Feature Complete or Minimal Viable Products

July 22, 2022 Hosted by Parker Dillmann, Stephen Kraig

Custom designed instrumentation tools? Stephen and Parker dive into differential oscilloscope probe designs on this week's episode of the MEP!

Project DiffProbe

  • Landed on the topology Stephen wants
    • High voltage dividers
      • Compensation capacitors
      • CMRR calibration (120dB rejection)
      • Offset correction
    • Buffers and Instrumentation Amplifiers
    • Differential Stage
    • 10x and 100x attenuation means offsets have to be bang on
  • Opamps (3 of them)
    • Buffers
      • Low input bias current
      • Low offset
      • Bandwidth?
    • Differential amp
      • Low offset. Capable of driving 50 ohm load to the scope
    • Gain setting resistors
      • Vishay ACAS 0612 – Precision resistor network
      • 4×0603 resistors to make a diff amplifier with a gain of 2 
      • Relative tolerance of 0.05%
      • Worst case relative temp-coefficient 15ppm

Project Snackey

  • Firmware is “feature complete”
  • Display Commands
  • How the vending motors actually work
    • INA219 Current Sensor
    • Interrupts
    • Improved method for next revision?
  • The one byte Serial Buffer problem
    • NEOPIXEL (WS2812) vs APA102 (SK9822)
    • Blocking functions
    • DMA – Direct memory access
    • Importance of full system integration testing 
  • Timer Lockouts for motors
    • Is there a better way?

Hosts: Parker Dillmann, Stephen Kraig

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