a thread about janitoring individual bits and using oscilloscopes and stuff

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > a thread about janitoring individual bits and using oscilloscopes and stuff

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Base Emitter posted:

disregard my other post

oh dont worry everyone already did

seriously tho, those spark things seem really neat and I might end up ordering some

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 19:05

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 19:02

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Sagebrush posted:

but the fuses are inside a heavy plastic housing. i've blown up ~22ga wires, about the same size as in those 10a glass fuses, with capacitors before and i can't imagine there being that much damage from one exploding wire encapsulated in glass and plastic and rubber. a startling bang and maybe destroyed meter sure but it's not like you're going to lose a finger?

now if you're accidentally probing something that's really high voltage, thousands or tens of thousands, i guess then you could be in poo poo, but i think most people encountering that sort of circuit would know what they're doing

generally true but better to have the protection just in case. a significant portion of eevblogs audience is professional EEs who are a lot more likely to run into that sort of voltage too. if you're a hobbyist who will never measure anything more than your arduinos power supply then sure get the $10 special

Eevblog dude knows his stuff

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 20:56

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Jonny 290 posted:

do we need a separate surplus thread, or should i just megapost

i will clue u all in about american science + surplus, electronics goldmine, fair radio sales

Wanna see this post

# ¿ Dec 26, 2014 19:39

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

i have a Tek TLA5204 (136 channel absurdly fast logic analyzer) i got when work threw it out because we needed something beefier

i also have no probes for it and nothing to use it for. i would much rather have a saleae but selling one of these things is impossible

# ¿ Dec 31, 2014 18:46

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Tin Gang posted:

where do you even get probes for something like that?

ebay

actually i think it might use the same probe jack as the current ones? idk either way theyre super expensive

Tin Gang posted:

e: have you considered "donating" it for a tax write off?

wife asked a tax dude she knows about that a while back, iirc the answer was that it would get us basically nothing. could be wrong tho, i dont know the dude's credentials and i know nothing about tax junk, i just fill in turbotax every year

# ¿ Dec 31, 2014 21:32

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

eschaton posted:

eBay has lots of people selling used test equipment, including Arcsech�s Tek TLA5204 ($10K!), and stuff like probes & pods too

the latter seem to run $25-$100 or so for other logic analyzers, I don't know what the 5204 takes so I can't look up much in the way of details

i wish i could get $10k for the thing. the last one to sell on ebay was listed as $1200 obo and took an offer. the last one before that was listed at $550 and took an offer (although that one had a flaky power supply)

probes (e: tek p6418) go for $75-$100

# ¿ Dec 31, 2014 21:53

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Base Emitter posted:

apparently fluke trademarked yellow cases or some poo poo?

its trade dress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress

i think apple used the same thing against samsung but idk for sure. anyway it was a case of customs thinking it violates their trade dress and if fluke had said "naw its cool" they would have lost intellectual property rights over it, which would have resulted in "fruke 117"s in identical looking cases being a-ok

or something, like that idk

# ¿ Jan 1, 2015 05:26

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

longview posted:

I have the original Fluke 17B, the word on the street is it was a legit Fluke, just a special version for Asian markets.

A year later I bought an Agilent U1272B, a far better instrument. Also bought a full set of probe tips (super fine SMD probes, SMD clips, small insulated alligator clips) and the "leather" carry case. Unfortunately I had to buy my large alligator clips from Fluke, a set of huge clips is great for clipping onto N connector barrels or other large bits of chassis for grounding. Also used the same set of batteries from 2011 up to a few months ago (lithium AAAs are great).

I checked the DC accuracy of the 17B a little while ago with my home made 5.0000V (+-100�V or so on a calibrated 289) reference and it measured 5.04V whereas the Agilent had 4.999 to 5.000. I guess that's ok for most uses, but not great for precision circuitry.

I have a $100 instrument I bought around the same time as the Fluke and that's smaller, came with better probes and had the same features + True RMS, haven't checked the accuracy. Only upside for the Fluke over that is that it runs on AAs instead of 9V batteries.

Anyway you should all get the Keysight U1272B or better instead of Flukes, I don't care for the Fluke 289, it's slow to power up and the menu system involves a lot of navigation to get to common modes.

the 17b indeed a legit fluke but it is really rather poo poo, which is why they only sell it overseas

the proper competition isn't the 17b or the 289, it's the 87-V. anyway you should probably buy the fluke 179, which will do everything you need to a good precision and is $100 cheaper than either the 87-V or the mentioned HP ~~Agilent~~ Keysight

# ¿ Jan 1, 2015 22:38

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Mido posted:

$75 is the real price for that imo

yep. the 434 looks like a curiosity in that its an analog scope that can store waveforms, but its still a 2 channel 25MHz analog scope

jonny what are you looking for in a scope?

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 17:41

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Jonny 290 posted:

ability to build and troubleshoot HF oscillators, filters, amps. i do not see myself loving around with >30 mhz stuff for the near future really

if you want to do hf stuff (up to 30MHz) reliably, you want a scope rated to 60MHz or more. the rated bandwitch on a scope is the -3dB point so looking at a 25MHz signal on a 25MHz scope the scope will report only about 70% of the actual signal strength and you'll basically completely lose any harmonics so a square wave will look like poo poo

I'd look for 60MHz as your bare minimum and you should be able to get a 100MHz scope for p. cheap

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 18:52

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Jonny 290 posted:

alright. am i going to hate myself if i don't go for a storage scope? and are analog storage scopes at all reliable/decent

i have absolutely no experience with analog storage scopes so I can't say for that part. i actually didn't know they existed until i googled that model you posted

most of my work with scopes is looking at digital or power supply lines, and having a DSO for those is super duper nice since you can capture and examine power-on, spikes, generally non-repeating stuff at your leisure. however for mainly analog stuff like filters and amps you're probably fine with an analog scope since you can easily test it with repeating signals. somebody who works with that kind of stuff more regularly should chime in though, I am talking from school experience, at work I am a 1s and 0s guy

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 19:12

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Chill Callahan posted:

should i get this y/n http://www.amazon.com/Rigol-DS1052E-Digital-Channels-sampling/dp/B003MYND5A

that is a good low-end modern dso, yes. it will do your needful

xilni posted:

fancy fancy, look at me here looking for my first multimeter. moving past simple arduinos and need a good multimeter for more in depth microcontroller projects.

how does the fluke 115 (http://amzn.com/B000OCFFMW) fair?

the fluke 115 is good (it is a fluke after all) but the thing you'll miss is a milli-/micro- amp range. you wont find both a small and a large current range on a fluke until you get to the 177/179 at like $250-$275. mA range measurements are probably going to be your most common current measurement as a hobbyist, and also the range missing from the brand name's low end meters (looking at you Agilent U1232A/Fluke11X). I'd look on the used market, fluke/agilent meters are very very stable and used will be pretty much as good as new

# ¿ Feb 4, 2015 00:42

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

analog is very straightforward as long as you have your copy of sedra/smith handy

my undergrad used sedra/smith and it was one of the worst textbooks I've ever used

I literally got fed up with it and went and read the wikipedia articles on whatever I was trying to learn at the time and everything made sense finally

analog is straightforward until you get to the point where all the simplifcations break down and then there's like a million things you have to take into account

# ¿ Feb 16, 2015 23:00

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

movax posted:

fpga tooling on linux is only good for running headless builds imo; if you need to use the gui at all, stick with windows. linux is a second-class citizen (as it should be)

this man speaks truth

# ¿ Feb 23, 2015 20:30

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Mr Dog posted:

i am

but it seems like a tough gig to break into

also microcontrollers and socs being what they are these days it seems there aren't that many places where asics or fpgas are cost-effective

network processing and packet inspection

no way you can do meaningful operations on a 40gb or 100gb line going full speed in anything but an fpga (or an asic)

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 22:26

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

what's a CAM?

Content addressable memory

# ¿ Mar 18, 2015 04:29

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

BobHoward posted:

what a magnificent thread i did not know about before

anyone trying to use xilinx ise for anything: don't, it's bad. use vivado, it's still bad but much less so. of course this means you have to use at least 7 series parts and i feel bad for you if you can't do that

also jfc guys who were complaining about writing port lists 3x, verilog 2001 port declarations are a thing, google dat poo poo and stop suffering with the 20 year old version of the language

Agreed on Vivado

My work uses vhdl for everything. Kinda wish I could use verilog but oh well

# ¿ Apr 5, 2015 15:25

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

why does this pos toolchain not seem to support sysemverilog? what year is it???

in fpgaland it is always 1993

# ¿ Apr 21, 2015 22:56

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

eschaton posted:

I wonder if, 10 years from now, the FPGA environments will all be local web garbage running in an app shell and written with node.js

it seems like the sort of tech backwardness the vendors would embrace, especially after the rest of the industry has moved on

given that vivado is a java app, yes, this is exactly what fpga tooling will be like 10 years from now

# ¿ Apr 30, 2015 22:57

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

c electron s: 12+ inches of clock

# ¿ May 19, 2015 19:45

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

BobHoward posted:

how fast is the target clock?

how fast????

(fpga speed junkie)

ps i have been janitoring bits in systemverilog a few weeks now and i'm really liking it. holy poo poo, multidimensional arrays and/or structs allowed in port lists? fuuuuuuuck yessssss

at work we (not me, the actually smart people) are doing a 250MHz design and it is like woah

we're in the biggest part xilinx makes and its not enough

# ¿ May 29, 2015 06:52

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

what do verilog generators do

You seriously have never used or even seen generators before

I feel better about my ultra-poo poo FPGA skills now

My pov is probably distorted because all my coworkers have been doing this poo poo for like like 30 years and are way too drat smart

# ¿ Jun 27, 2015 20:31

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

JawnV6 posted:

there's no career in it, way too niche and most places just have "the fpga guy" which is why they have a fpga at all, the only people who ship fpga's on purpose is garmin, everyone else is/should actively be moving off of it

We use fpgas for deep packet inspection of like 40-100gbps fiber lines and I doubt they're going away for that purpose any time soon.

Still not going to make a career out of it though. Nice to be able to do though, it impresses software people who think it's black magic

# ¿ Jun 28, 2015 19:18

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

karasu posted:

how are the system integration tools in xilinx land, are they comparable?

i dont know much about the specifics of what youre talking about but every xilinx software tool ive ever used has been a giant piece of poo poo so theyre probably really bad

# ¿ Jul 1, 2015 18:53

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Phobeste posted:

it's the same guy that did spacechem. this is kinda His Thing

He also made a game about programming in assembly. It's called TIS-100 and is on steam. It's actually really good

# ¿ Jul 19, 2015 01:41

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

BobHoward posted:

if you want to go brand x, i recommend the avnet microzed for $200 plus an io breakout board for $50. it's a zynq part so it's actually an arm soc with some 7 series fpga fabric on the side, which is a very nice combo. boots linux from a microsd card out of the box, 1gb ram, gigabit enet, dual core cortex-a9 so it's reasonable fast, and loading a bitfile into the fpga fabric is literally "cat yospos.bit >/dev/some/path/i/dont/remember"

run the tools in a linux vm. the license voucher you get with xilinx eval boards will require nodelocking based on ethernet MAC, so make one up for a virtual ethernet interface in your vm, nodelock yr license to that, and you will not be forever tied down to one specific computer

idk what's out there for brand a

can confirm this is as decent a way to get started as any

# ¿ Aug 6, 2015 17:38

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

same except this is literally my job

same except i really truly have no idea what im doing, vhdl is confusing send help

actually vhdl isnt that hard, timing constraints and getting the loving thing to meet timing is whats hard

# ¿ Aug 26, 2015 18:27

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

step one don't use vhdl use systemverilog or however much of sysv your toolchain supports

I am the low man on the totem pole in my group and its all I can do to get people to use git instead of the garbage ancient proprietary version control thing. No way am I getting anyone to use system verilog (and most of my job is "take the thing that the graybeards made and modify it to fit into this smaller slower part")

# ¿ Aug 26, 2015 21:57

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

other things coming to the next rev: replacing the fpga with just, like, t he biggest one in the family, who even cares

where all nontrivial fpga projects end up eventually

# ¿ Dec 7, 2015 21:22

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

why is it a colossal pain in the rear end to integrate 10/100/1000 ethernet into a thing

alternatively why is isolating usb a colossal pain in the rear end

ethernet is generally a colossal pain in the rear end

10 is really different from 100 is really different from 1000 (is really different from 10G if you care about that but seriously dont use 10G over copper, just use fiber optic you cheapass). often your phy and mac will abstract these differences away, but if you cant afford a non-poo poo phy and/or dont have a built-in mac then lol good luck.

also gigabit ethernet uses a shitload of power on embedded devices

# ¿ Mar 7, 2016 21:17

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

longview posted:

marvell requires an NDA for data sheets but is used a lot, no experience with them myself

marvell's phys are pretty great. but yeah unless you're going to be a fair amount of business they dont care about you

never even look at their processor line. its just not worth it. overcomplicated mess of a product, and the most useless FAEs ive ever encountered, and ive worked with xilinx FAEs

# ¿ Mar 7, 2016 22:06

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Fanged Lawn Wormy posted:

idk much about flash memory

what is the issue? read/write speed? accuracy of data?

When we had the same problem it was because the lovely things would fail as soon as they so much as got lukewarm, much less their actual max rated operating temperature

# ¿ May 27, 2016 07:23

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

extremely gently caress anything about targeting fpgas. the tools, the languages, everything. it is all absolute poo poo.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 20:14

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Mr Dog posted:

i know almost nothing about fpgas but i do know that all the fpga vendors have one guy whose job it is to come in every morning and think long and hard about everybody who keeps code for their products in any form of source control and how to loving ruin their day and then go out and do that

everybody who thinks this is a joke, it is not

when we asked xilinx if they could give us any guidance on which of the 27 billion files their lovely ide generates we needed to check in, we were basically told that it was silly to ask that and to go gently caress ourselves

we kind of trial-and-errored out a solution but it is extremely fragile

thank gently caress, im so happy i got out of fpga-land

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 21:07

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Barnyard Protein posted:

xilinx answered that way bc they have no clue themselves how to find out enough information to form a claim or back it up right

likely

vivado (the xilinx ide) is a horrendous piece of poo poo in just about every way. it is the definition of software written by hardware engineers, i wouldn't be surprised if nobody really knew how it worked

# ¿ Aug 18, 2016 00:02

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Bloody posted:

yes, that is an exhaustive list

# ¿ Nov 30, 2016 20:38

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

Spatial posted:

yeah if you're this guy

hey man, better than accidentally buying a bga

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 01:16

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 19:02

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

JawnV6 posted:

nah, you're thinking of Otto, his problems were around building super sensitive analog equipment and getting 18+ ENOB's out of the claimed 20

can confirm psoc adc's are garbo

e: they're okay to develop software for tho. at least, they're no worse than average for microcontrollers

# ¿ Aug 2, 2017 01:56

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