Dissolving Energon Cubes

• Stephen has been running tests on the Energon Cube for the SSPS. So far everything is working great. Check out Stephen’s blog post update: Super Simple Power Supply “SSPS” Design (Part 3).
• The FX Dev board enclosure arrived and it looks great. See Figure 1 for some sweet powder-coated goodness.
• Parker has been working on streamlining all the MacroFab Engineering Github Repositories. Most of them should look consistent in layout and information now.
• All the Eagle footprint libraries have been updated with MPN and Populate attributes. Check them out here. Should be adding these features to DipTrace and KiCad footprints by next week.
• Releasing MF-CON-2.54mm-01xXX pinheaders. Check out the house parts section on the MacroFab website.
• Parker posted an article this week on Eagle Part Attributes. This way designers and engineers can easily add the MPN and Populate field to their own parts.
• In Episode 26 of MEP, Parker had a hacked together USB Type C prototype. Now Parker has a full on development board he designed using a FTDI FT230X and a Parallax Propeller (See Figure 2).
• ‘Transient electronics’ research develops dissolving battery. Basically, it’s a battery that has a polyvinyl alcohol-based polymer casing that swells causing it to dissolve (except for some nanoparticles) in around 30min after contact with water. It supposedly can power a laptop for 15 minutes but Parker did some napkin math and found out it was a bunch of crap.
• PokeBall Wiggles when Pokemon are Nearby. Cool project that uses servos inside a 3D printed pokeball to wiggle when it finds pokemon nearby for the Pokemon Go App. Uses Particle IoT’s “Photon” hardware and the Pokemon Go’s API.

Hosts: Parker Dillmann, Stephen Kraig

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!