Asaril

@[email protected]
5 Followers
13 Following
72 Posts
Black cat online, sometimes also IRL or in VR. Building electronics and software, mostly embedded / microcontroller stuff.
Linkshttps://fursona.directory/@asaril
Pronounshe/him
Asaril5d ago
Ruth — of systems & designMar 17

“1. You don't know what to build

This is the one nobody wants to talk about because it's embarrassing. Your PM hasn't talked to a real user in two months. Your requirements arrive as a Jira ticket with three sentences and a Figma link to a design that was approved by someone who's never used the product. Your engineers are making fifty micro-decisions a day about behaviour, edge cases, and error handling that nobody specified, because nobody thought about them.”

https://andrewmurphy.io/blog/if-you-thought-the-speed-of-writing-code-was-your-problem-you-have-bigger-problems

If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems | Debugging Leadership

AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy cultures, and an org chart that needs six meetings to decide what colour the button should be.

Debugging Leadership
Show threadAsarilMar 16
@ret searching for the text, some of the other modules I found the wires listed as being Vcc, Gnd, and "enable", and the device itself as being a CW transmitter. So it probably is just that, a bit of power management, oscillator, amplifier. If the enable is fast enough, it could maybe be used as a CW/OOK transmitter. But I wouldn't be surprised if it just takes a while to get to steady state, so maybe not so useful outside its suggested main use
Show threadAsarilMar 16
@ret the lower half though, seems like it could generate something on its own. The input wires don't look suitable for an RF input for just being an amplifier (unless one of then is a coax, hard to see), and the part in the left side could be some oscillator?
Show threadAsarilMar 16
@ret maybe the circulator then is used as a safety against reflected power, if no antenna is attached or it is mismatched. Or the block next to it could be a connector on the other side, which would then lead to a receiver?
Show threadAsarilMar 16

@ret ah. Yeah, that looks like a lot more  

If the labeling is correct, it would probably be an amplifier then (PA = power amplifier, the last stage in a transmitter). And GaN could then be the material of the power transistor, suitable for high power in RF

Show threadAsarilMar 16

@ret the keyword probably is circulator. It's a device with three equal ports, that forwards RF signals only to one of the neighboring ports, around the circle.
A signal going in port A comes out on B, going into B out of C, and into C comes out in A.

Can be used to join a receiver, transmitter, and antenna, so that the signal from the transmitter goes to the antenna only, the signal from the antenna goes to the receiver only (and the receiver doesn't output a signal, so nothing goes into the transmitter).
Nothing smart inside there, apart from the genius engineering itself. It doesn't produce a signal in itself, and is not particularly "dangerous" to import.

[Based on the pic in the thread, link also doesn't work for me]

AsarilJan 31

I made a thing. Again.  
If you have a Tanmatsu, and an MLX90640 sensor, there now is an app to use it as a (somewhat mediocre) thermal camera.

v0.1.0 is live in the app repo, and 0.2.0 will follow soon to give a better startup experience. I forgot to add some hints on what features the buttons have.  
#tanmatsu #maker #diy

Show threadAsarilJan 28
@Soblow @sunflowerinrain this. It's an analog audio cable, from before digitally extracting and playing CD Audio was a thing in PCs. The controller just commands the drive to play, and it does the whole D/A by itself.
Some games used that also for their soundtrack.
Show threadAsarilDec 31

@Jencen nice find!
I remember those also from when I was a kid. It still might be around somewhere. I also remember using a similar model, with color screen, in school to write some qbasic.

Gotta show the expansion slots so people can appreciate the size of this thing  
Or the handle (or was that only on the newer ones?)

Show threadAsarilOct 31
@mborges knew I had a pic like that from back in university. Was just trying to save a screenshot to my keychain USB, and WMP autostarted because there were mp3s on it