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Hi, and welcome.

 

This attempts to be a free-form, (mostly un-cohosted) podcast about tech-oriented hobby-projects. Do not proceed if you're looking for a high-quality production.

On a semi-biweekly basis, Michai and optional cohost talk about software, electronics and mechanical engineering from a hands-on point of view. Most of the time, that means giving excuses for not having done any work at all.

Jun 24, 2019

Hi there! Thanks for tuning in (or reading this text and then deciding not to tune in at all). Another episode with a mixed bag of semi-interesting topics. 

Thanks for the feedback - the inter-segment jingle will be a bit less loud from now on. Poor ears.

We start off by counting pass & fail on this year's new year's resolutions, followed by mentioning a small inline PCB for driving LED-strips and so on. The PCB was used for 2 light effects so far - links to videos of both are given below.

Ran into a "gotcha" when dealing with LED-effects: intelligent LEDs stuck in "full brightness" mode, causing the supply to shit itself and the system to become unresponsive. (Quickfix: small delay between boot and start-of-effect at power-on.)

For the LED-effects, I measured rand() execution times (avr-gcc, avr-libc, ATmega168 @ 8 MHz) and was pleasantly surprised by its speed and predictability. Will use again.

Finally, some fuzzy guesstimates / measurements about what kind of voltage drop to expect when running current through long cables.

Relevant links:

Snapshot of my inline PCB:

pcb