#hardwareishard — Public Fediverse posts

*It's a whole lot easier to satirically write about satirical sci-fi computers than it is to build one #hardwareishard medium.com/@bruces/il-v...

“Il Versificatore Sixty Years ...

Can you identify the moment when I moved the cable that was blocking the case fan blades? 🤔

#TrueNAS #HardwareIsHard

Everyone say it with me:

Multi-controller I2C **NEVER** ends well

Note: I did not do this, someone's debugging something and strongly implying to me this exists

#HardwareIsHard

Reminder: Multiple screen sessions open to the same serial port results in WEIRD stickiness in the serial port interaction.

This gets much better when you realize what you've done and stop doing it.

#HardwareIsHard

Another episode of Hardware is Hard™. This time from a company that already made a successful hardware product: Panic abandons Playdate Stereo Dock for the time being.
https://play.date/stereo-dock/
#Playdate #HardwareIsHard

Sooooo kiddo has pinewood derby coming up.

There's an adults open class.

Aaaaaand my car is going to have wifi because I can! Also addressable RGB lights, and an IMU.

Being an adult is weeeeird sometimes

#HardwareIsHard #Scouting #PineWoodDerby

Well #HardwareIsHard strikes again

Rebuilt a Middle Atlantic network + local control PDU, sent it off to my parents and when I went to fire it up there it was DOA.

*sigh* ok, I had replaced some caps but not all probably the others went bad in transit.

Sent it back home

Just got it, and started tearing it apart, found some things had come loose, fine, took out the board, was doing some testing, put it all back together aaaaand...

...

Works fine again. I guess I'll send it back to my parents, and probably need to have someone do some onhands stuff there. Fun times.

"We Can, and We Must, Clown on the Humane AI Pin Forever"

#ai #badAI #ml #machinelearning #LLMs #ambientAI #hardwareIsHard #fail

https://www.404media.co/we-must-never-forget-how-dumb-the-humane-ai-pin-is/

So I've got a #SparkFun weather module I've been running #MicroPython on for a couple of years. It's almost perfect and I'd leave it alone except that:

* MicroPython doesn't support power management *facepalm*

* MQTT has been the Achilles heel on this project, and when something goes wonky in a few places it utterly misses what's going on and can't reset itself against @homeassistant so it juat kinda disappears.

Sooooo close

So I'm doing a quick rewrite into #ESPHome and accepting that I was only mostly successful on the original code.

#HardwareIsHard

Building up a box related to work from my brother's bricked ASRock Rack C25504di (c2000 bug) that I unbricked with the help of two resistors and the TPM header.

3D printed up a mounting adapter for the m.2 adapters for the Supermicro SC505 case, which I think turned out super well. Need to make a slight adjustment before I publish it. There's enough Z height to stack them, but I'm not doing that on this go.

This will end up with a Tenstorrent e75 Grayskull based AI card in it. Not 100% sure what I'll use the AI cores for yet, maybe try and get it talking to Frigate?

All told, amusing little build.

Update: uploaded the project after the couple of minor edits:
https://www.printables.com/model/702830-supermicro-sc505-case-m2-adapter-mount-adapter

#HardwareIsHard #AI #Tenstorrent #3DPrinting

Because I noticed I hadn't pushed these out yet:

An @olimex ESP32-POE based thermocouple hat based on the MAX31856 that I'm using for HVAC monitoring

https://github.com/warthog9/esp32-poe-thermocouple-hat

and

An ESP32 based Vending Machine controller I've specifically built to run my Halloween vending machine so we can do full sized canday bars, a light display, track how many "kids" we get *AND* I get to go trick-or-treating with my own kiddo all at the same time.

https://github.com/warthog9/halloween-vending-machine

I should add proper READMEs to them, get some pictures, etc but the important bit, the License, is actually embedded on the respective boards (CC-BY-SA 4.0) so I'll deal with the rest later ;-)

#HardwareIsHard

Ok hardware folks, a ponderance for you: I've a design I'm using the MAX31856 on, it's lovely *EXCEPT* it has a tendency to wig out and claim a sensor is over/under voltage and space out. Might be EMI, could be something else, could just be I've botched the deaign somehow too.

So with that in mind, if you needed multiple thermocouples on a board, what's your recommendation? MCP9600? Something else?

#HardwareIsHard

I'm clearly getting old: I don't like janking around to get something to work poorly when there's a clearly better way. This worked sooooooooooooooo much better than my janky attempts to flash it

#HardwareIsHard

I'm debating if it's impressive, or insane that I now have excessive temperature monitoring on one of the mini-splits ALONG with damper control that's all IP based.

#HardwareIsHard

Ok I've a gripe to pick with a childs toy:

There's plenty of space here, why did they not silk screen the pin assignments on the IC blocks?!

I mean sure, it's true to life that you have to glare at the datasheet all the time, but even basic modules these days sneak pinouts onto the boards!

#HardwareIsHard

@trini ugh yeah, or lack of serial numbers in devices...

#HardwareIsHard *PARTICULARLY* when its cheap

@indrora WELP...

#HardwareIsHard

So debugging progress, there is in fact PROGRESS!

Disabling the motor sense clears up that issue, yay.

Wiring the relay the way I now think it should does seem to work... however it didn't work on the first try. Poked around and I used a mosfet instead of a transistor to trigger it. D'oh. Swapped in a transistor I found in the spool stash and it click clacks exactly as I expect.

So these boards are recoverable, I need to:

• white wire the relays, which will be obnoxious but doable.

• Replace the mosfets with transistors

• Disable the motor running sense.

Not ideal, and I'm debating if it's worth it to me to re-run the boards. I probably will, but it's somewhat silly too ;-)

#hardware #HardwareIsHard

Well I have discovered the 4th bug on the halloween vending machine board. I think these 5 boards are salvageable, just not perfect and they'll be white wires to make them work. Double check tomorrow, but if they are I'll offer them up to folks.

Bug #1: messed up the footprints on some LEDs. 0603 Metric != 0603 SAE. That was fixed before production thankfully

Bug #2: I had forgotten some mounting holes, fixed before production

Bug #3: Wired the relay to the wrong side *facepalm*. Testing tomorrow

Bug #4: Wired the motor running sense to 12v vs. the motor negative, which means that the system always thinks the motor is running *double facepalm* Testing tomorrow by disabling the motor sense entirely.

Once I confirm this last bit, I'll do a new run and it should be sorted for 2023! \o/

#Hardware #HardwareIsHard

Last round of parts are in aaaaand my IoT plant watering board is complete!

3 more to do up, but now to finish figuring out how this works on the indoor plants (*coughs* more parts on order...) Aaaaand I should be good to go soon!

#Hardware #HardwareIsHard

Mental note: these green leds are... Ummmmm... *BRIGHT*

#Hardware #HardwareIsHard

Kept being confused on why this ssd1306 screen I want to use couldn't be talked to from this esp32...

Turns out that thing that should be ground, apparently doesn't go anywhere, and somehow DRC didn't catch it, and of course I TOTALLY looked at the gerbers before sending them out, right?

*facepalm*

Well at least there is plenty of wiggle room here for an easy bodge wire fix, but I'm going to feel dumb for a bit.

#HardwareIsHard #Hardware

Who needs black friday when there is soldering to do?!

#Hardware #HardwareIsHard #ESP8266

As a reminder to everyone: it sure does help in debugging a new board where you can't seem to talk to ANY of the i2c devices to ensure the appropriate power rail that actually *POWERS* those devices is plugged in...

I'll be over here facepalming at myself for missing that last night

#HardwareIsHard

Not the prettiest board I've made, but i think it turned out ok.

Now to make 9 more of them and scatter them around my house replacing zwave sensors I've grown cranky at.

#Hardware #HardwareIsHard

So turns out that if you are using micropython and umqtt.robust it try/except catches the error before passing it back up. If something goes wonky it just repeatedly pounds on trying to perform that mqtt action but never really lets anyone above it know. This can cause it to just sit there and spin.

Found this when my weather station kept just wandering off and stop talking to anything when the AP would firmware update or reboot, you know events that shouldn't be a huge deal. Solution: revert to simple, trap the error myself, force a disconnect on the session and on the next attempt to publish reconnect. Means data loss, but also means the device isn't just gone and never coming back.

#hardware #HardwareIsHard #MicroPython

In #hardware #HardwareIsHard news, open hardware projects getting released from me:

Sensornode Cyclops - https://github.com/warthog9/sensornode-cyclops
a quick esp8266 node to get a bme680, tsl2591, and mpu6050 into #HomeAssistant. Bonus it would make a decent soldering kit for a faire that builds things.

Serenity Doorbell Sensor - https://github.com/warthog9/serenity-doorbell-sensor
ESP32-C3 based (could be re-worked for esp8266 though) that can read the a/c bell push at the doorbell. Bonus points siphones power from the doorbell transformer