Notices by Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange), page 7

@whitequark @mmu_man and a very small handful of aerospace etc applications where the environmental and financial impacts of putting up a new satellite or crashing a plane due to a fraction of a percent change of tin whiskers outweigh those of the few grams of lead used in the solder

Random thought: if a nuke plant worker has a nuclear medicine procedure done, do they have to stay home on medical leave until it's completely decayed/excreted or are there policies to handle hot employees?

Anyone know of a microwave VCO (I'm not picky on exact center frequency range as i can up or down convert, but ideally around 4.5 GHz) with several hundred MHz modulation bandwidth?

Or more generally, what's a good way to create an FM modulated signal with 100+ MHz of modulation BW given an analog control input?

@rubylith so adc + FPGA+ dds, while architecturally straightforward, is way too expensive

@rubylith goal is to take a low voltage analog signal and send it over a 10Gbase-SR sfp+ for the lowest possible transmitter cost (sub $100 target) and highest possible bandwidth (100 MHz target).

Receiver cost is of no concern, comparatively. The goal is fiber isolated probing of sketchy/ high voltage signals so it's expected you'll be blowing up transmitters routinely but the receiver can cost a lot more as you won't be damaging them often.

@rubylith i want fm because sfps are limiting buffers not linear, so I can't just am modulate the laser like the system in the recent TSP vid did.

So I need to take the analog input and turn it into a squarewave pulse train with roughly 50% duty cycle (so it's dc balanced), roughly 4.5-5 GHz frequency range so optics meant for 10GbE can pass them, and do it on the cheap

@nixCraft "A program begun early this year to bring employees back in the office five days per week, among tech's most stringent, has failed to generate sufficient attrition"

This is one of the first cases I've seen where this was explicitly stated as a *goal* of an RTO program.

@whitequark maybe one day but i dont have the time near term

@whitequark With the big boy toys at work? No doubt.

In my basement? Less sure. I'd need a good reason and a fair bit of time and still no guarantees of success.

With the FIB my friends are trying to get running? Probably, whenever that is.

I'd have to do a fair bit of RE since I don't know where the AVR lock bits are stored (physically); I know what a lot of PIC security fuse macros look like so it's just a matter of finding the right bit in the array to fib (or going shotgun and UVing the whole thing).

What's the target, how many do you have, why do you want to dump it, etc?

@whitequark I am not aware of any attempts, successful or not, against AVRs.

UV fuse reset should work on any Microchip PIC made on their 350nm 160K node although I've only ever personally done it on the 12F683.

At least some AVRs are immune to UV reset attacks because the polarity of the lock bit is such that UV sets, rather than clearing, the lock. I do not know how widespread this is across the family. PICs descend from EPROM based parts so they had the 1 state be blank.

@whitequark
ROUTER
ROUTER
CLIMB
CLIMB NOW

USB-C JESD204 alt mode

First time I've seen a product ship with a branded desiccant pack

Biblically accurate BGA footprint.

You know, for those times when you really need 6865 balls on your BGA package, which is 77mm on a side despite shrinking the ball pitch from the standard 1mm to 0.92mm so it wouldn't be even bigger.

I'm so glad I'm never going to have to design a board for this monster (it's a Versal so exactly zero chance of me ever wanting to use it even if I got one for free)

@whitequark To be fair, there's several different types of power outage here and some are more excusable than others.

"We shut down a transmission line serving a major city that we didn't want to pay for maintenance on, because we don't want to be on the hook for starting an apocalyptic fire storm" - inexcusable

"Our generation capacity can't keep up with all the slop generators and buttcoin miners so we're gonna disconnect a bunch of houses to load shed" - inexcusable

"A few houses got knocked offline by a tree landing on an above-ground line" - pretty much unavoidable in any large rural area where burying the lines isn't cost effective.

@whitequark Where I am, the first 2 are very rare (although they're very common in e.g. California).

The third is an every-few-months occurrence. My neighborhood is served by buried power lines but the medium-voltage lines from the substation to the neighborhood are above ground and occasionally get taken out by a storm (or in one case an errant driver).

The beakers go smaller than the flasks.

Here's a 5 ml and a 500 μl. MicroSD for scale.

Ever seen smol cute lab glassware before? Now you have.

@whitequark obligatory

@whitequark @s0 and now i'm picturing a character designer screen where you get to choose AMBA, Avalon, or Wishbone instead of a gender