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Creating panelized PCB designs in KiCad

quorten

2020-07-12

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

Creating panelized circuit board designs in KiCad? How do you do that? It’s necessary if you want to take advantage of certain offers provided by printed circuit board manufacturing houses. Well, there is no straightforward way, but a plugin for KiCad helps automate some of the work, though duplicating the board will have to be done separately.

20200711/DuckDuckGo kicad panelized board mouse bites
20200711/https://hackaday.com/2019/03/12/panelizing-boards-in-kicad/

There is also this other nice utility that operates directly on Gerber files, useful if you need to merge together the output from different CAD software programs.

20200711/https://hackaday.com/2017/06/21/panelizing-boards-the-easy-way/

Digi-Key article about safety circuits, and Texas Instruments article a bout power supply ideal diodes

quorten

2020-07-12

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

This is a very basic article on safety circuits, somehow I thought it would be more in-depth on first sight. Well, I guess I would… with that dream I had and all.

20200711/https://www.digikey.com/en/articles/basic-understanding-of-safety-circuits?utm_medium=email&utm_source=aut&utm_campaign=69370_AUT2006A&utm_content=featured1learnmore_US&utm_cid=12399633&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWWprNU5XSmtNRGMzT1RZdyIsInQiOiJ0MThvWWY5cnd1N0JyMlQ3QzVIcXdLb21CdG9YY3RFcmVqZUVsZGRCanFiMVdhS2QxTmFNV3Q2Mk9lS2dsSVhzQkwxaTd3SVQrYVZYQkNGZWdTOHdiUjZzeGhQOXJvUE1hZ1VaT0FMWVZPS0pmdENWNnF4ekRia1c1bUpHTjA3WSJ9

This is a really good article about ideal diodes. Schottky diodes in power supplies for polarity protection or OR-ing together multiple power sources, like battery backup and AC line power? Sure, that works okay for low-current (and low-voltage) systems, but for high current systems, considerable energy is lost inside the Schottky diode due to forward conduction power loss and this can create considerable heat dissipation issues. Hence, this is the motivation for using “ideal diode” integrated circuit controllers since they have lower energy losses for switching high current loads.

20200711/https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slvae57/slvae57.pdf?HQS=app-psil-psw-discretes2020_slvae57-exah-mc-emada-wwe&ts=1594513676720

Other folks on Twitter discussing automatic GPU compilation

quorten

2020-07-12

Categories: unlipic   media-prog   raspberry-pi  
Tags: unlipic   media-prog   raspberry-pi  

I’m not alone in my desire to compile arbitrary high-level programming languages onto the GPU! Indeed, Bharath Ramsundar … Automatic differentiation, even quibbles about automatic integration, automatically rewriting programs based off of a Calculus operator modification.

20200711/https://twitter.com/rbhar90/status/1269835368351719424?cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjcw%3D%3D&refsrc=email

Summary of DIY printed circuit board manufacturing, and tips on solder fume protection

quorten

2020-07-10

Categories: raspberry-pi   reiterate  
Tags: raspberry-pi   reiterate  

Again, I reiterate, because this is important!

Want to make your own printed circuit boards? Or, to put it rather more bluntly… commercial printed circuit board ordering as-a-service typically has a minimum order quantity greater than one. If you only need to manufacture exactly one printed circuit board of a design, commercial services will leave you with 2-10 extra circuit boards. So, to get that manufacturing in quantity of one, you have to do-it-yourself. How?

There are three main methods at your disposal as a DIYer.

1. Chemical etching: use a laser printer to create a photoresist mask, iron it onto copper-plated bare board, then chemically etch away the non-conductive parts. The disadvantage is that you have to buy extra metal that gets dissolved into your chemical etching solution that thebn gets disposed. Also, the fact that you have to work with wet chemicals.

2. Chemical deposition: use an inkjet printer or similar to deposit conductive ink onto an unplated circuit board substrate, then use a copper ion bath to electroform the metal traces. The disadvantage is that you’ll typically be left with unused metal ions in your ion bath, which will need to be either saved for future use or disposed of. Also, the fact that you have to work with wet chemicals.

Read on →

Exporting 3D board models in old versions of KiCad

quorten

2020-07-10

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

How do you export a 3D board model in old versions of KiCad? The trick is that in Pcbnew, you can export the board as a VRML file. Then, you can import the mesh inside of Blender, MeshLab, or some other software for 3D meshes. Before important into CAD software like FreeCAD, you’re going to have to cleanup the meshes first. Then you can import into FreeCAD and export as STEP files if you so wish… but for my workflow, generic 3D modeling software works fine. From there I can visualize the mechanical CAD structural layout and do raytracing renders to get photorealistic depictions of the product, model the fit within a larger system, etc.

And, oh, IGES… wow how I never worked with IGES in years nor has Blender native support for it or any other common 3D modeling software I used, but hey, I am still finding more name-drops of it.

need some mesh cleanup first, since the models and board are not guaranteed to be nice manifold meshes.

20200710/DuckDuckGo kicad vrml
20200710/https://www.drechsler-it.de/UsefullStuff_FromKiCadToCad_VRML.html

Efficient ways to factor numbers

quorten

2020-07-09

Categories: unlipic  
Tags: unlipic  

What’s an efficient way to factor numbers? Wheel factorization is the name of the game. But first, let’s try this idea of simply dividing by a composite number of the first few primes.

2 * 3 * 5 * 7 = 210
43728 % 210 = 48

Okay, once you get the remainder, you can check which factors are in the remainder, via a lookup table. Then you can divide those out.

48 % 2 = 0
48 % 3 = 0
48 % 5 = 3
48 % 7 = 6

So we can divide out 2 and 3.

48 / 2 / 3 = 48 / 6 = 8

Read on →

Uptick of COVID-19 in America after reopenings, more COVID-19 statistics

quorten

2020-07-07

Categories: covid19   twitter  
Tags: covid19   twitter  

There has been an uptick of Coronavirus in America, after reopening rolls out. Yep, we know what needs to be done, but it’s still not coordinated enough. America is a “big mess.” Yeah, disorganized. Were the deaths needless? Definitely. Comparing with Germany, three times as many per capita one million. 391 versus 109. And among blacks, one out of every 1500 about, have died.

There was, he added, “a lot of pent-up desire to interact and to go to bars and do things that they couldn’t do for the last couple of months and that’s what you’re seeing – basically like everybody turning 21 all of a sudden”.

Another significant point is fear that bar closures causes parties to move “underground.” That is, private house parties that are responsible for the spreading. And, that increased spreading among young people can cross over and spread to old people, especially among multi-generational households.

Our hope is that young adults get the message: Even though they’re less at risk, they’re getting it and they’re putting a huge dent in the numbers.

20200706/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/05/coronavirus-us-surge-experts-what-to-do?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
20200706/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/02/covid-19-young-people-america-coronavirus

Cirrus with Direct3D 8? No, but there are other good hypervisors to use

quorten

2020-07-06

Categories: windows  
Tags: windows  

Can I get Direct3D 8 working with a virtual Cirrus video card in QEMU? Apparently not… it’s 2D only, but there are some other nice options for VM hypervisors that work better for 3D virtualization. VMware Player, for instance, provides 3D acceleration drivers. There’s also another old product that is no longer maintained but is nice where it works, Virtual PC.

20200705/DuckDuckGo cirrus direct3d 8
20200705/DuckDuckGo cirrus direct3d
20200705/https://msfn.org/board/topic/177209-best-hypervisor-for-windows-98/ 20200705/https://github.com/OBattler/86Box

Interesting Direct3D team wall of GPU history in Microsoft

quorten

2020-07-05

Categories: computer-history   media-prog  
Tags: computer-history   media-prog  

Wow, this is interesting. The Direct3D team has been doing GPU hardware testing for quite a while, and they needed access to a lot of physical hardware to test across. They decided to make a museum wall of GPU history with all their hardware they had collected for testing. And, guess what? This blog article is written by, yours truly, Shawn Hargreaves.

20200705/https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/wall-of-gpu-history/

Better Cirrus Windows drivers for virtual machines

quorten

2020-07-05

Categories: windows  
Tags: windows  

Okay, so the problem with Direct3D not working in Windows XP? Maybe I’ve found a solution… better drivers. Purportedly, Windows XP only supports 2D out of the box on the Cirrus 5446 video card, not to mention that the card is 2D itself. Proper 3D support simply entails the inclusion of a software 3D renderer included as part of the video card’s drivers. As for the Direct3D interface, “device capabilities” bits will be set to indicate which features and functions are available, and up to Direct3D is compatible with drivers written for any older version, back to Direct3D 6 or maybe even Direct3D 5.

20200605/DuckDuckGo qemu cirrus video
20200605/https://www.claunia.com/qemu/drivers/index.html
20200605/DuckDuckGo cirrus 5446 direct3d
20200605/DuckDuckGo cirrus 5446 direct3d windows xp
20200605/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX
20200605/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Logic

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