This is an excellent read. I was expecting a Rust rant but was instead treated to a very well thought out article about how to write more defensive code in Rust. Highly recommended.
When writing codecs in Rust I found the Iterator trait (and all its provided methods) to be very useful for avoiding panics relating to out of bounds indexing into arrays. It also tends to generate very efficient code since bounds checks are done on the order of once per loop rather than once per loop iteration. And then there is the powerful itertools crate that gives you even more capabilities. Highly recommended!
During The Plague of 1665 in London they culled 200,000 cats thinking that they were the root cause. It turned out that the rats were the cause and cats were their natural predator at the time. So they made things worse.
The OP article does mention cats as a predator. Insignificant compared to the medieval times. Still interesting.
> “Parsons et al. (56) documented less than a 1% predation rate between feral cat carnivores and rats in an urban setting.”
I have also recently been through the same steep learning curve you have and the following worked for me. Reading spec sheets is fine but nothing beats measurement if its feasible. I built a custom PCB with all the power pins for all the peripherals broken out so I could put an ammeter in series with each of them individually. Then I used Nordic's inexpensive power profiler kit 2 (search for Nordic PPK2 - its under $100). Really decent specs at 100kHz sampling rate and 100nA resolution - you connect it to a PC to see the charts. I also bought my own resin 3D printer. They are so cheap these days and it helped with iterating on designs and not having to wait days for things to arrive. PS, great post, loved it.
It’s CRITAAS proliferation. Copyright infringement takedown as a service. It only feels unfair because right now it’s asymmetric. Wait until there is an automatic SAAS to counter balance it and let the bots duel it out whilst laws eventually catch up.
Yes, a shame. I honestly expected this could get picked up as a mainstream news story over Christmas (except I think the actual story is older than this video);
Young people with talent and ingenuity, using modern skills and tools to acquire and maintain something with a history behind it.
I've bookmarked it for next time some old guy complains that young people aren't smart or motivated etc. etc.!
There are many cheap ultra low power microcontrollers that can keep a time clock going and a small amount (say 32KB) of ram. 30 years on a coin cell. Pair that with a Bluetooth low energy transceiver to automatically transfer the data when the home base is in range (or any number of base stations). Like at a port in your example.
As someone who spent many months designing a product around CM4 and then waiting for more than 2 years for modules to arrive over the parts shortage era (eta kept being pushed out by the distributor) I will never put myself in that position ever again. The solution I have found was to skill up and learn how to do hardware design myself. At that point there are many more options. Understandably that's not ideal for a lot of people.
Unfortunately, chips EOL all the time, charge pin-outs, and the temptation to in-house an integrated SoM solution may add hundreds of thousands to the cost. If you are not moving >3m chips a quarter, than you are still vulnerable.
We also had to violate the Design for Manufacturability guidelines to adapt to the shortages and part skelpers hitting JIT lines. Even today, we incur a questionable 12 USD labor cost on every product to ensure a generic carrier PCB drop-in population option is always available (0.1" pins 1980's style).
Training slide deck: "Rule #21: No unicorn parts, and no excuses"
We dodged the CM4 choice luckily due to my concerns, but still were tagged by a proprietary missing RF module needed for legacy system interoperability. The vendors lied about inventory levels, and kept the order tied up for years before the spools arrived.
Can you highlight the resources that you used to level up this way? I can design my own microcontroller boards, but the complexity of SoCs and required peripherals seems too much for this part-timer.
Admittedly I ended up building a board with a microcontroller rather than a microprocessor because I could interface with the modem over spi too. However, this YouTube channel was great to work through:
It has some high speed stuff with ddr memory, fpga’s gigabit Ethernet and usb3 too so I’m pretty sure you could use the same concepts to build a board with a microprocessor on it. Proper grounding, emi, impedance control and length matching are well explained. I think he has some more advanced courses via his website too.
