Recent Posts

1

Power/Renewable Energy/EV's / Re: Aussie Fast Charger Company Tritium Goes Bust

« Last post by floobydust on Today at 03:57:52 am »

I would say that is a blip - down 40% since July and I don't see anyone handling the EV party coming to an abrupt end, well.
Canada we roll ahead blind as a bat, announce new battery plants after billions in subsidies. Meanwhile, BYD is preparing to decimate the low end. Tesla has china BYD nipping at its heels, actually Europe is terrified too of those cheap EV's decimating their car industry and panic adding tariffs to protect it.

But battery chargers, inverters are a technology in power electronics. The chinese are masters of the cheap, short lifetime, race to the bottom vanilla tech, whatever they can copy. Their inverters/chargers are junk and not what people want. I would expect the Tritium products to be decent, reliable and higher tech designs.

I wonder if anyone other than china would buy them and resurrect?

2

General Technical Chat / Re: Russia and China to Build a Nuclear Plant on the Moon.

« Last post by jonovid on Today at 03:53:14 am »

luna-concrete is going be a thing,  the problem is in finding water. 

IMO in this age of micro engineering robotics.
anybody with a modified 3 stage intercontinental ballistic missile on the back of a modified semi-trailer
can put a shoebox sized satellite-robot-camera on the moon.  if your smart enough? looking at you Kim Jong Un.

3

Test Equipment / Re: Hacking the Rigol DHO800/900 Scope

« Last post by mrisco on Today at 03:44:56 am »

Are you continuing with their work or doing something different?

I'm making changes directly to the latest Sparrow.apk version.

4

Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff / Re: PC74hct4046ap Replacement

« Last post by dj_holmes on Today at 03:43:39 am »

Thanks for the input:

1, its not my design
2, the colock works fine already, but I'm trying to get "more" out of it as its in a very important section.
3, I have no idea how to redesign it.

I'm just trying to get the lowest noise/jitter out of this VCO setup. I can't change the other custom chip only the VCO chip which is PC74hct4046ap made by Philips.

I have a scope and I did see the output 11.2XX frequency and it was pretty badish. I'm new to this and just want to get a better frequency output!  Thanks

5

FPGA / Re: Lattice has silently removed free iCEcube2 license and now charging $471

« Last post by asmi on Today at 03:42:57 am »

How did it work before? For how long was a free license valid? Did it require internet connection to run?

Lattice licensing generally speaking is based on license files that must be renewed every year. You don't need an internet connection to run the tools, but you need one to ask for the license - they send it by mail.

Technically you can request a license from any device, it doesn't have to be the actual target pc - as long as you know the MAC address, that's all you needed. So it's possible to use the license on a totally offline/isolated pc.

6

Microcontrollers / Re: Routines to convert binary to BCD in C code

« Last post by SiliconWizard on Today at 03:39:04 am »

Is there an actual problem that's trying to be solved here?

Not really.  Binary to decimal conversion is considered "slow" and requiring "surprisingly much" machine-level code, compared to arithmetic operations, so these can be useful in some cases, but that's about it.

Library implementations, especially various printf() implementations, are written for correctness and not for efficiency, so when you work with smaller microcontrollers, especially 8-bit ones (AVRs, PICs, 8051s), a custom implementation can be useful.  More annoyingly, most standard library functions use arbitrary precision arithmetic and dynamic memory allocation during conversion of floating-point numbers.

Even on fully hosted C environments, it turns out that if you read numeric data from text files, the standard C library string-to-number conversions (strtod(), strtol(), scanf() and their variants) become the bottleneck, when you have enough (megabytes) of data.  Then, too, "optimized" conversion functions can reduce the load times to a fraction of what they would be using standard C conversion functions.

Yep. scanf() being the absolute dog of them all.

And sometimes the "simplest" solution is actually also the most efficient. As I said before, the simple approach to count powers of ten, requiring "only" up to 9 iterations per digit with just a subtraction and an increment per iteration, will be faster on most targets that do not have a hardware multiplier (with which most optimizing compiler will implement the divide by 10), or on which the hardware multiplier is a multi-cycle operation. In particular, I've used the solution I mentioned earlier on AVR targets and it led to a lot smaller code size, and much faster too. Don't let the fact that it looks too "naive" deter you - looking at the generated assembly if in doubt will help picking the most efficient approach, in simple cases like this.

7

Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff / Re: Vacuum Fluorescent Display Driver

« Last post by floobydust on Today at 03:34:41 am »

I would look at the G1 with a scope to see actual voltages. G1 might be not be driven (floating) or the 518's shift register is wonky.
This thread, it sorta seems like the OP found VFD had internal leakage but not sure about the English, his bench test of the VFD:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/hp-agilent-53181a-display-error/msg1399630/#msg1399630
Inside the VFD is a set of close PCB traces that very rarely have some ion migration happen.

8

Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff / Re: PC74hct4046ap Replacement

« Last post by BrianHG on Today at 03:24:19 am »

Are you sure the source of your noise is the 74HCT4046?

What about the VCO feedback input from your 'Custom Chip'.  That loop filter with the series diode doesn't look like it can create ever guarantee a super-tight loop.  That 4.7meg as a pull-down is kinda like a weak open circuit.  I would be surprised if that circuit could even be made stable unless you have a fluke of a tuned circuit.  I would toss out that design and do things properly, then you will have no oscillator noise when using any 74HC/HCT4046 variants.

9

FPGA / Re: If Lattice iCE40UltraPlus has DDR primitives like ODDR in Xilinx?

« Last post by KrudyZ on Today at 03:23:08 am »

Looking at the IO buffer diagram you can see that there are DDR structures for both inputs and outputs.
I have used these on the ICE parts and they work fine.
However, I found the PLL to be more limiting in many cases compared to let's say a MACH-XO3 device.
Also, as others have said these parts are pretty slow. Don't expect your main clock speed to be much higher than 60 MHz.

10

Test Equipment / Re: SDS800X HD Wanted Features

« Last post by electronics hobbyist on Today at 03:21:20 am »

Modify the rules for adding wanted features list. "Wanted features" need the "Say Thanks  " of two other people besides yourself, so you need to describe usage scenarios clearly so that you can get the approval of others. "Improvements" can lower standards.
Based on historical experience, manufacturers will not guarantee that they can add new features. Siglent is also constantly adding new functions when releasing new versions, such as the serial analysis function of sds2000x plus.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/siglent-sds2000x-plus-bugs-missing-features-feature-requests/msg5434955/#msg5434955