Notices by Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange)

Is there a good cross-platform way to do ASCII number formatting and parsing using a specific set of rules (e.g. decimal separator is a period, no thousands separator) regardless of the current locale?

Right now libscopehal is constantly messing with the current locale and setting to "C" for serialization and protocol parsing and the user's selected display locale for end user presentation stuff, but this is proving to be a huge can of worms and I'd like to do better.

@dalias @foone This is something I'd love to see more exploration of. Especially with changes over time. Scanlime had that "temporal hex dump" tool but that's only scratching the surface of what could be done UI wise.

I would love a tool integrating with ngscopeclient that lets you look at e.g. QSPI bus activity in a graphical manner to somehow visualize access patterns and understand how a boot image is constructed by dynamic analysis.

@whitequark @dalias I have never seen either outside of an ascii table.

This is a sister part to one I currently use. Thankfully the one I use is a nice sane 676-BGA with a uniform 1mm pitch, not whatever this mess is.

cc: @CursedFootprint

@0xabad1dea @airtower @carlozancanaro I've had quite a few cases where the SOW said we were supposed to be doing X given Y, and then once work started we were told that there was no way in hell we were actually going to get Y.

Sometimes it's like pulling teeth to get a *binary* much less source code. Which is fine if we're allowed to open the widget up and dump the flash, but if the ROE doesn't allow that...

Imagine a video game about academic publishing. Your character starts out as an undergraduate writing assignments in a simple text editor with minimal formatting capabilities, then over time you unlock the skills to add pretty graphics, two-column format, citations, etc.

You could call the mechanic...

... a TeX tree.

@jpm I'm never going to have one here, no space.

I have friends with a shop across town that have, I think, a LumenPNP. It's a WIP, they dont have it working reliably yet. May bring some of my designs there for hybrid placement (e.g. robot the 0402 passives and do the rest by hand since it's less work than setting up feeders for a single part)

@jaseg @jpm Yep I'm honestly thinking of just machine placing 0.47 uF, 4.7 uF, 33R, 470R, 1K, 4.7K, 10K. By volume that's probably 80% or more of the parts on one of my typical designs.

Back side of the line card is pasted! Used my new... 8 8 inch i think? stainless steel drywall knife with great results.

Also running low on solder paste, I only have what's in the syringe on the bench now. Deep storage in the fridge is empty.

Time for a stretch break. This is gonna take a while.

Minor print defect in the very corner, probably insufficient paste at the edge of the array.

Tried to tin the pads with an iron but the board had too much thermal mass. Couldn't use preheat or hot air because board was already pasted.

I did the best I could, it'll probably bridge but I can fix it post reflow.

At some point I'm definitely going to have to start thinking about PnP-ing some of these bigger boards. My designs are already beyond the point most people would have given up on hand assembly.

This one has a touch over 600 components on it. Given the time I'm probably going to try and finish the back side but not do the front tonight.

My wife recently described Chuck-E-Cheese as "kid Vegas".

I couldn't help but agree.

(quick, somebody start an "infosec for toddlers" event there!)

@luckytran Correction: P100 is a better particle filter than N95, and is resistant to oil mists (P vs N designation - not a consideration for wildfires, but it doesn't hurt).

It does not provide any gas protection whatsoever, only particulate. For that, you need something with an activated carbon layer. Ones sold for "odor removal" (like 3M 2097) are better than nothing, proper NIOSH rated organic vapor + acid gas + P100 cartridges in a half-face elastomeric respirator are best (e.g. 3M 60923 cartridges paired with a 6000 series face piece).

These will remove some combustion product VOCs etc, but do not provide any protection against carbon monoxide or insufficient oxygen (this isn't possible without a full SCBA). But unless you're inside a burning building or something, this is not likely to be a huge consideration (there's plenty of air around a wildfire it's just filthy).

Does anyone know of a lab (university or otherwise), preferably close to Seattle, that has a nearfield scanning optical microscope capable of working in reflected-light mode?

#ScienceMastodon #microscopy

@dalias @bipartisan @jbhughes I'm OK with tax exemption for bona fide charities that have nothing to do with politics, but not churches.

Think more like MSF or your local volunteer fire department.

@dalias @gsuberland I thought they had managed to actually factor arbitrary numbers up to like 20 by this point?

Anybody have recommendations on a (ideally FOSS) Android photo viewing application to replace Google photos?

ALL it has to do is display images by timestamp within folders and let me navigate and maybe delete them. That's it.

No cloud "backup" nagging, no filters, no QR scanning, no tagging, no searching, no ads, no phoning home, no AI BS. If it opens a socket to the internet for any reason it's disqualified.

Layer 2 ground plane, including various cutouts under connector pads and BGA lands for impedance matching