6
points
nudgeee
Joined 511 karma
sup
you can see more at my website: https://nudge.id.au/
- nudgeee parentTeensy is based on iMXRT which are NXP, not Nexperia.
- Sibling poster did a good job explaining how research relies on labs.
Agree that complex EE work can be expensive for individual and smaller companies, indeed :)
A comment on the application side:
> "[..] for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering"
Zoom out to the system level, and you cannot just rely on IC vendor recommendations, and this kind of engineering can still require access to $$ labs.
Similar to complex software systems: for example take a large scale distributed system made out of many individual frameworks and services. The system as a whole may now exhibit emergent behaviour, and have failure modes due to the complexity of the system.
Same happens in complex EE designs, your design might pack in multiple cutting edge RF radios such as mmWave, UWB, with bespoke power amplifier, detection and antenna designs. Add in EM from multiple clock domains, high power distribution circuits, digital noise from FPGAs/CPUs, and EM from nearby sources. You can easily have noise couple from sources causing unintended issues in other subsystems. The vendor may say "keep a way from sources of noise", but your application may still be to engineer a solution that fits in the design envelope of a modern smartphone. The system level design needs to be engineered for EMC and coexist/desense, and validated which takes a ton of lab simulation and measurement/characterization work.
- By fab you mean lab, then agree.
Fabs are specific to the manufacturing of integrated circuits.
EE encompasses more than just manufacturing of ICs, for example research and applications in radio propagation and EM/wireless, signal integrity, antenna design, coexistence/desense, advanced power electronics, control systems, simulation/solvers, etc.
- This is known as Lights-Out Manufacturing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
- Hilarious. Reminds me of Pioneer CDJs as well, even on the flagship CDJ-3000 models. If you read the user manual it says:
> About using MP3 files
> This product has been licensed for nonprofit use. This product has not been licensed for commercial purposes (for profit-making use), […]. You need to acquire the corresponding licenses for such uses. For details, see […]
Best use an open audio codec instead.
- Agree on this. As a layman in Australia, i had a friend who was coming back from the USA and asked him to buy me an iPhone before its release in AU (late-2007 iirc, iPhone 3G launched in Australia in 2008) and promptly jailbroke it so i could get it on an Australian carrier.
When i whipped it out in public, take a photo at concerts, etc. random people would come up to me and ask me to play with it -- thats when i knew for sure Apple were on to something, a complete game changer that captured the attention of the public.
- Indeed, this is a common vector for leaking PII and sensitive data. For example, what looks like an innocuous logging/print statement in an exception handler ends up leaking all sorts of data.
And it gets more messy when you start to ingest and warehouse data logs for on-call monitoring/analytics/etc, and now you have PII floating around in all sorts of data stores that need to be scrubbed.
In a previous job, we handled credit card numbers. We added PII detectors to logging libraries that would scrub anything that looked like a credit card number. We used client-side encryption where the credit card numbers are encrypted on the client before sending to the backend, so the backend systems never see the plain credit card numbers, except for the system that tokenizes them.
- My guess is it probably was a content update that tickled some lesser trodden path in the parser/loader code, or created a race condition in the code which lead to the BSOD.
Even if it’s ‘just’ a content update, it probably should follow the rules of a code update (canaries, pre-release channels, staged rollouts, etc).
- I’m amazed there was no mention of LISA [0] — a space-based gravitational wave detector using 3 satellites flying in formation 2.5 million Km apart! Seriously cool engineering, planning to launch in 2035.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_A...
- NXP runs a USB VID/PID Program [0] for small production designs (<10,000 units) that use their MCUs. They’ll give you 3 PIDs for free under one of their VIDs. I use this in my side projects (~200 units) and works pretty well!
[0] https://community.nxp.com/t5/Kinetis-Microcontrollers/NXP-US...
- Not just institutions, individuals too. I’ve seen many individuals ‘dig their heels’ into protecting their own pet project/baby/solution/etc, mainly due to ego.
It takes maturity and humility to step back, assess objectively, trade off pros and cons, and ultimately let the best decisions, ideas and solutions win, even when it’s hard to give up your idea or a solution you’ve worked super hard on.
- The point is to use what ever works best for your team, not blindly follow some process that may or may not necessarily work for you.
Just as product requirements can change, so can the way we work. Just like there is not one singular product that solves everybody’s needs, there isn’t necessarily one process that does that either.
- Indeed, Zuken is still a large player in Japan, and has a leg up with IC packaging tools which the big players (Cadence, Mentor) have that Altium doesn’t.
Altium’s play has always been to segment the market at the hobby+small enterprise+startup level, with aim to push further up to larger enterprises as those companies grow. They’re taking aim at the next gen EE/design engineers as the graybeards age out of the industry. Let’s see if this strategy holds out with Renesas positioned above.
- +1 for last.fm, so glad its still alive and that scrobbling still works :)
Been at it since 2004 [0]!
- Here’s the catch, as you scale up, more and more users could get caught in the edge case. Remember why we build systems — for end users to use. It is our job as engineers/technologists to solve them.
This is where trade-offs in engineering and product are important.
Is the edge case safety critical or poses a safety risk? If so, it definitely should be considered and handled.
Does the edge case block a critical user flow (eg. purchase/checkout step)? If so, it should probably be considered.
Does the edge case result in some non-critical piece of UX having the wrong padding in some lesser trodden user flow? Possibly acceptable.
- 10 points
- Indeed, I get the gist of the message, however I’m just highlighting how much advanced electronics and software drive something as ‘mundane’ as a washing machine motor to improve its efficiency [0].
This often requires real-time software calculation of precision timing for FETs that control the motors. Very loosely related to what an ECU does in cars.
I agree this is different to the DRM/internet connectivity stuff, but does disservice to the rest of the electronics and software housed within.
[0] Trapezoidal Control of BLDC Motors Using Hall Effect Sensors