paw prints

I need a phone with a Windex sprayer. Or a scope with windshield wipers.

My Samsung phone is awful, but it has great cameras.

The fingerprints on my screen? Don't know. It's not a touch screen. I suppose some interns may be primates.

The waveforms are mine. I was maybe a little critical of the FPGA designers until I figured out that one signal was inverted. Well, they made mistakes too. The best button on that scope is DEFAULT.

FPGA design discipline is another topic.

I'm making a delay generator from a triggered oscillator and a counter, and that's the first light.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

What's connected to your scope's USB port?

You can create a more professional photo by printing it to a flash drive connected to your Rigol's USB port.

Although phone photos are easier, it's also a thankless task to try take a picture of a surface because its never squeaky clean enough.

It's powering the fan in my beer-cooler environmental chamber.

I like to add post-it notes to identify the pic. USB files names are useless unless I keep a log on the side.

And one has to move things all around to find good lighting without reflections or a silly background.

One of my people used AI to improve some pics that I put into a manual. The result would look great to a layman but it made no sense. Like those "pcb trace" patterns you see everywhere.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That proto board has an RP2040 Pi cpu and an efinix T20 FPGA. The pi configures the FPGA and then talks SPI to registers inside.

That's fabulous for $10. I don't program the parts myself; I whiteboard the logic and let some kid code the VHDL.

FPGA culture is more like software than hardware. When we design a multilayer PCB with hundreds of parts, we are super careful and review it hard, because iterations are slow and expensive. Rev A always works.

Coders type fast and let the compiler find typos and silly mistakes. Once it compiles, they turn it over to the hardware guys to find mistakes. They have no incentive to be careful.

Sadly, FPGA design usually follows the software methodology. Let the users check your work.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

One of my obsessions is to use a X Windows whenever possible as a GUI front end for instruments. If you use xpad to create sticky notes you can then capture the whole kit and caboodle with a crisp, clean screen print image.