about the flow of current in a conductor.

'drift velocity' is the first eye-opener and is a good pry-point to start with.

I saw companies selling oxygen-free power cords etc today

the most expensive one was 40000 euro

sounds like a huge scam

even if you have the best 20 feet power cord in the word with gold, why does it matters if 5000 mile of the electricity connection is high-voltage copper wires and the 60 feet of connection from it to your house?!

[tardy badger]

I think it’s aluminum actually, don’t quote me though

Yeah aluminum or aluminum wrapped steel core

Could you imagine copper transmission lines though

[dusty citrus]

didn't they make the first transatlantic cables in the victorian era from copper ?