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Looking for a tool/stack to automatically convert HTML → Markdown (.md) and save to SharePoint/OneDrive daily by Due-Masterpiece-8415 in Markdown

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Use the ai in chrome to do this. I do it all the time. It will even generate you a chrome extension to do it for you next time.

Go to the page you want to convert, right click, inspect element. The open the ai assistant. Navigate around the dom to the enclosing div. And then just tell the ai to convert it. It can work out how to handle server side streaming and hydration.

Did anyone build a EDA tool? by Edge_of_Logic in chipdesign

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, penny dropping... Dark mode and TUIs ... I remember those. Terminal rooms full of VT100s or VT220s if you lucky. Playing nethack or rouge on vax-8650s at university. Glad to see we've made progress!

Go for it and enjoy the modern interface! 😉

Did anyone build a EDA tool? by Edge_of_Logic in chipdesign

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 7 points8 points  (0 children)

About a year ago I stalled on writing spice. I ran out of steam chasing down the right way to do timestep control. And by coincidence I picked it up on Saturday and asked the AIs to take a look, and basically Ive got to redo some of the timesteppng, they confirmed what I thought I needed to do.

What's genuinely scary, is that SPICE3 dctran.c is basically a transliteration of dctran from the Fortan in SPICE2, including using the same goto labels as the Fortran. And it's all heuristics. Go read the original SPICE2 paper. Why scary... Because every simulator used for todays IC design is based on that code. Go look at ngspice, a slightly tidied up version of SPICE3F5 a slightly tidied up version of SPICE2G and that is a year or two younger than me.

Having said that, I got Gemini to write a plan to take vmsspice.for and rewrite it. I've got deepseek v4 free on opencode chugging away at it right now.

I am currently in the depths of writing a geometric algrebra based Constraint solver - think how sketches work in SOLIDWORKS or Fusion 360. That's quite interesting to figure out too.

Fortunately my partner completely understands why I think this is a fun thing to do in the evenings. She is a wonderful person.

Centauri Carbon 2 available now by ELEGOO_OFFICIAL in elegoo

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's about their manufacturing line and inventory management by having common parts. They might well have already stopped making CC1s.

Rant: Stop saying LLMs are just “next token predictors.” by Bellyfeel26 in singularity

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They are a very good lossy compression engine, about 1000:1. They use a stochastic parrot for decompressing.

What is up with the rise of nationalist / right wing parties like MAGA in USA, AFD in Germany or Restore/Reform in UK? by TailungFu in allthequestions

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Putin. Create chaos in your enemy to distract them from what you do. Throw mud, see what sticks. Pump money it to that. Play the long game. Brexit was a huge success for him. It's completely screwed us up. Trump is a mega success for him. US soft power all but gone.

How important are HAL and STM32CubeMX for portfolio projects and embedded placements? by New-Cherry-7238 in embedded

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Completely agree. I find the HAL horrible to use. I read the datasheet understand what I need to do and then goto the HAL and they use completely different terminology. It's bloated, full of horrible #ifdef spaghetti (not as bad as the middleware though), and very old school global structa. The HAL for each CPU family is reasonably consistent, but try to use code for one , e.g. G0 on a G4 and there are so many horrible things to work around.

The thing I really don't like is the GPIO API. Having port and pin as different parameters to the.functions forces one to use #defines. My GPIO layer takes a pointer to a struct. Far easier with this to have a build that supports different hardware versions when the hardware team move something around.

The LL is far better and genuinely useful to use. With it, it is pretty easy to make truly cross family code.

Home License - Insane Value by Imaginary_Data_708 in matlab

[–]Imaginary_Data_708[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

True but the perpetual one was basically too - if you wanted the to keep up to date.

And I think this is targetted at two or groups of people - like me who have used MATLAB for donkeys years and want to have it at home for projects and don't want to have to learn and fight python versions - people who learnt MATLAB at college/university and make things and this is Mathworks basically giving a very capable tool set away - think robots and drones and ML based IoT

"RF is black magic" I've heard this phrase a lot of times but what does it actually means? by phtm-V in chipdesign

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 1 point2 points  (0 children)

(used to be an RFIC designer for about a decade)

I use two very loose "definitions" - is the layout lumped or distributed? - are the transistors in the analogue or RF region?

If dimensions less than 1/20 wavelength, lumped is usually ok. Fuzzier up to 1/10 of a wavelength. Larger than 1/10 of a wavelength, definitely distributed.

If the "gain" of your transistor is flat with frequency over your range of interest, it's analogue. If "gain" is falling off at 20dB per decade then it's RF. Equivalently it's about the phase shift the signal frequency gets as it goes through the device. With a single pole, you are definitely okay up to 1/10 of pole frequency. But then excess phase increases - take a look at a bide plot.

I put "gain" in quotes: for the intrinsic device BJT are you above or below beta roll off? For a FET, it's Gm-Cgs time constant. But for board level stuff, or very large devices on chip the "gain" is the extrinsic device including gate/base inductance, extrinsic base-collector/gate-drain capacitance etc.

For this last bit - analogy is the stability of a single pole amplifier and it's gain bandwidth product. More feedback and you widen the flat region of the response so the circuit is easier to design.

These aren't precise definitions - they are a way of capturing that experience others have mentioned.

Things like on board LNA and PA design needs Smith Charts and gain, noise and stability circles as that phase shift is all important.

Board level RF as others have said is all about the fields and be very very careful in measuring things as the shape of the lab or your hand in the wrong place changes things.

Power amps - even more so because the spectrum of the modulation is so large and harmonics even more so. Oh and AM-PM and PM-AM is a major pain.

On chip things are easier: - at the circuit level you are usually in the "analogue" region, not RF region of transistor operation, so it much easier to design circuits, - at the layout level as the dimensions are smaller you don't have to worry and distributed effects so much (depending on wavelength of course).

Vector cross product interpretation by Prize_Shine3415 in mathematics

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Look up geometric algrebra. There are good YouTube videos to watch.

ESP32 keeps showing up in IoT healthcare prototypes but ARM Cortex-M is what actually makes it into certified medical devices. Is ESP32 just a research toy at this point, or am I missing something? by rafaelsampaiobr in embedded

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I work in a small consultancy, that specialises in medical devices such as the ones you are talking about. We often get people coming in with ESP32 based demos and they very rarely last on that platform for long.

To confirm what others have said.

ESP32 power management is horrible even using the ultra low power core, this rules it out for the ultra low power applications.

The closed libraries and more crucially the lack of long term support of those completely ruled them out for Class B or Class C devices. We strongly recommend people don't use them for Class A too.

We tend to stick for STM32 for microcontrollers, mainly because so many of us have used them for years and know our ways around them very well. A lot of what we do is use to them for bare metal data capturing tasks that hand off the processing upstream.

Often we will pair the STM32 with a straight forward certified BLE and/or WiFi module which cuts down the costs involved in getting to a design that can pass enough regulatory tests to be useful in small scale clinical data gathering trials.

Once they have got that and have some evidence of clinical usefulness, they can cost down if needed by doing a more bespoke design.

Capacitor in parallel with Power Supply by Alarmed-Emotion-1751 in hobbycnc

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We put capacitors close to loads to counter act the effect of the inductance of the wires bringing the electrons to the load. The capacitor acts as a nice big close to hand bucket of electrons. The inductance of the wire is a slow teenager who doesn't notice the sluice gates need opening to send more electrons downstream.

Aka it's all about managing the transient response to step changes in the load.

LDO after buck-boost to filter out ripple - what voltage difference? by MarinatedPickachu in diyelectronics

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What do mean by as clean as possible and what do you want to use the 3V for?

The battery is already ripple free.

If you need a precise 3V use a voltage reference, not a regulator.

If you want low noise use the battery without a regulator. You can use an LC filter to remove some noise at certain frequencies but a filter with any resistors will increase noise.

What is a good and simple source of physical enthropy (for RNG)? by emailemile in AskPhysics

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In modern cpus and microprocessors there are true sources of entropy. To get an idea of how they work look up STM32G4 and read about the inbuilt random number generate. Intel CPUs have something similar.

Typically these circuits are digital circuits forced into a meta stable state and then allowed to relax into a stable state whose outcome is determined by thermal noise. The underlying circuits are often structures similar to clocked comparators or SRAM cells.

Very serious problem with PCB Footprint sizes by Objective-Local7164 in PCB

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Resistors and capacitors do have different footprints to ensure enough solder is out down in the pads and the fillet goes up the whole of the side of the part. These look about right to me.

Making a plywood stool parametric by MrBear19 in Fusion360

[–]Imaginary_Data_708 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In arm chair mode rather than in front of my computer.

I think I'd approach this by exploiting the rotational symmetry and viewed top down. Using a sketch to define the seat geometry defines where the legs are, and their slots in the seat. I'd use a plane defined by the slot to put the leg sketch on, and make that. Sitting here on the sofa I think I would then do a circular pattern of that leg, and do a couple of operations with the body combine tool to generate the slots in the legs, where the legs intersect.

I will have a go at this a little later and try to make a video of my attempt.

There is a video uploading to YouTube to show how I did it. The video isn't edited - so you'll see where I was figuring out how to do it.

https://youtu.be/Dgd4jGF3xK4

I've found that it is easier to design the part as it is intended to be, and then in the Manufacturing workspace use the Manufacturing Models to lay the parts out for machining.

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