saw a reddit comment on the lenghth of modern dev cycles earlier that stuck with me: "The PS2 had three Grand Theft Autos, GTA5 had three Playstations"

TIL that I have something in common with Linus from @linusmediagroup.com. We both own a fire truck because we both apparently are children that earn money and spent it on things we think are fun.

Is it too much to ask for a car that you don't have to take to the shop for repairs multiple times a year? Especially for a six-figure car that's ridiculous.

If AI made building new software so much more quick, easy and approachable, where are all the new killer applications? I haven't seen anything.

I double and triple checked the datasheet, and the timing looks correct. A quick test revealed that adding a 100kR pull down on CS fixes the issue. Professionally jammed between the pins of the connector.

2006: Less is more, don’t repeat yourself 2016: Beautiful code prevents technical debt 2026: trillions of lines of generated spaghetti code that generate other spaghetti code will save us

Managed to get the SPI display working after all. I disconnect the logic analyzer and suddenly it doesn't work anymore. I guess the added capacitance from the probes affected the signal so that higher frequencies were stable, when they aren't actually?

AI is still useless. Billions wasted for this. RAM prices are up because we can now draw wrong things.

Incredible work!

What do you connect embedded Rust with? For me, embedded Rust is massively generic programming, to the point where it's almost ridiculous. The following is an entirely normal struct impl block, like I have in many of my generic drivers. #rust #embedded

The D keyboard shortcut in @kicad.org to open the datasheet of a selected component is simply brilliant. This makes checking your PCB and/or schematic.

Seeing some of the old aqua macOS interface makes me really nostalgic. I loved that style. And it still looks great and modern. I have yet to update my MacBooks to Apples new glass interface, but everything I have seen so far looks awful.

I'm using @kicad.org for like a week. I'm four crashes, and one bug report in. I really like KiCad, and I really want to continue liking it, but it's some of the most crash prone software I have ever used.

Nice round numbers! This is what you get for making sure things are aligned within a 100 mil grid.

Oh noo! One of the best sources on crimping tools, and connectors went offline (mattmillman.com). Fortunately, the web archive has good backups with pictures.

I do really like KiCad; it's working much better on macOS compared to an emulated Altium via Parallels Desktop. However, is it just me or is KiCad a little crashy? Sure, with Altium I also got the few known bugs that result in crashes, but KiCad is crashing on me like two or three times a day.

That mouser package I was waiting for for the last 10 days is suddenly getting delivered on Monday instead of Friday. This ruins my weekend plans.

Yet, I'm getting the unicorns.

Places I shouldn't browse because they will make me want spend a ton of money: JBC One day I'll be able to justify spending 600-700 Euros on a soldering station. In the meantime, I'll continue being annoyed that I have to wait my hakko to cooldown to swap my tip.

Is it just me or is building egui applications with lots of asynchronous background processing more difficult than it should be? Or maybe I'm just too used to building Dear ImGui applications in C++, which has none of that lifetime wrangling of Rust.

After searching for a Thunderbolt 4 KVM docking station for the past three years, it looks like someone finally built one. For 800 Euros. And only 4k @ 60 Hz. I need 4k @ 120 Hz (at the minimum). I'm going to learn high-speed Thunderbolt and build one myself. \s

In 12 months replace NFTs with LLMs

I never understood why standards are paid. Being part of a standards committee doesn't pay. And the 200 CHF for the PDF won't refinance anything sufficiently. It's simply making adoption more complicated. And for some standards, the final drafts are 99.9% equivalent to the released document (eg C++)

I don't know what products/code people write that find AI a useful tool, but AI is completely useless for anything novel/out of the ordinary. Sadly, I find myself reaching for AI only in these circumstances; therefore, I have the opinion that AI coding assistance is beyond useless.

For No Reason in Particular Here’s a Bunch of Games Where You Kill Nazis

I had ignored KiCad for a long while and stuck with Altium for most projects. However, running Windows on an ARM MacBook was never a great experience. Therefore, I gave KiCad a real chance this week. As many said, it's brilliant. And will likely replace most uses of Altium for me.

Happy new year! Don’t forget to update the copyright date in your footer.

"C is unsafe at any speed"

I have the luxury problem that my reflow oven is actually too powerful, and I need to massively derate it.

Testing the reflow oven. The kitchen was converted into a test lab for a while.

gen z sysadmins be like rm -fr

Ditto. Plus FFI. For me the biggest contributor to unsafe code. Unfortunately, not possible due to pointers semantically being mostly unsafe.

Linkers for embedded kinda suck, no? Do you work at a big company who could use a new one? At @tweedegolf.bsky.social we have some amazing people who could build an awesome new embedded linker. We should talk.

Anyone has experience with a LumenPnP pick and place machine?

It's the 1980s again and there is a #Commodore64 under the Christmas tree. 🎄 Merry Christmas.

Thunderbolt is brilliant but when you're operating on the absolute limits of what the connection can do, it's wonky. It's still absolutely astonishing that I can connect a 4k@120Hz, a 1440p@120Hz and about 800 USB peripherals over a single cable.

If you build a library, for the love of God, don't print anything to stderr or stdout. Return either an error or make the error messages otherwise accessible.

Even though the Harwin M20 Du Pont crimp connectors are dirt cheap, the original Amphenol JST connectors are most definitely worth the money for anything that's not on a super tight budget. The SN-025 tool makes decent enough crimps as well.

New blog post: Testing async logic written with any embedded-hal using a std runtime. ragnarlab.com/blog/testing...

New Blog Post: Single file scripts using `uv` on older Linux arvid.io/2025/06/26/u...

Germany tries really hard in the last few days to make me move out of country once and for all. www.heise.de/en/news/Berl...

Snow from snow cannons tastes funny.

Amazing! Free Code Signing for Open Source software signpath.org

Didn't think you could make File IO this complicated. What a piece of work. I'll stick with C. I wanted to like Zig. And it's got some nice benefits but the stdlib is not my cup of tea.

I've been looking into Zig more over the last couple of weeks, and I'm asking myself the question of "why?". Zig is neat and all, and the interoperability with C is great; but so is the interoperability with C from Rust, and Rust gives me a big ecosystem, memory safety and great compiler diagnostics

Presented without comment.

Funny story. I built a team to redo to companies ci/cd pipeline and cloud infra. We created a tool that orchestrated ci/cd. Since this is devops, and it is easy to hire devops with go exp, we chose go. One dev went rogue, rewrote it in rust, and I inherited it as the only other rust dev.

Running Doom in KiCad because why not? I bet Altium can’t do that www.mikeayles.com#kidoom

Even checking your schematic and PCB design three times does not guard against mixing up R1 and R2 in a voltage divider to set the output voltage of a buck converter.