ESP32C3+Dialog Mixed Signal FPGA DIP or SMD adapter board
On Wednesday, 6/29/22 at 6:30pm at the Forge Initiative, 2172 N Salem St Suite 001, Apex, NC 27523 there will be another meeting of the TriEmbed comunity project to create and use development tools coupling ESP32 microcontrollers with Dialog mixed signal Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
Best to park on the street or in front of an adjacent building if possible so that folks who find the hill hard to walk can park in front of the door.
This will follow up from last month’s “installathon” format to refine tool chain installation and get as many people as possible up and running while turning attention to the Dialog Synthesis tool and creating and running some simple FPGA applications. There will also be demos of things around the corner and related technology (Aaardvark has a graphing function now!) A lot of work has gone into the project (special thanks to alpha testers Jaime Johnsen, Rob Mackie and Dawn Trembath and note taker Glen Smith). Bring your laptop (currently best support is for Linux followed by Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) but raw Windows will succeed with extra work and Docker images are in the works to take the sweat out. An ESP32 dev board is highly desirable but there will be a few spares at the meeting. The meeting will be facilitated by the usual suspects Rob Mackie, Nick Edgington and Pete Soper and is scheduled to end at 9pm.
The daily infection rate in Wake county is currently 433 per day and there will be high risk people at the meeting. Please wear a mask (available at the meeting). There will be an ice chest with some soft drinks to enjoy outside but you’re invited to bring your favorite.
The normal meeting format will be followed (welcome new attendees, announcements, problem/design review of the month, presentation, community project status, show and tell). This month’s presentation will be by Nick Edgington of Edgington Labs. Nick will share details of a very inexpensive line of mixed signal FPGAs (initial breakout board coming from OSH Park). Additional meeting time will be devoted to the status of the TriEmbed Community “Espressif 32 bit processor board + FPGA(s)” development board project.
In a recent edition of the Embedded FM podcast, you can listen to ideas for projects from a fire hose. This is a concentrated and amplified version of the sort of ideas regularly floated, discussed, and demonstrated every second Monday night in one of the NCSU engineering buildings during monthly Triangle Embedded Interest Group (TriEmbed) meetings.
If you’re a student hoping to find a killer internship or permanent job doing embedded development this summer, check out TriEmbed. Details are under the Meetings dropdown menu above.
We look forward to seeing and getting to know you there.
Sparkcon starts this weekend with “Geek Expo of Maker and Digital Arts” back at the Redhat Annex on Saturday from 11am to 5pm. And this just in. Adam and Dan will be there with this stuff:
Maniacal Labs @ Sparkcon this Saturday: they’re back!
Raleigh Mini MakerFaire is September 23rd. Splatspace will have a learn to solder booth and other things to share. TriEmbed is passing this year but multiple folks will be attending with handouts.
Problem of the Month
Paul presented his “counting pushups” problem and gathered ideas submitted by the attendees
Details of past problem solving sessions are available via the “Problem of the Month” main menu above. Or here.
What can we say? Ben stunned much of his audience, especially during the Q&A.
Show-and-tell
Paul gave an update about his power over ethernet development project and his ongoing wrestling match with 802.3AF.
Alex presented his “leg movement logging via accelerometer using European Data Format” project using a Teensy USB and open source tools and custom Python code. He gave everyone a great accounting of a typical development project based off open source starting points and got the final results he was after. The GitHub repository for his project is here.
(No notes were taken: if you contributed something please drop a line on the email list so this can be back-filled!)
Solar Power Management/Charger rev 2B, Trail Counter rev 9
Stainless Steel Stencil from OSH Stencils
Here are Chip McClelland’s latest Trail Counter and Solar Charger boards, together with a shot of the stainless steel stencil now offered by OSH Stencils. The metal stencil makes it hugely easier to get perfect pasting and confirms that the curve that comes with polymide stencils has been at least one root cause of that type being so challenging to use. There was no paste bleed through to the back of the stencil, and the fine pitched power controller and Simblee BLE chip lands were perfectly formed. To get a sense of the cost difference some existing board specs were plugged into the OSH Stencils web site: a roughly five square inch battery charger, a three square inch decade counter/divider, and sub-square inch 6-axis breakout board. The steel stencils would be almost exactly double the cost of polymide, averaging about $12 each. By the way, multiple PCB designs can be grouped within one stencil. This can greatly reduce the cost difference depending on the areas involved.
These are OSH Park boards: very deep blue/purple, sitting on a sky blue antistatic mat. This is a tradeoff with the very bright, high color temperature LED flood lights used to illuminate the bench.
