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Alvaro and Jen invited me to discuss the reverse engineering aspect of the Mega IIe project on the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast. We focused on some of the finer details about the Mega-II chip’s operation. The discussion followed many rabbit holes. (Totally my fault and not theirs!) We also talked a little bit about how to (not) identify unlabeled capacitors when reverse engineering hardware. The to-long-did-not-read (tldr;) is that for multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs), there…

On April 26th and 27th, the first year of KiCad KiCon kicks off in the Windy City. Join me and 26 others for talks about the open source electronics CAD tool. The list of speakers is impressive. There are many names which I follow on social media and some I recognize from the KiCad team. For example, Wayne Stambaugh is the KiCad project leader and has one of the keynote talks. You can see the…

The concept of high end varies depending on what you are talking about and who you talk too. In this Evaluation Engineering Evaluation Engineering article the author discusses high-end oscilloscopes. I am mentioned several times in this article as part of my day job at Rhode and Schwarz. There I am a product manager for oscilloscopes in North America. We have scopes that range from 50 MHz to 8 GHz. For a little bit of…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLF1QMVMJi8 If I were a professional actor, I would feel typecast at this point in my career. Whenever someone wants to talk about Arduino, Oscilloscopes or Capacitors, they call me! In this case, element14 asked me to do two videos on how to replace multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) with Polymers. Polymers are an interesting capacitor type. What is usually called a “polymer” is better a called a “polymer electrolytic.” The reason for that detail is…

Looking through my parts boxes, I have counted at least 15 distinct “Arduino boards” in my collection. Either they are variants of the Uno form factor or they have different processors from the 8-bit boards. That number easily goes to 30 if I include boards with just the “Arduino header” on them. This pile of microcontrollers got me thinking, how does anyone ever choose the right board? For example, I have had several people tell…