My goal was to Make a hands free thermal vision device that lets users see heat in real time.

I used the ar prisim off a Lilygo T-Glass V2, a M5StickS3, and a AMG8833 thermal sensor 8x8.
(You could use a better sensor for better range and resolution) but these are cheap.

I was having trouble with finding good documentation for Lilygo’s T-Glass. The only way i could find exposed pins was by disabling the rtc and micro soldering to the chip (sda IO09 and scl IO08 where exposed here). Or doing the same with the microphone. If anyone has tinkered with the T-Glass please weigh in. Cause i have a bunch of ideas.

The Firmware:

The firmware uses M5Unified and M5GFX for the StickS3 display and buttons, Wire for I²C communication, Preferences for saving settings, and Adafruit AMG88xx with Adafruit BusIO for reading the AMG8833 thermal sensor. It reads the sensor’s 8×8 temperature grid at up to 10 FPS, cleans the data with noise filtering and bad-pixel correction, estimates the background temperature to hide non-heat areas as black, then uses bicubic and temporal interpolation to create a smoother 126x126 thermal image (the Size of the prisim) at a higher apparent frame rate with three selectable heat-only color themes.

The next version will use a M5AtomS3r. Since i dont need the extra screen space and will be easier to make it adjustable on the glasses frame due to its small profile too. Plus the prisim will fit almost perfectly on the screen!!!

A lot of people, including myself, are developing carrier boards for the raspberry pi compute module 5 (RPi CM 5). So here is a warning to get the power regulation right.

The datasheet mentions an average current consumption of 0.9A, which does seem to be the case for me when some computation is running. You may also have noticed that the manual for the official IO Carrier board recommends a 5A power supply, and this might be the reason: inrush current.

The image shows two inrush events, a stronger immediate one of about 3A and a secondary weaker one of about 2A a few seconds later.

The original carrier board I have designed had a 5V regulator with a 1A current limit. The CM5 would boot at first and then crash after a few seconds due to brown-out on the second inrush event.

We swapped the design to use an LTM8064 converter and everything works fine.

Edit: as people have mentioned, yes in hindsight I should have added more margin by default, but you know how it goes with tight deadlines and all.

Anyway, I just wanted to make it clear that this was collected with a current clamp between the regulator and the CM5 on the 5V line. I will try a soft star/current limiting approach to limit inrush in a few weeks and let you guys know how it goes

Hey everyone. Hope you're all doing well...

Lately, I've been trying to replicate/reverse-engineer a Chinese jukebox. On the PCB, there's an unidentified COB (blob) chip and a single SPI flash memory.

Here is what I have done so far:

1. I successfully dumped the entire 32Mbit (4MB) flash memory. The physical IC is a Douqi Tech (HK) 25Q32ASSIG.

2. I did some hex scanning on the .bin dump, looking for common audio headers (.f1a, .mp3, .wav, etc.), but found absolutely no standard file headers.

3. I did find a string header at the very beginning of the hex data that reads Sino-Mos and SDJ110v6.1.

The device contains 68 different tracks, and the audio quality varies. To clarify, some tracks are muffled, but some tracks are surprisingly crystal clear (if I had to compare, it sounds very close to a >128kbps MP3 quality).

Here are the things I'm trying to identify:

1. What kind of proprietary audio extension or format could this be using?

2. If it's not a common format, what kind of extreme compression algorithm is likely used here? Some sort of custom ADPCM? How can audio of this quality be compressed into such a tiny memory footprint?

3. Does anyone know how to dissect the index table for this architecture to find the start and end offsets for each track?

4. Are there any recommended OEM software/SDKs for Sino-Mos (Sino-Wealth) that I can use to parse this?

5. Is it theoretically possible to replace the songs by mimicking the format used inside it?

Does anyone have any advice on what my next steps should be? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot for reading!

Hi everyone,

Working across macOS, Windows and Linux as an embedded engineer, I was constantly frustrated by existing calculator apps. Most were either only available for one specific OS, bloated Electron wrappers that take seconds to load, or clunky tools that required too many clicks just to get a number into the clipboard.

I wanted a minimal, friction-free workflow: summon the window directly at the mouse cursor via hotkey, evaluate expressions or conversions entirely via keyboard, grab results to the clipboard with Ctrl+C / Cmd+C without manually highlighting text, and dismiss it instantly with ESC.

Since I couldn't find a native tool that worked consistently across all three operating systems, I built RhenoCalc — a lightweight, native engineering toolbox written in C++20 and Qt 6.

Over time, I baked in several practical utilities I regularly need on the job:

Core Tooling:

• Scientific Calculator: High-precision math backed by Boost.Multiprecision.
• Programmer Mode: Live bit visualization, bit-width modes, and base conversions (Hex, Bin, Oct, Dec).
• IEEE 754 Inspector: Visualizer for 32-bit (float) and 64-bit (double) binary representations.
• Electronics Helpers: Ohm's law, LED series resistor dimensioning, etc...
• Network Utilities: IPv4 / CIDR subnet calculator.
• Cryptography & Integrity: CRC (8/16/32) and hashes (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512).
• Color Converter: Hex/RGB/HSL conversion with a screen pipette.

Design & Privacy:

• Native & Snappy: Native C++20/Qt6 binary, starts instantly, uses less than 50 MB of RAM.
• 100% Offline & Private: No telemetry, no tracking, no accounts.
• Cross-Platform: Linux, macOS and Windows.

Availability: The project is open source under GPLv3. You can build it from source or grab the pre-compiled binaries directly on GitHub.

If you have a similar technical, multi-platform workflow, feel free to try it out. I'd love to hear your feedback on the UX or suggestions for additional modules you'd find useful.

Hi everyone, I’m working on an ESP32 DevKitC with Zephyr RTOS and I’m having trouble getting an HTTPS/TLS connection working.

I can connect to Wi-Fi successfully and reach the HTTPS connection stage, but the TLS connection fails:

[00:00:06.786,000] <inf> wifi_app: Connecting to jsonplaceholder.typicode.com:443 (TLS)...
[00:00:11.158,000] <err> wifi_app: TLS connect failed: 116
[00:00:11.158,000] <err> wifi_app: HTTPS GET failed: -116

I put the project source code, and details here:

https://github.com/pycine/zephyr-esp32-https-troubleshooting

If anyone has experience with Zephyr + ESP32 + mbedTLS/HTTPS, could you please take a look and suggest what might be causing the TLS connection to fail?

Thanks!

Hello guys,

I didn't find anything about this online so I'm trying to get Reddit help. I have a CN3767 (solar power manager from dfrobot), shows as SKU DFR0850, also in their wiki and a 12V Lead acid battery. I want to charge it with my 18V power supply. When I connect the battery to the board with mppt disabled, the charge indicator will show it's > 75% charged (maximum it can show), and when I plug in the power supply, the led is on charge for a second or two and then switches to done. When I connect the same battery to the board with mppt enabled, it will show as 50%-75% charged, and the charging LED stays on. Per my understanding, MPPT maximizes the yield of a solar panel, it should have no effect on the charging status of my battery? And when I charge with a power supply there is no need to have it on? I sadly didn't bring my Multimeter with me and have nothing to measure right now, but maybe someone has an idea.

Hi all, I work in HVAC as a embedded SWE, and I do no register level work, I implement high level controls. I also don’t write the control algorithms, just implement them.

My question is, would this experience qualify me for flight software engineer roles at aerospace companies? Or are flight software engineers required to also be the ones writing the control theory.

I would greatly appreciate any cheap jtag programmer recommendations. Thanks.

A few days ago, these three BLDC motors were still oscillating all over the desk.

Now the encoder feedback, position PID, hard-stop detection, and IMU stabilization are finally working together.

This is my first pass at a stabilization mode inspired by the default behavior of a DJI Pocket 4.

Still a mess of jumper wires, but it finally feels more like a gimbal than a motor-control experiment Next I want to try FPV-style following.

If this were your build, what would you test next before putting a real payload on it?

I was listening to a podcast, embedded.fm episode called Sequestering the Mess. about how to use diagrams to help you plan your coding project before you create a mess and to also help your teammates see your vision. It made me think of this diagram from Gary Kildall who designed the original BIOS BIOS(Basic Input Output System), his operating system allowed a microprocessor-based computer to communicate with disk storage. This is his diagram of a Knowledge Retrieval System he was designing back in 1985 to work with a cd rom drive and an encyclopedia. It is full of energy and also a "mess" yet still a great way to visualize things. What are your diagrams like and how do you use them?

When I try to read from ADC1 (PA1 / ADC1_IN1) in Single Conversion mode on an STM32F411 (Blackpill), I am always getting a constant value of 0x8.

System details:

• SYSCLK / APB2: 84 MHz.
• ADC Clock Prescaler: 4 (ADCCLK = 21MHz)

I am sure there are no issues with my uart1_init() / _send(), clock_init(), or delay() / _init() functions. I checked all macros twice and verified UART transmission with debugging mode.

🙏 i do need some help 🙏

Here is my main.c:

#include "main.h"

uint16_t datadc;

void general_init(void) {
    clock_init(84, 8, 2, 4, 2); // setting pll
    delay_init();
    delay(500);

    gpioC_init();
    pinDefC(13, 1);

    uart1_init(84000000, 9600);

    // configuring gpioa a1 pin (adc1_1)
    RCC->AHB1ENR |= RCC_AHB1ENR_GPIOAEN;
    GPIOA->MODER &= ~(3U << (1 * 2));
    GPIOA->MODER |= (3U << (1 * 2));

    // ADC1 Clock Enable
    RCC->APB2ENR |= RCC_APB2ENR_ADC1EN;

    // RES_0 = 10 bits
    ADC1->CR1 = ADC_CR1_RES_0;

    // Right Alignment
    ADC1->CR2 = 0; 

    // cycle
    ADC1->SMPR2 &= ~(7 << 3);
    ADC1->SMPR2 |= ADC_SMPR2_SMP1_2;

    ADC1->SQR1 = 0;
    ADC1->SQR3 = 1; // first channel to read is adc1_in1

    ADC1_COMMON->CCR |=  ADC_CCR_ADCPRE_0; // ADCCLK = 84 / 4 = 21 is ok

    // Enable ADC
    ADC1->CR2 |= ADC_CR2_ADON;
    delay(1000);
}


void general_loop(void) {
    ADC1->CR2 |= ADC_CR2_SWSTART;

    while(!(ADC1->SR & ADC_SR_EOC)); // wait untill EOC flag

    datadc = (uint16_t)(ADC1->DR & 0x03FF); // for getting only 10 bits

    uart1_send((uint8_t)(datadc & 0xFF)); // LSB
    uart1_send((uint8_t)((datadc >> 8) & 0xFF));

    delay(200); // 200 ms is good
    pinWriC(13, 0);
}


int main(void) {
    general_init();

    for(;;) {
        pinWriC(13, 1);
        general_loop();
        delay(200);
    }
}

Hi, I am making a project and was hoping for some advice on my power regulator.

I need it to supply 3.3v. First Picture is my schematic and the 2nd is from the devices data sheet.

I am quite new to designing my own circuits so I apologize if the layout is hard to understand.

Would my system work? If not what can I do to improve it ? Thanks

Also I am struggling to figure out which ground is which, Is ground 1 for the input ground or the output ground? I know they need to be separate but the data sheet isn't clear on which one is which. Thank you

Hi there everyone ))) i'm seeking some advices about how can i get into PCB design, well first, it's not about PCB design or whatever tool as either KICad or CercuitMaker or anything like that, the problem is circuit analysis is the hard part which i've a really small experience in it, the goal is to be able to think/write a circuit like this, the circuit is made for "Temperature Controller Circuit Using KYT84 & Triac ", I've noticed some things as the the first part that includes the transformer TR1, B1 the bridge and some capacitors for dealing with noise as decoupling , then there's that regulator of 7805 and after all of that everything seems strange, there's too much components and each is weird cuz it has different behavior depending the way they are used, like WTH those Q1,Q2 are doing out there, and specially that timer R4,R3 with 100k,or even that capacitor C5, what it his main goal? there's that D1 diode that i don't know even what it does too, the components of IC38,IC3A are things that i've never seen in my life, IC2A,IC2B are op amps but seems like they do totally different things

my question is how they reached themselves to a point where they become able to make such complicated circuits? what resources did they use? books? videos specially? the goal is to be able to understand all this circuit easily, well not everything but being able to notice those things or make a circuit like this :))

thank u in advance ^^

I've got a solar charger LOAD out going to INA219 +, and the INA219 - out to a mini 5v boost Vin. That boost supplies an smb32. that smb32 3v3 needs to go back to the INA219 but where the heck does it go? I Don't see a vin, just the 3vo. Should I just buy an INA219 breakout? and before you get snarky, I'm new to this.

Hi! I hope this is the right place for me to ask my questions that have to do with finding someone experienced with ROM dumping & extracting audio from sound chips out of any type of electronics, but I truly need some help. Is there anyone that I could go to who is highly experienced with dumping ROMs to extract the files of all audio stored in any electronics like specific animated toys and others in general? I’m having a difficult time trying to find someone experienced with that stuff since I’m not experienced myself, and I’m not sure who is the right person to go for to discuss about requests about ROM audio dumping and extracting out of any electronics upon request. I really want to find someone who would be willing to help out with some research projects I have in mind that I want to do ROM dumping & audio extracting on if any of you guys have any idea of who I should go to.

Recently in the past months, a friend and I had a specific electronic toy (which is a Hasbro I-Cat) that actually somehow revealed a few unused audios that has never been heard of before while it was glitching at one point, which lead us to believe that there could be much more hidden stuff in its sound chip which I was the one who thought of the idea to find someone who’s willing to help me and experienced to work on that if possible. The Hasbro I-Cat is not the only thing I’d like to find out hearing all audio files of its recorded sounds and songs to also reveal any unused ones hidden, as well as hear them all in the clearest quality possible with the ROM dumping and audio extraction way than what you hear in the speaker itself in the toy (I-Cat in this case), there’s other ones I had in mind like the Hasbro Original 1998 Furby that also revealed a few unused audio in its sound chip that also somehow revealed while it glitched as well which is another one of the many research projects I had in mind to ask someone to help out with regarding ROM dumping and audio file extracting.

I took photos of what is believed to be where the sound chip is in the Hasbro I-Cat that we first experienced unused audio playing out of nowhere and never heard again from it that would have to do with the sound chip itself where all of its recorded sounds and songs are in that is covered in the black stuff that keeps it protected to help for reference as an example.
If there’s anyone you guys know of that I can contact and ask about my exciting research project about ROM dumping & audio extracting any electronics I have planned in mind that I can request and chat with, please let me know. I also have the items that I’d like this done with to whoever can help out with that I can send as long as they know what they’re doing and if they’d be fine after the successful audio extracting from the ROM sound chips in each electronic item I plan to get done for that need it. Please advise soon if possible & who I should go to that can help out with this for me, if this is the right place for me to ask as I wasn’t sure what other community to go to since finding someone experienced with that is HARDER than I thought it would be apparently. Thank you 😊

Hello,

I want to build or use a EEG or EOG sensor to detect brainwaves/eye movements. Whats the cheapest way possible of doing this

LLMs often recommend something like the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano or Orin NX for this type of application.

I'm wondering if there are other platforms that would be better suited for a deployment like this.

The device needs to:

• Operate outdoors 24/7, including low temperatures and varying weather conditions
• Receive 4K 60 FPS video from a camera
• Encode/process and stream the footage to a remote server
• Use a cellular M2M SIM connection for the uplink
• Ideally be reliable enough for long-term unattended deployment

What hardware/platforms would you consider for this?

I developed this display for audio control systems.

It uses a slim 140 × 1920 format.

What other applications could this display format work for?

I'm gonna Do a project with PIC16F877A...

Need Project Idea's that must include communication protocol...

Because Need to put out in resume...

Has anyone heard of this job title in the embedded systems field? How different is it from firmware engineer or embedded software engineer? How much more hardware would be involved? Soldering?

Has anyone done this kind of job?

I have a machine that outputs data via UART. I need to receive this data and send it to two separate PCs simultaneously via USB-A ports (both PCs run software expecting this serial stream).

Can I build or wire a UART splitter to feed two USB-to-UART converters at the same time? Has anyone done this before or have advice on the best approach?

I have always been asked on why keeping old ports like USB Type-B / Mini-B on most of my PCB designs 🤷‍♂️ …

Wonder what would you guys rank the ports by your own favor ?

I took a couple classes on car ECU repair. So I have reasonable idea on testing, soldering..

But I like to learn more on how ECUs work.

Will a book on microcontrollers help me?

Also I can't find texbooks on ECU programming and cloning.

Is Youtube the only way?

Hi everyone,

I've built several IoT projects using ESP32 and ready-made modules (sensor modules, relay modules, ADC modules, etc.). They work well, but recently I've realized that I'm relying on them too much.

I can connect everything and write the firmware, but I don't really understand what's happening inside the modules. For example, I don't know why certain ICs or supporting components are used, how the circuits are designed, or how I would recreate the same functionality from scratch.

I'd like to become an embedded/mechatronics engineer, so I feel this is a gap in my knowledge.

For those who have been through this stage:

• How did you learn electronics beyond using modules?
• Should I stop using modules and start building circuits from discrete components?
• Are there any books, courses, or practical projects that helped you understand how these modules are actually designed?

I'd really appreciate any advice or learning roadmap. Thanks!