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There are modular dot shaped led matrix blocks that are basically LEDs under a cast piece of resin that guides light. They're tillable and you can drive them with an FPGA and a smart shift register based constant current driver. They're generic so you can look around online.

For example: https://www.jameco.com/z/SBM-2388ASRG-RG-Super-Bright-8x8-Do...

However this is assuming your installation will be reasonably large. If it's too big, I recommend making your own array out of discrete LEDs. They sell LEDs with a built in milky diffuser that are suitable.

Very cool. Though it's unfortunate that most DIY electronics projects end up looking like IEDs, mine included

I have read the docs, and like I said the point of STM32 is ubiquity. It's not a great design in other respects but it was once ahead of the envelope and that made it ubiquitous which made it king for longevity. There is no room for another "king" on that throne. Especially counting all the clones of STM32, it is basically a forever design.

Comparing a 60 cent chip to a 10 cent chip is itself crazy work. That's like a whole three stratums apart in terms of capability. Dammingly, you are forgetting about the cost of the external flash that it requires, when program flash is the main cost of MCUs. It shows you don't have much experience with this stuff.

> I see no mention of exact part number of inductor requirement in their hardware design guide, are you making shit up now?

LMFAO go read the literal datasheet page 455 https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.p...

They literally had to "work with Abracon to create a custom 2.0×1.6mm 3.3μH polarity marked inductor" like wtf

Besides how it looks like you weren't one of the early adopters (since RPi shipped one abracon inductor with every one RP2350 for a bit), you also clearly haven't designed a board with the chip in question.

> theoretical maximum of 3.2 gigabytes per second bandwidth. That is pretty crazy.

This is what I'm talking about, like honestly what capability does that unlock for you beside party tricks? Can you name anything meaningful beside "logic analyzer" and "some memory card?" Even disregarding that, what can you do with such thruput if you are bottled by USB 1 speeds and a core without FPU? It doesn't come close to being able to do interesting things like LVDS ADCs or actual high speed memory interfaces because of the bit width requirement, yet people will go into a frothing frenzy should you dare insinuate that RPi Pico might be kinda useless

> rp2040/rp2350 are unironically one of the best MCUs on the market (esp. in their niche), both in documentation/API and price/perf and features/flexibility in doing highspeed interfaces/bandwidth.

As you might surmise, I disagree. Go make some actual projects instead of "reading the docs" all day (though I must admit I do the same). Also, it sure looks like our definition of high speed differs by a wide margin

I'm referring to their collective effort in MCUs, including RP2040 and RP2350. There are a bunch of issues that are now addressed but permanently makes me distrustful of them especially when combined with how uninteresting the hardware are

- Broken ADC design on RP2040 with nonlinearity at certain codes (and they're not fixing it)

- Shipping chips with exact part number of inductor and specific DCDC layout requirement (like come on, the Chinese are advertising zero decoupling capacitor required and you can route the USB right under the chip in funky shapes and everything "just works".. meanwhile RPi is doing this)

- GPIO current leakage (fixed with a stepping but I would hate to be those who bought a reel of the earlier stepping)

"Actually good MCU products" in my opinion are those with at least a reason to exist. For example the ubiquity of STM32, the radios of ESP32, the high compute of i.MX RT1172, the cheapness of PY32 et al, the low power of Ambiq chips, the reliability of Atmel/Microchip, the USB3 on CH569, the potential true MCU-level-SoC-capability on AG32, etc. When compared with these, RP chips are frankly not innovative at all (PIO does not unlock much actual capabilities besides party tricks). Combined with the general culture of people hyping RPi Pico chips, it results in a culture of ignorance and hype.

Erratas alone aren't a big deal, but the fact that they're happening with such basic things and for no innovation is not a good sign. We shouldn't give RPi a pass just because "it's the good old RPi that we know"

I completely agree. I can't handle watching his videos for long, for similar reasons.

However besides the personal dislike, I think its worthwhile to stop giving so much merit based on advertising "open source" or "effort" or "presentation" etc, because frankly many of these YouTube "makers" and the "maker community" are misguiding a lot of people to make bad designs and waste time and resources. People ought to value correctness and quality a bit more, lest our things become even more enshittified than they are now. One would think that hobbies would be a refuge from disposable low quality shit... yet we get RPi Pico et al (which are arguably getting less shitty but still laughable compared to actually good MCU products) and the people who claim to "out do the big corp" by using a Raspberry Pi with an SDR dongle and saying they achieved $50000 of capability with $60 in parts..

Case in point, the Opulo PNP systems are significantly overpriced and have amateurish mechanical as well as circuit design that are worse than cheaper systems like Pandaplacer in terms of reliability and performance.

QFN packages would not benefit much from this (you cannot make much more than a basic breakout board, whose same purpose is better fulfilled with one of those SMD adapters from aliexpress)

And regarding high-speed digital buses... are we being genuine here? Just the fact that you cannot have meaningful design over ground return paths with this thing makes any moderately fast digital link unfeasible. Best you'll be able to manage is regular speed SPI (which also does not need a board like this), you can forget about RGMII, ULPI, LVDS, MIPI, SLVS-EC, or anything else for that matter.

Yeah but like FPGA fabric can also be programmed (sometimes by actual software like on Zynq or Stratix SoCs), would you call those bit banging too?

I see your point but, they're really not selling much more than golf carts and drones. If they go all-out with selling their actual military hardware (which they have a large stockpile and production capacity of), it would be get much more difficult for Ukraine to keep up the balance without increasing support from the west.

It's really quite interesting to see China being labelled as imperialist mean while the western powers have been colonizing and meddling in all kinds of affairs for generations... (see Operation Northwoods as one example)

> "Corporations," in this context, is just another way to say people.

No, I think its referring more to the systems that describe how the group of people behave. It is an important distinction.

Also, the idea that effective and lasting change requires significant personal sacrifice and enduring hardship is yet another thing that corporations and politicians would like you to believe. It's great for causing inaction through human nature. Its effectiveness can be seen in anti-riot measures like tear gas or less-certainly-lethal munitions, asking people the question of "do you believe enough to endure THIS?" It's a rhetorical question.

The coming update has trains and factories! The game is mainly about managing compounding growth with discrete losses (having more land and cities increases you population cap, and your population follows a logistic curve, so you want to reserve an amount of population to maintain growth, and it's programmed so that you want to use a discrete amount for attacking instead of a constant trickle)

A good strategy that works well for me is to prioritize moneymaking and win by cleaning up a nuclear wasteland. Some tips for that strategy aka trademaxxing:

* The fastest way to make money is to get lots of ports and ally with people near and far. Boats give you more gold depending on their distance traveled

* Set up turtled-in bases on islands and have warships patrolling near them to shoot down potential land invasions. This combined with your small land area will make it less appealing for the big countries to focus on you

* Once you have enough funds for a MIRV, maintain strategic deterrence by having multiple missile silos - so you can launch the MIRVs any time

* Continue to trademaxx and wait for the big countries to nuke each other into oblivion

* Once the time is right (and you have enough funds for multiple MIRVs), move in to clean up the nuclear wasteland. Get some cities but don't spend too much money. If another country starts attacking you at this point, you can MIRV them again. You are also much more resistant to MIRVs since your assets are in money instead of structures and can rebuild quickly

Yes, hard silicon will be another magnitude more performant than FPGAs and GPUs, but ASICs properly take on negative value when they're no longer profitable to mine with. (Note that efficiency won't be much better at the same process node. You can just pump more power through each ASIC die)

Edit - I misread your comment. ASIC designers will use FPGAs to test their design but it won't be optimized for FPGAs which have a different logic-and-memory characteristic than ASICs. There aren't many great SHA256 FPGA implementations, largely because there's not that much demand for one

I know why you're downvoted, but it's true, the author is not using FPGAs correctly.

Quite slow. It's largely due to the author using FPGAs wrong. Clocking down a 7-series Artix to 62.5 MHz means the design is not pipelined correctly/enough. My friend got 1 SHA256 hash per cycle at 300 MHz on 7 series, but slightly fewer of the design fit on a chip. Thruput would easily be in the GH/s range.

Keep in mind RTX4090 is 5 nm process node and has a lot more transistors and memory than XC7A100T, which is 28 nm. That's a huge difference in terms of dynamic performance. Also, the two are also released 10 years apart. If you compare RTX4090 against a similarly modern UltraScale part from Xilinx, I believe the FPGA can be notably faster than RTX4090.

Integrating over a longer time to get more accurate light measurements of the a scene has been a principal feature of photography. You need to slow down the shutter and open up the aperture in dark conditions.

Combining multiple exposures is not significantly different from a single longer exposure, except the key innovation of combining motion data and digital image stabilization which allows smartphones to approximate longer exposures without the need of a tripod.

We've been in the age of direct RF for a while. The new cellular base stations that Nokia makes are literally eight RFSoC chips connected to 64 power amplifiers. You can get one for yourself for pretty cheap: https://www.realdigital.org/hardware/rfsoc-4x2

The reference signal generated by Si5351A is used to clock two flip flops which I believe are used to generate a 90° quadrature local oscillator (LO) which enters a dual 1-4 multiplexer acting as a Tayloe quadrature mixer. And as you know, the nonlinear switching action introduces frequency products and allows frequency conversion.

This is a pretty clever system. The RF is low enough frequency that faster logic chips can be used effectively. I recommend getting yourself a cheap receive-only SDR for around 15 bucks and play with GNURadio, if you want to get more familiar with DSP for telecommunications/radio detection

"Union" is another good example

It's not hard at all to get good uA/MHz numbers, it just increases die size and cost. You can push it pretty far by tuning the synthesis, for example the same Cortex-M4 core on the Ambiq Apollo3 Blue advertises "6 μA/MHz executing from flash or RAM at 3.3 V"

These are magnitudes of difference across the Espressif, Nordic, and Ambiq parts. The difference in price is also proportional.

https://ambiq.com/apollo3-blue/

I'm wondering if we looked at the same document... there is no FPGA and it is PIC32MK0512GPK064 instead of STM32. It's also 12 bits at nowhere near 100 Msps, being only 18 Msps.

Did you use the aid from AI to write the comment, or are you referring to another device?

Consumer image/video processing is one of the few applications where requirements of low cost, high performance, and tolerance of poor software support and low reliability converge. It makes a lot of sense that StarFive would target that application. Most of the SoC vendors from China are competing in this same space, like Allwinner, Rockchip, Goke, Ingenic, SigmaStar, Ambarella, Fullhan, Xiongmai, etc.

Seconding this. I found out that I get mini-nightmares and get woken up if I try to sleep immediately after a hot shower, so I switched to morning showers. This also helps me set a hard wake up time since the shower gets me awake

What does POSSE stand for?

I think your sentiment encapsulates the hypocrisy of modern people where the systems have developed over thousands of years to further and further insulate us from all the less pretty aspects of life, to a point where we largely forget the fact that we shit and kill things for food and greed. Our meat comes pre-portioned on a polystyrene tray and wrapped under cellophane. Just abstract blocks of yummy protein. We also built garbage collection and sewer systems that lets most of us forget about the waste we produce. Out of sight, out of mind.

Humanely dispatching chicken is probably among the most mundane, natural, necessary, and arguably righteous aspects of what humans do to survive. While this part of the modern system is certainly not a "bad thing", I still think about my friend's opinion that everyone who eats meat should kill and process a living creature at least once in their life. If they can't handle it, then they shouldn't eat meat

Sorry just saw this. I don't make "conventional" SoMs, but I could help you with some information. What sort of quantity are you looking for?

Usually the value isn't a big deal for "power rails" which expect to have additional capacitors connected elsewhere. However, sometimes microcontrollers expose decoupling pins for use with internal voltage converters and regulators (for example the core voltage on older STM32 parts), and those require very specific values that correspond with the tuning of feedback networks and power converter design within the IC

Most of the advanced chips (the 16 nm that Xilinx uses for UltraScale/+ and below) are flip-chip wafers and have an interposer which is basically a very dense PCB that helps fanning out the extremely dense and small pitch of flip-chip bumps. They will usually include extra low impedance ("landscape" orientation) capacitors on the substrate, which leads to much relaxed PCB decoupling requirements.

Having designed FPGA boards with both their 7th generation parts and their Zynq UltraScale parts, the internal capacitors are such a time and cost saver in terms of being able to fan out more signals without more PCB layers

I can also attest that even relatively "slow" chips like 14 nm FinFET MPUs from Renesas have decoupling caps on the substrate

The title was edited by supposedly HN moderators after I posted it. I actually ran into this youtube channel and thought it was very interesting, since I didn't realize academia seems to make so many mistakes all the time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42728742

I just saw the two comments in question and find it to be absolutely hilarious.

A serious answer to your question - no, these are in the "whoop" weight-class. Warhead carrying drones for anti-personnel and anti-armor are usually 10 inch and up, meaning they are using "10 inch" frames and likely 3115 motors, with 6S battery packs. Of course, there's endless variation, but that seems to be a optimum combination

Where did you get the number of 4x from? It seems different than what I understand, but I don't have any sources handy.

"Modern electronics are more fragile" issue really is not overblown. One of my peers have tested different types of non volatile memory in LEO and the TLC NAND sample gets totally wiped by ionizing radiation within the first week. CPUs, while being mostly logic and less susceptible to low energy events, can still be easily destroyed especially if radiation causes latchup. MMICs and discrete devices have huge features in comparison yes, but the junctions still degrade notably under radiation.

From my opinion as someone working on LEO satellite hardware, it's easy to have opinions about stuff like correctness and reliability because it is not naturally intuitive and usually requires observation of many samples over a long time that it doesn't affect most engineers. However, I've definitely seen a strong correlation between the effort spent on correctness and reliability, and the success of missions.

But this is about the overall engineering of Voyager, not just the programming. Also, I'm skeptical how much better modern hardware will fare in deep space conditions, considering the use of finer and more fragile electronics. Since you're talking about general people instead of specialists, also consider how the median software developer seem to focus less on correctness, reliability, and optimization, compared to the standards of spacecraft engineering.