179 karma · joined July 27, 2025
Above that they need a fan.
Sometimes stuff is missing. But that's implemented and upstreamed quickly.
For SWD you can one of the ST-Link clones or the free open implementations of it.
Porting stuff to another microcontroller would be easy as we are not using too proprietary features... as long the uC has SPI/I2C and a bunch of timers the embedded developers will be happy. Thanks to Zephyr.
Maybe some basic stuff like usart, i2c works fine. But the the deeper you dig into the specialties the more you will have problems.
And STM32s and expensive? Maybe if you buy them from Digikey or Mouser. With the right distributor they are dirt cheap.
They still are.
No vendor until now was able to push out microcontrollers with a solid Wifi integration. Sometimes you can find weird 2-chip-solutions.
I still wonder why ST doesn't bring one. That device would be a multi-billion-business.
This is more about the application running on that device.
I also work a lot with ESP32s. Their ADCs (non-linearity, and with the integrated calibration you loose resolution) don't make too much fun.
Going to write the ferrite core on my next shopping list.
Was a fun experiment: https://www.dm5tt.de/2025/07/26/thunderstorm-detector-with-m...
Like at the ECMWF: you can have a look at all beautiful charts for free. But if you want to have the data behind them they want to see big cash.
They are receiving Sferics on the lower HF frequencies and tag them with GPS timestamps (with the PPS signal they are in the Nanoseconds precision range). A central server will then do the triangulation.
All with off-the-shelf hardware (STM32, etc.).
Their service is stable for many many years now.
(Offtopic: The STM32H7 ADC is great for many many things)
Siemens Solid Edge also has a hobbyist version with very fair terms.
On 868MHz with standard 5dBi omnis.
Thesis: as long you are using one of the more robust LoRa settings it always will work as long you have LoS or at least only lightly obstructed LoS.
Thanks too relatively modern digital modes this doesn't need too much transmission power.
On the upper GHz bands with dishes they even manage to do reliable FM chats. But that requires a lot of gain and active steering of the dish.
If you want to learn embedded you should try to understand the example codes the vendor supplies.
That renders it entirely unusable for us :-(
We work a lot with heavily NDA'ed datasheets/sources.
They offer a lot of public example code and documentation. LLMs inhaled that.
But they still produce a metric ton of unusable hallucinations.
At work we have access to the latest LLMs (Claude, Gemini, Open AI) and they are not really usable. The code looks great (which makes it extremely hard to debug) - but produce too much hallucinations.
The company I'm working for has its own EMC chamber (maintaining that huge room fully calibrated and standardized is ultra expensive... just looking at these EMC test receivers that go up to 40GHz my me cry in $$$$) and we invested giant engineering effort into our products to be far below every radiation limit norm in the world.
Shouldn't satellite companies have even better stuff and more strict regulations or are these unintended effects maybe caused by the harsh environment?
Public projects: Github. Having no problem with it. Also makes me happy poisoning LLMs with my shitty code.
Will move to that fork in one of my future private infrastructure reconstructions.