Member and Staff Blogs - All Comments

RE: PLC Pandemonium: On The Line Challenge

DAB — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:35:12 GMT

Very good post on your experiences with the project.

When you begin to define a project, you need to do a lot of research into the devices and components you want to use to ensure that you do not find surprises during the build.

RE: ESP32 Bit Pirate: a browser-based hardware debugging ecosystem around ESP32

HKPhysicist — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:53:30 GMT

It sounds good.

How big is the firmware size? So it only runs when testing and will be removed in production firmware?

RE: Si5351 Clock Generator

wolfgangfriedrich — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:54:15 GMT

Would be interesting to see the FFT graphs of the different clock speeds and calculate the scope roll off at 200 MHz and above.

RE: Si5351 Clock Generator

colporteur — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:46:54 GMT

will the final design be shielded..If you have any unwanted signal power escaping through the air directly from the device chassis and cables you might *** off your neighbour if he is a HAM operator. 50Mhs is in the HAM radio band.

RE: Cutting Edge PLC Implementations.

SensoredHacker0 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:07:09 GMT

well I had delete folders and files working, but still, sometimes, things go wacky.
then again, Im black box hexing this stuff, and sometimes I make the wrong assertions about how a thing works.
The PLC gets in some weird state, and that takes a while to figure out.
Made some useful tools, but still no where near the automated PLC Fleet Management system I want to make.

Maybe Element 14 can partner with IDEC Engineers. that could be amazing. Right now, I talk to application support,
and they have no clue about most of the technical issues. XYZ times out, doesn't register, catastrophically fails after 1 lost packet. ...
Id would be amazing to chat with the engineers behind these systems. IDEC makes a nice product, and the price is right, but I have
engineering problems to solve, beyond which glyph means which operation.

RE: From Vector File to Finished Foam Routed Sign: A Complete CNC Workflow

Fred27 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:01:34 GMT

The content doesn't really live up to the title. I suspect this is just AI generated.

Ah - just noticed the link is to a commercial site. Definitely AI slop.

RE: The car radio issue

DAB — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:16:16 GMT

I agree, nice attempt.

Now days they just want you to replace devices, not fix them.

RE: The car radio issue

colporteur — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 16:04:29 GMT

Impressive you have gotten so far. I hope your share will give you some results. Your walking on a path that a few keen minds have done here on other devices.

I tried doing something similar with an android device and ran out of air diving for answers.

Part of the reason for making this post is to track your progress. Good luck.

RE: Analog Discovery 3 - current and power measurement

Qbit — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:27:16 GMT

The ability to measure current and power with the Analog Discovery 3 is a huge step up. Having used the Current and Power Adapter myself, I can say the 10 mΩ shunt resistor combined with the programmable gain current sense amplifier makes it incredibly versatile for both low-power and higher-current applications. It's really impressive how seamlessly the WaveForms software visualizes voltage, current, and power in both DC and AC circuits.

RE: Validating an idea: a tool to explain STM32/Cortex-M HardFaults more clearly

Qbit — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:41:20 GMT

his is a fantastic and very real problem to solve. Anyone who has spent hours staring at the CFSR and HFSR bits trying to figure out if an imprecise bus fault was caused by a wild pointer or a clock issue knows exactly how intimidating this is for beginners and frustrating for pros.

As for validation: yes, the pain point is real. While intermediate/senior devs might eventually get used to manually decoding register dumps or running custom GDB scripts, a dedicated, human-readable report would save a massive amount of time—especially when dealing with junior team members.

For the format, I think a cross-platform CLI tools that can output JSON/Markdown would be the most versatile starting point. That way, it can easily be hooked into VS Code tasks or automated CI/CD build/test pipelines later on. Looking forward to seeing how this develops!

RE: ESP32 Bit Pirate - A Hardware Hacking Tool with Web-Based CLI That Speaks Every Protocol

Qbit — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:51:55 GMT

This is a brilliant project! Turning a cheap ESP32 board into a multi-protocol hacker's toolkit is exactly the kind of innovation the community needs. The web-based CLI is a killer feature, and the list of supported protocols is staggering. Great work, and thank you for making this open-source and sharing it with everyone.

RE: ESP32 Bit Pirate - A Hardware Hacking Tool with Web-Based CLI That Speaks Every Protocol

DAB — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:34:12 GMT

Very cool device.

RE: Validating an idea: a tool to explain STM32/Cortex-M HardFaults more clearly

shabaz — Sun, 17 May 2026 10:46:41 GMT

Is this a uni project? I thought you were developing an IDE, but now you explicitly state this is not an IDE related project.

I can't see much value to this new idea either. Regarding:

developer copies the relevant GDB/register dump

In reality, apart from the simplest scenarios, this alone can be very insufficient, so any tool that only relies on that will be suboptimal. I'm not saying the tool might provide no benefit, I'm suggesting it might provide little additional benefit, and wouldn't reduce the workload much, nor reduce the learning curve much:

In a work environment it's probably more worthwhile the user being familiar with how to drive GDB themselves, and in an education/learning environment students are often taught principles of typical microcontroller instruction sets at least to a high level so I can't see where your tool fits in.

Also. I'm curious, what benefit can the tool have, over (say) pasting in the detail into any LLM such as ChatGPT and also providing a load of context (e.g. "this crash happens when the temperature rises").

Crashes should be so infrequent that almost every debugging session is fairly unique; for instance, sometimes the user may need to add more code to get more usable debug when the system crashes.

RE: Analog Discovery 3 - current and power measurement

DAB — Sat, 16 May 2026 19:41:33 GMT

Nice experiment.

RE: Validating an idea: a tool to explain STM32/Cortex-M HardFaults more clearly

vmate — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:45:05 GMT

I think it should definitely be a VSCode extension. Getting people to use another tool, that doesn't integrate well with their workflows, is unfamiliar, etc, is a big hassle. With a VSCode extension, you'd have a bunch of existing tooling to build upon, simple to install, integrates well, no need to install a separate program.

I don't have any Cortex-M debugging experience at all, so if an extension existed that could just magically tell me what went wrong, give me a call stack, jump to the specific lines in source files, maybe even give some plain English description for common issues, that would be a really cool and useful tool.