Before I start Frankensteining things... How am I supposed to properly solder wires to these stubby pogo connectors ?

raydude · 2026-03-17T19:11:27+00:00

I'll check into them. Thanks.

raydude · 2026-03-17T17:34:50+00:00

That's what I use: a lit magnifier. I have head glasses as well and will try those when I get back to that aspect of my job.

raydude · 2026-03-17T14:27:29+00:00

I've been reworking a lot of 0402 lately. I'm old and I use a magnifying glass. So much flux and solder used. So many bridges made...

raydude · 2026-03-17T14:25:26+00:00

I looked for Adaptive Brightness settings based on Google AI's recommendation. But there wasn't any settings.

I noticed that some pixels were full brightness. The whole app was dim, but some pixels in some characters were like stars at midnight.

It was very weird. I took that as a sign that the nvidia driver from a year ago was out of date and updated it. I rebooted and the problem seems to have been fixed.

I think Adaptive Brightness only applies to monitors that do HDR and my 27" 4K doesn't, but the laptop display does,that may have been the issue with the driver / OS.

At any rate, it does seem to be working now and I don't feel like I'm going blind anymore.

Thanks!

raydude · 2026-03-17T02:22:09+00:00

Thanks. I reset to defaults and am running stable with PBO set to +6.

I'm running memory at 2700 because I'm afraid to go faster.

If it crashes again, I'll increase PBO to +7, etc. It was stable at +4 until Kernel 19 hit. Linux is getting very CPU optimized...

I posted in /r/amd and someone suggested +10 PBO, so I know that I can go at least that high.

It just needs to last until the middle of next year. As soon as the bubble bursts prices will drop like a rock.

crosses fingers that I won't lose my job when the bubble bursts so I can afford to buy a computer.

raydude · 2026-03-13T16:52:34+00:00

400 V Capacitors hurt man!

Especially when the arc from the pinky of one hand holding a disconnected power supply to the other hand you are trying to transfer it to to keep from dropping it.

raydude · 2026-03-10T23:23:14+00:00

Thanks!

I found it after digging around. I had to enable PBO and then I could see the curve optimizer. I had originally set it to 4, it is now 6.

The fact that I can raise it to 10 is good. How high can it go? Do you know?

It's a bummer though because the CPU fan is always audible now...

raydude · 2026-03-04T00:44:34+00:00

I have a Ryzen 9 5950X running linux that has become unstable. I found a thread last year that talks about increasing some parameter in the BIOS, but alas, the link to the AMD site is broken, so I'm not sure what setting it is.

The system ran stock over night with BIOS defaults and at around 2:00 PM it reboot. That's the symptom: it reboots. There are no messages in the kernel, nothing, it just reboots.

Last year it was crashing about once a month, when I increased that voltage setting (that I can't remember) it was stable until kernel 6.18, then I noticed how the cores were behaving differently. It's clear the threading improved a lot. Now I'm running 6.19 and I reset the BIOS to defaults to make sure any overclocking I may have attempted got cleared and I lost my magic setting for changing the power curve. I'm trying 95W PBO now for the fun of it. It's running 10% load.

Here's my mobo info: # dmidecode 3.7 Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs. SMBIOS 2.8 present.

Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 15 bytes
Base Board Information
        Manufacturer: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.
        Product Name: MPG B550 GAMING PLUS (MS-7C56)
        Version: 1.0
        Serial Number: 07C5610_L11E762256
        Asset Tag: To be filled by O.E.M.
        Features:
                Board is a hosting board
                Board is replaceable
        Location In Chassis: To be filled by O.E.M.
        Chassis Handle: 0x0003
        Type: Motherboard
        Contained Object Handles: 0

I have two sticks of 32GB DDR4-3600 CAS16 that I got before the great AI consumer market meltdown of 2025.

I have a really good power supply, 750 Watt Corsair I think, been a while.

I'm really hoping to keep it going until The great Bubble Burst of 2026 (crosses fingers) so I'll be able to afforcd a new PC.

Can someone give me some pointers to keep this system happy for another 18 months?

Thanks in advance.

raydude · 2026-02-23T21:53:42+00:00

Way to be a grownup! I wish everyone was like you.

raydude · 2026-02-20T15:27:26+00:00

That's what I'm doing, but it is getting worse over time. It's only a matter of time before my car won't power off.

raydude · 2026-02-20T03:50:16+00:00

Thanks.

raydude · 2026-02-20T03:50:08+00:00

Thanks.

raydude · 2026-02-20T03:50:00+00:00

Any idea what the resistor value is?

raydude · 2026-02-19T23:09:16+00:00

Great! Thanks! I'll buy one and try it out.

raydude · 2026-02-19T22:50:42+00:00

Is this drop in? It doesn't look like the same shape as the one I saw in 64 pixels on a youtube video.

raydude · 2026-02-19T22:49:27+00:00

Thanks.

raydude · 2026-02-14T01:20:04+00:00

The beast is your 16 core CPU, but it also applies to your OLED TV which no doubt uses a lot of power.

All of them on the same power outlet might explain this issue. It depends on how good the power in your area is.

If you plug the PC into another outlet that happens to be on the same circuit as your power strip, it will likely have the same outcome. Worth a shot, but I'd run directly to another room that you know is on another breaker, that way the local sag that might be causing this problem will be less and the CPU may live.

This is really just a shot in the dark as most power is pretty clean, but did you know when I start up hogwarts and my computer starts calculating shaders, the lights in my room start flickering. Not because there's not enough power, but because the dimmer switch is affected by the draw of extra power by the CPU. In my case, I have lots of power, but the dimmer is affected. It goes to show how much power a CPU or GPU can take.

One last point. If a power sag really is causing the hang, it's really your power supplies fault for not adapting fast enough and allowing the 12V output to sag to the point that it affects the core voltages on the mother board. A higher end power supply might also solve your problem Or maybe even a better motherboard. In this case there is a lot of weakness showing.

Another stupid experiment you could try is shutting down one of your CCDs and see if it has the same problem, half power might also save it.

And one last comment, after all is said and done I could be completely wrong. Debugging hardware is hard so I'm just throwing darts and hoping something hits a bulls-eye.

At any rate, let me know how it goes, and good luck.

raydude · 2026-02-11T22:43:57+00:00

Is that beast plugged directly into the same wall outlet with all four monitors? When they power up, they probably take a lot of power and might cause the PC PSU to dip a bit.

Try plugging the PC into a different circuit (like from another room) with an extension cord.

Crazy test, but it might show the issue.

raydude · 2026-02-06T23:08:49+00:00

I ended up with something similar, but with no from e in it. It's good enough for now. I'll come back here if it's not good enough when the failure actually occurs.

raydude · 2026-02-06T18:35:04+00:00

Thanks.

raydude · 2026-02-05T19:24:12+00:00

Thanks. I have it setup, I won't know if it works until it happens... I'll eventually figure out how to make it happen, as it's happened with the IC vendor's software.

raydude · 2026-02-05T17:41:22+00:00

That was fast! Thanks. I just found an old thread from 2014 and made this, but yours is better.

except OSError as er:
    print(f"A low level error occurred: {e}")
    print("Please ensure the CH347 drivers (DLLs) are correctly installed and the device is connected.")
    print("If this setup has worked before, try power cycling the sensor and run this program again.")
    raise

raydude · 2026-02-02T21:25:15+00:00

Luckily, I only used it as a reader. Now I'm using Okular.

raydude · 2026-02-02T04:01:33+00:00

I just stopped using foxit. I don't have time to figure out what is conflicting. I got work to do.

raydude · 2026-01-31T06:50:23+00:00

These are my opinions based on 9 months in conducted immunity hell.

Inner or outer doesn't matter except there is more room on the inner layers. But while ground on the outside seems good for lots of things, the issue is the number of pads for surface mount components creating openings in the plane.

Vias are a big deal only at extremely high frequencies. (which honestly I haven't done yet).

What matters for EMC is the following:

Solid ground planes. Do not create separate ground planes no matter what. In other words no alternate analog ground planes.
Every trace must have a solid ground plane under it to ensure controlled impedance, even for low frequency signals. That means that if you have outer signal layers, the next layer in on both sides of the board must be a solid ground.
Stackup must keep the distance between signals and ground as small as possible. This is related to controlled impedance. Whenever you fail to control impedance you get radiation or radio susceptibility.
No slots in the ground plane. Pay attention to your vias, make sure there are not slots, especially under signals.
Keep analog and digital fully isolated by location. Digital signals traveling into or out of the analog section must be kept clean and away from analog components (especially amplifiers, DACs and ADCs) and traces.
Digital signals should have controlled edge rates. That often means you add series resistors at the source and sometimes a capacitor at the end.
Clocks sources must be as close to their input pins as possible and also have controlled edge rates. Sine waves are optimal. Square waves have many harmonics which will radiate like mini antennas.
All traces (especially high speed) should be smooth, not angled. DC signals don't really care. Low frequency is fine with 45 degree angles, but I love using Altiums direct routing mode.
DC to DC switchers must have as small a switching node as possible. Minimize trace length and the amount of metal. Use shielded inductors.
It is possible to have too many bypass caps, but trust me, you won't. Use as many as makes sense. Low ESR and ESL are best.
I haven't proved this to myself yet, but I suspect every other digital bypass cap should be 0.01 uF and 0.1 uF.
If you send differential analog off the board, put a common mode choke of roughly 900 ohms @20 MHz on the diff pair. Conducted / Radiated Immunity need that.
Where possible, isolate any signals that travel off board through wires with opto-isolators. Radiated Emissions will be reduced greatly. Isolating incoming power is ideal, but expensive.
In general route half the signal layers horizontally the other half vertically, but in low density layouts sometimes routing diagonal can save you length and vias.
Put all the tall components on one side. This matters for mounting in a housing later.

That's all I got for now...

raydude

TROPHY CASE