Hacker News Reader

_Microfton Debugging and Reworking a PCB

Make sure to scroll down to 2024-03-29 at which time he discovers an unconnected pad under a BGA part and needs to rework it - which involves milling right through a ten layer board.

_Microfton Bionic Bee

Festo is developing a new biologically inspired device/bionic animal for the Hannover Messe (a renowned trade fair in Hanover, Germany) for many years now. Searching YouTube/the web for Festo and bionic will return a lot of amazing results.

_Microfton Implementing Neural Networks on a "10-cent" RISC-V MCU

How would one get these 16x16 images generated in a way that does not need a lot more compute power than the inference itself? Maybe by using a sensor from an optical mouse which seems to have a similar resolution? [0] According to a quick web-search, the CH32V003 seems to support SPI and I²C out of the box [1] which the mentioned sensor supports?

What would one do with such a system?

[0] https://pickandplace.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/2d-positioning...

[1] https://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH32V003.html

_Microfton Android features I envy as an iPhone user

> Well, there's good to have vs. stupid. It would perhaps be nice to have per-app volume. But the fact that iPhone has just a global volume ... that my ringtone vs. media volume can't be separate is plain stupid isn't it.

The volume of media playback und ringtones can be changed separately. Ringtone volume can be set in "Sounds & Haptics". Disable the toggle for changing the ringtone volume with the physical volume keys if that interferes.

_Microfton Inverters with constant full load capability for electric drives

If you are wondering about the project name "Dauerpower": "Dauer-"/"andauernd" means permanent/permanently/continous and and - equally important - it rhymes with power ("d-ower").

Here [0] is a longer article by Fraunhofer on silicon carbide power electronics. Depending on how much you want to know, there are Wikipedia articles on a number of terms used in it (SiC, MOSFET, wire-bonding, micro-via, parasitic inductance, IGBT, ...; there is also an explanation of "PCB embedding" on the Fraunhofer website [1]).

[0] https://blog.izm.fraunhofer.de/silicon-carbide-for-power-ele...

[1] https://www.izm.fraunhofer.de/en/abteilungen/system_integrat...

_Microfton Presence and collection of DNA from air and air conditioner units

There are attempts to do something similar outdoors to get an idea which animals are in a certain area.

https://www.science.org/content/article/dna-pulled-thin-air-...

_Microfton Fire alarm audio detection, using FFTs and Go

1W of continuous power consumption is not great. To put it into perspective: that’s 1x24x365Wh, almost 9kWh per year. A kettle (1.8-2kW) can run for 4-5 hours for that amount of energy. If getting a kettle to boiling takes 5 minutes, that’s almost 50-60 kettles. That’s two month of boiling one kettle a day.

_Microfton How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

What would prevent anyone making off with the money owed if they didn‘t require that?

_Microfton How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

If this reply [0] to a comment of yours is true, then you’re allowed to „temporarily“ leave Germany for 7-12 years before being affected by this.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39790138

_Microfton Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar

Does KiCad allow to take these delays for each pin into account automatically or do you need to do all that manually?

Edit: it's using the pad property of "pad-to-die-length" if doing it manually, right?

_Microfton Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar

"The traces are length-matched with squiggly lines[...]. The trace matching requirement is ±10 ps according to the Zynq PCB design guide, which is approximately ±2mm in trace length. [...] There is also some delay difference inside the FPGA package which should be considered in the length matching."

This is a shortened excerpt from the article. It can be found below the image with six colorful images of PCB layers. I'm curious how the delays inside the FPGA package are known. Is there a table which pin adds how much delay to a signal or something like that?

_Microfton Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar

Here are some resources on PCB layer stack-up by the way. While I'm an amateur, they didn't sound unreasonable. Chapter 10[0] has a list of links to different layer stack-ups for boards with 4 to 10 layers.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200124214936/http://www.hottco...

Edit: removed wall of links

_Microfton Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar

> Above is the final DDR3 routing on all the PCB layers. Layers 2 and 6 are ground, 5 is supply voltage, and others are reserved for signals. Two grounds are needed for correct impedances on the top, middle, and bottom traces of the PCB. With only one ground plane, the distance from the signal to ground would be too large on either the top or bottom layer.

Is the textual description in the article correct? To me the images make it look like signals are on 1 (red), 3 (orange) and 6 (blue), with ground on 2 (green) and 5 (pink) and supply voltage on 4 (teal). If you match some vias, you will find that 2 and 5 are definitely connected.

_Microfton Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

> On that same note though - in some free and open energy markets it is not unheard of to buy at <$10/mWh during excess production periods and sell at >$200/mWh at peak on-demand - plenty of margin for arbitrage there - as the tesla megapack facilities have demonstrated in Australia. In comparison a 4mWh megapack facility (2MW in/2MW out) is priced at $1.9M before installation [2]

m means milli, M is mega.

_Microfton Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

Casey is also very bullish on Musk and his Mars plans. I wouldn‘t be surprised if half of the plan is to have the tech ready to build the methane generation infrastructure for Musk‘s Mars colony.

_Microfton Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

Natural gas doesn’t stink. It’s the additives that are there for exactly the reason to be able to smell it if there is a leak.

_Microfton Population tipping point could arrive by 2030

Yes, in the language of demography at least.

See the Wikipedia article on fertility.

_Microfton First human case of avian flu in Texas

> Most countries implemented policies they called "lockdowns" so whatever personal definition you're using isn't very helpful.

That doesn't make much sense. Just because some country called their measures "lockdown" doesn't make the situation comparable to another country with different measures who called theirs "lockdown" as well. I suggest doing a duck-test ("if it walks like a duck, ...").

> Where I live I was forbidden from leaving my apartment for a couple of weeks when my wife got COVID, for any reason except purchasing groceries. So that was definitely a China-style lockdown.

That doesn't require a lockdown. Technically even the status of your wife and yours was different at the time. Your wife was in medical isolation and you were quarantined (at least it sounds like you were not testing positive at the time which makes all the difference here).

_Microfton FuryGpu – Hello

Discussed a few days ago at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836745

_Microfton Clocks

Actually, the title is not correct. It's "Let's DFAB" which is very nondescript and "DFAB" might mean "Digital Fabrication" as far as I can tell now. It's also not only about clocks either but they are the most varied and interesting devices on the page. So let's focus on these for now?

_Microfton U.S. Navy Submarine First in World Fitted with Silent Caterpillar Drive

This is an april fool‘s joke, isn‘t it? This website is the only source for this news that I could find and the ship was also commissioned only two years ago.

_Microfton Yamato-1

Since the other submission of an article on a ship with a magnetohydrodynamic drive seems to be an april fool’s joke: here is the Yamato-1, an actual prototype ship from the 1990s that had a magnetohydrodynamic drive and an awesome Star Trek TNG/DS9 design (predating DS9 though, so it might be rather that it inspired the latter).

_Microfton EEG channels with low-cost PiEEG device

The BoM is of course only a small part of the cost and there is lots of work time and prototypes that need to be paid off by selling finished devices. I‘m sorry if that sounded like I thought that the price might be too high. Thanks for your efforts!

_Microfton EEG channels with low-cost PiEEG device

The Elecrow page says that the analog front end used on the board is a ADS1299. The eight channel version of it is 60€+VAT on Digikey. The rest of the parts is most likely very cheap.

_Microfton EEG channels with low-cost PiEEG device

NeuraLink is using a specialized robot to surgically insert very thin electrodes into the brain.

This device here uses good old wet or dry EEG electrodes that are touching the outside of the head (e.g. on an EEG cap).

_Microfton DongleHider+ Framework Laptop Expansion Card

Also make sure that the data lines do not have over-voltages then (level-shifters on these?).

_Microfton Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

Add a few other countries to the list and see how their curves look almost the same as Germany's...

(The situation is not much different on the other graphs)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...

Edit: Here's the same (semi-randomly chosen) set of countries, applied to the same article (see parents [0]-link) in full:

https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany?country=DE...

_Microfton Filling Nuclear Power's $5T Hole Is Beyond the Banks

Are you not concerned that two thirds of the nuclear conversion and over half of the enrichtment capabilities are controlled by Russia and China? [0] This feels like the "cheap Russian energy for Europe"-trap again?