As CAD tools go SW is on the lower end of the scale. Though the price increases have been feeling pretty abusive in the recent years.
Creo has come down relative to it's ProE days and is priced similarly to SW(?), and I believe NX still starts at double to triple per seat.
ANSYS (specifically Fluent) and similar simulation tools have eyewatering per-seat prices, though I'm a little out of date to know if they're less horrible about multicore licences etc.
I was interested to see, or at least what state they're in so I grabbed a couple. Might try to compare them against some genuine ones with CT and destructive inspection.
On the chance they're half reasonable, thanks for the link.
Let me know if the barcodes are anything but unique/perfect. This has been the case with many vendors, but these chips are cheap enough that you can try 50 vendors.
Will do. Not too worried about trying low cost parts to gain some minimal confidence in a possible source, they're compelling for weekend side-projects at least.
I've previously struggled to roll the dice for higher end parts as the cost difference isn't as extreme and had some obvious reballed parts a few years ago. If they're OK then their $20 XC7K325T will be at the top of my list...
That's low-end Zynq and Artix and I'm thinking more >676 Kintex, though I appreciate any discussion on sourcing.
In the way that that Aliexpress vendor lists the 7010 parts at 1/10th the price of LCSC, some of their $20-60 listings are also shockingly cheap in comparison.
Ah, missed the K! For the K420T, I pay around $30-45 from CN (not Aliexpress) sources with original barcodes (but these vendors are quite a bit harder to deal with.)
I have some obviously reballed (but well done) aliexpress XCKU5P's that I got for $55 a while back. Haven't tested yet but the price was so good I couldn't resist.
I am also annoyed by most modern tech marketing using percentages incorrectly and inconsistently. But 150% is a bigger number than 1.5x so I suppose their hands are tied.
Reasonably experienced and 'a week' can mean vastly different things... It's certainly easier to keep the cost down with longer time-frames.
For a focus on electronics rather than implementing some kind of toy 'algorithm accelerator', I find low-hanging/interesting projects where the combination of requirements exceed a micro's peripheral capabilities - i.e. multiple input/output/processing tasks which could be performed on a micro individually, but adding synchronisation or latency requirements makes it rather non-trivial.
- Very wide/parallel input/output tasks: ADC/DACs for higher samplerate/bitdepth/channel count than typically accessible with even high-end micros
- Implementing unique/specialised protocols which would have required bit-banging, abuse of timer/other peripherals on a micro (i.e. interesting things people achieve with PIO blocks on RP2040 etc)
- Signal processing: digital filters and control systems are great because you can see/hear/interact with the output which can help build a sense of achievement.
When starting out, it's also less overwhelming to start with smaller parts and allocate the budget to the rest of the electronics. They're still incredibly capable and won't seem as under-utilised. Some random project ideas:
- Find a sensing application that's interesting and then take it to the logical extreme - arrays of photo/hall-effect sensors sampled at high speed and displayed, accelerometers/IMU sensor fusion
- Laser galvanometers and piezo actuators are getting more accessible
- Small but precise/fast motion stages for positioning or sensing might present a good combination of input, output, filtering and control systems.
- With more time/experience you could branch into more interesting (IMO) areas like RF or imaging systems.
With more info about your interest areas I can give more specific suggestions.
Good list, thanks. I have a couple of years professional experience as a software dev and worked in the embedded space too. Nowadays I am in security and that is definitely an area of interest.
I only dabble with recreationally reverse engineering industrial/consumer grade HW and following blogs/conferences, so I can only provide a rough shotgun of search terms to try and hit something you're interested in:
- The Glasgow interface explorer is an example of a smaller FPGA making interface level RE tooling more accessible.
- The Chipwhisperer hardware has a focus on power supply glitching, side-channel attacks and general hardware security education/testing.
- There's a handful of FPGA-based implementations intended for high-speed protocol sniffing/MiTM (TCP/IP, USB and CANBus are both pretty common) on github etc, Cynthion is one example.
- Some recent projects have been trying to implement and improve the FOSS ARM Cortex programming and trace experience, Orbuculum ORBTrace probe is an example though the benefits aren't fully realised yet.
- In an odd use-case for an FPGA, I've personally seen hardware that enforces brutal/paranoid DRM/licencing via customised downloaded bitstreams to guards against reverse-engineering/copy efforts, all to most likely run a soft-CPU. I've read (unsubstantiated) that this approach appears on some military hardware.
- Slightly adjacent to specific FPGA projects, but the SDR tooing ecosystem has lots of cool stuff to play with for wireless signal identification/spoofing/re-implementation. HackRF, LimeSDR, GNUradio etc. If you want to get deep then there's lots of overlap with custom FPGA implementations.
As someone who works in embedded/digital design, I don't quite get this post. Can someone explain if I'm missing something obvious here?
- There's a huge range of great lab supplies between random $50 bulk regulator and a 10k supply from R&S/Keithley/Keysight which have OVP, OCP, SCPI, and other monitoring.
- The preface would probably be better posed if it were comparing a low/medium cost lab supply with load, against a higher end supply.
- There was no discussion on performance or capability of this approach, i.e. the load isn't going to be responsive enough to help reject any CM/DM noise, and would likely add some of it's own.
- If you really need to monitor the DUT, then the integrated monitoring in these kinds of supplies/loads are not going to be up to the task, and again, low-cost 'correct' tools will massively outperform this 'hack'.
- One feature that low-cost loads do hold over similarly priced lab PSU's is the ability to program relatively high speed transient tests, but this wasn't discussed. The obvious follow-on would then be trying to justify the lack of waveform control over using a cheap sig-gen.
- What class of security/reverse engineering tasks call for 4-quadrant SMU?
Also, if you're doing this for 'precision at low cost', shouldn't you be putting the sense leads on the DUT rather than the supply?
I'm the author of the post, and one of my colleagues alerted me to your questions. I'll try and address them the best I can:
Re: Range of Lab Supplies: Absolutely, there's a wide range of lab supplies available. The post emphasizes a cost-effective strategy for scenarios where budgets are tight or where flexibility is needed beyond what mid-range supplies offer. Even in a professional environment, access to "That" power supply might impossible due to other people using it, or maybe you need a procurement that works with your company's budget and timelines. In our line of work, we're generally powering equipment up that may not have come with a power supply, so we generally expect well-behaved hardware on the down-stream side. We've been pretty successfull with mail-order $30 high-power supplies and the goal here was to offer a little more protection without applying the same protection requirements to each supply we procure. In the end, it saves our customers money and allows us to be incredibly competive in the marketplace. Hopefully that clears up the preface context.
Re: Performance and Capability: The focus here was more on cost-effectiveness and versatility. While acknowledging the load's limitations in noise rejection, it's a trade-off for a broader range of testing capabilities at a lower cost. Also in this trade is the general expectation for a pretty well-behaved load/DUT. For specific noise-sensitive applications, additional filtering or more specialized equipment would indeed be necessary. In our industry we often use downstream filtering to gain more insight on what the hardware is doing, which allows us to extract a notion of state. This aids the reversal and VR process substantially.
Re: DUT Monitoring, Transient Tests, and Waveform Control--again, we're not interested in testing the performance of the supply, though it is a nice feature to use to do a quick burnin/smoke-test when we do receive them. Luckily the loads we typically investigate are well-behaved, production tested electronics--and if we're really lucky, we can break as many as we want (and sometimes we do!).
Re: SMU's: SMUs in RE/VR can be a huge asset to have when trying to gain introspection or validating/testing side-channel analysis. We could easily write an entire blog post on how SMUs enable our mission. One of my personal favorites is using them to I/V characterize unknown component pins to undestand construction and possible funciton. On a lot of components/processors, the physical output stage has a glaring difference on input vs output pins, and both differ from bidir's as well. We also have a bit of IP related to this work that helps us with the competitive edge.
I definitely could have elaborated more on why we choose to do 4-wire sense at the supply. With an electronic load, it doesn't actually do any supply or load regulation. It only uses the sense wires as a trip-point monitor for OVP/UVLO. Using it as a pass-through, we leave it wide open to be lowest impedance as possible. Since we are way more worried about the OVP condition with these cheap alibaba supplies, it's slightly safer to monitor as close to the source as possible. UVLO isn't a huge problem becuase at that point, we'll start seeing signs of it in the RE/VR process.
Your points are well-taken, and thanks for asking! Please lmk if there are follow-up questions.
I nearly did, but the write-up was getting pretty long.
I'll try to find something for the planned range/interference tests. Morse Micro is also an Australian company so I'll probably look into their parts first unless there's any recommendation?
That sounds good if you're an Aussie. I'm honestly confused why there's still so few options, but I guess most radically new standards got a comparatively slow start.
You can possibly fix/improve this situation by tuning some config settings on the ESP32 and/or host. Changing these with the ESP-IDF is pretty easy, but you'll have to find the relevant calls that are suitable for an Arduino based project.
Your description of packet clumping sounds like Nagle's Algorithm at play, which I found increased TCP latency on the ESP32 fairly significantly.
If the hardware isn't battery powered, then you might also see improvements by playing with the ESP32's WiFi power saving modes.
Creo has come down relative to it's ProE days and is priced similarly to SW(?), and I believe NX still starts at double to triple per seat.
ANSYS (specifically Fluent) and similar simulation tools have eyewatering per-seat prices, though I'm a little out of date to know if they're less horrible about multicore licences etc.
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