Notices by Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange)

@foone @becomethewaifu @edward @markarayner please tell me it had a red flip cover

@foone Oh dear. Can you tell if it belonged to the client or the lawyer?

A careless client is at least sliiiightly more excusable.

Boost for reach: Looking for a UI/UX designer for paid work on a F/OSS project.

The fundamental goal is to improve the new user experience for ngscopeclient (https://www.ngscopeclient.org/)

I'm not looking for coding/implementation work specifically, more of general human-factors etc feedback on how to make the UI easier to figure out and as intuitive as possible. It's a complex tool with a large feature set and striking a balance between seas of menus and toolbars blocking your view of the data, and making the UI impossible to navigate, is not trivial.

Experience with electronic test and measurement, scientific computing, DSP, or data visualization is a plus.

If you're willing to offer discounted rates for open source projects that's a bonus.

Finally had time to go through data from my decap spree a while back.

This is a submission to "Andrew's Back Room IC Failure Analysis Lab", an RP2040 marked as having pin 8 blown.

Let's see if there's any visible damage... First, package shots for reference. Probably should have cleaned the solder off to get better views of the leadframe but I was in a hurry.

@mntmn I don't shove much but I find the walk-around feature to be useful at times.

And it's generally a smoother experience than the old kicad4 era router.

@whitequark @foone @munin My homeschool experience could not have been more different.

It was mostly hanging around the house reading encyclopedias, studying calculus, building suspension bridges out of k'nex and string, and teaching myself C++.

@mntmn Did you try decoding it in ngscopeclient? We have D-PHY and DSI decodes.

@mntmn @funkylab @Laberpferd @timonsku Innnteresting.

If you want to send me one or two of the fried chips I can do a decap and see if there's any obvious damage?

@mntmn You rank HDMI above Ethernet??? What PHY vendor hurt you?

@mntmn @theawesomerandomness What's the paste printer? Haven't seen that one before, looks cool.

@foone We used to run the display on my parent's Windows Mistake Edition box at 85 Hz. Significantly less visible flicker than 60.

Folks who have done both bare metal (RTOS or just simple event loop/interrupts) and embedded Linux system work: why does everyone seem to think embedded Linux is easier?

Having worked on projects doing both I struggle to see why that's the case. Putting down a big SoC and laying out DDR memory buses. Dealing with u-boot, spending forever compiling kernels and libraries and dependencies and device trees. So much overhead and effort.

I can see it making sense for high end stuff like video processing that needs GPU acceleration, complex GUIs that are eaiser to test in a PC environment using the same GUI toolkit, etc. Things that already need GB of external memory or compute power for the application software itself, so you need that overhead anyway.

But for simpler stuff like a web/ssh management interface on some simple embedded system it's soooo much extra work.

RAlink RT2150F. Focus is slightly imperfect on the bottom edge but at this point I'm just trying to rampage through my whole chip inventory and get low res overview shots of everything.

Photobit PB0100 RGB CMOS image sensor. Looks like ImageJ choked a bit on stitching the pixel array, there's some misalignments visible.

1.8 GB of photos in under an hour. Let's see how long it takes to stitch...

In progress now: Intel Pentium "Willamette". This is going to be around 1500 frames and is the first of several large chips I have that would be completely impractical to photograph by hand.

And it's crashing ImageJ. Guess I'll look at that separately. But the microscope itself handled it like a champ!

Here's a Xilinx XC3S400A in the meantime. Old decap, some damage around the perimeter.

Microchip 23K256. 20 frames and was done before I checked back on it.

Next, our old friend the Microchip PIC12F683. About 90 seconds for 40 frames.

Testing out a new toy! Early access demo of a Labsmore X1 CNC microscope. This is a purpose built tool for large area, high resolution optical imaging.

Should be awesome for silicon reversing work.