Notices by Timon 🛠 (timonsku@mastodon.social)

ThunderScope is an amazing high-speed USB-C osciloscope. With 500MHz bandwidth and an incredible low noise floor it also comes at a fantastic price! Other options go for easily 5-10x the price.
On top of all that, it is open source hardware!
Go check it out at https://www.crowdsupply.com/eevengers/thunderscope

The campaign closes in less than a week!

@mntmn Whats the use case there? I would just use a USB PD supply. No active parts needed other than a second USB-C port

@mntmn @jacqueline thats actually what I hear most of the time. If people use Rust its in a green field project thats Rust only. Which is by far the easiest place to start using it I think.
If I think about embedded the only place where I can see me starting to use it is in projects like the Linux Kernel if that ever wins the fight or in Zephyr potentially at some point where people are less weird about third language support.

@jacqueline Which is probably the main reason why Zig kinda seems attractive from a distance. It seems to be ridiculed a lot so not sure if its a *good* language but it tackles that issue head on and would make it far easier to just start with without needing to abandon my life and become a Crustacean full time.

@jacqueline People are so weird about languages.
Yes Rust does not seem easy to pick up but thats not the reason why I don't use it productively. If its worth the effort I'll suck it up and learn it.
The main reason I don't use it is because C inter-op is very cumbersome.
If I don't want a very hard life it seems either go full Rust or no Rust and I have no choice 99% of the time to have a massive amount of C code to interact with.

@jacqueline Which I think is probably the biggest reason for the divide. I know extremely few people who regularly write both C and Rust. People are usually either Rust only or C only. So there is a divide in communities and you don't get that much exposure to practical Rust if you are not a Rust enthusiast.

@mntmn @uint8_t @whitequark @fasterthanlime yea the online general purpose chat bots are absolutely useless. I never ChatGPT and what not, absolute waste of time every time I tried that. Even for stuff where it should in theory be pretty good at like schema less data conversion. I've only seen Copilot be actually good at this.

@whitequark @fasterthanlime there is definitely cost/benefit thing going on when looking at the industry at large. They are good enough to enable people to create much more code faster than before that they are unfit to review which creates tech debt and burden to others. /1

@whitequark @fasterthanlime I do find the auto complete that copilot does very useful because it strictly does basic "boring repetitive structures" type stuff that I hate to write, can review in seconds and is correct 99% of the time.
Its rare that I engage with the "please write full functionality for me" chat type thing. I find it useful as a better documentation look up, in a sense what StackOverflow filled previously to some extent.
But not sure if thats worth the harm it can do. /2

If you don't know Good Work_ yet, I highly recommend to watch some their videos. It's so so good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9BzS-bd1wg

@mntmn I used this for quite a long time at my prev. office job where I was running Linux Laptop as my daily driver. Worked very well for CAD!

For people that have their own machine/server you could also use Moonlight.

@ErinRose @mntmn I thought StepUp did that at least in one direction from KiCad to FreeCad?

@mntmn @wren6991 oh and bi-directional links to CAD packages, thats probably the biggest reason for product teams most of the time. It removes a lot of friction there.

@mntmn @wren6991 If you do very larger or very dense designs. Complex high speed designs, nested multi board assembly stuff or non standard stuff like flex or rigid flex assemblies then OrCad and Altium just make that a fuck ton quicker and easier to do.
You trade money for time.

@wren6991 Yea it def. looks decent, hence me looking into it. Def. far cheaper than Altium for comparable feature set.
It's just a sad standard that one of the most clunky tools in the industry is still a standard to go by and Altium with all its faults still seems to be the gold standard for the "can't afford 2-6k$ a month" part of the industry.

@mntmn pin is haunted

@mntmn @Laberpferd You can use the diode mode of the multimeter too to get the voltage drop of the diode and compare it to a working pin, will likely be very low or nothing at all.

@mntmn hrm, maybe blown ESD diode. Damage like that from reflow feels unlikely

Having an upset stomach a day before a long distance flight does not help with the anxiety of doing a long distance flight for the first time in ~5 years 🫠

welp, the night was still terrible. Here is hoping I survive the ~7h40min on the plane better x.x