Electonics Design Hack Chat Transcript

Bil Herd Well the Bios says it all, burned out years ago, have some scattered memories of working for Commodore in the 1980s's. I also was licenced to fix TVs , CBs and had my Master Antenna cert (all Indiana commerce requirements) at an early age. Worked at Pennsylvania Scale and learned all about heavy duty analog, FCC, ground loops, and things that proived usefull at CBM. After CBM I did vision systems and eventually owned an ISP which turned into a Software house, been an entrepeniur/self employed last 25 years

Morning.Star Hey all :-)

Bil Herd Square will cause extra heating

sfrias1 :-))))

DL101 how much power do those 9v need?

Bil Herd on C104

Frank Buss or, maybe replace it with a modern low ESR cap

Bil Herd I also was licenced to fix TVs , CBs and had my Master Antenna cert (all Indiana commerce requirements) at an early age. Worked at Pennsylvania Scale and learned all about heavy duty analog, FCC, ground loops, and things that proived usefull at CBM. After CBM I did vision systems and eventually owned an ISP which turned into a Software house, been an entrepeniur/self employed last 25 years

DL101 can i ask nonpuppy questions on that doc?

Sophi Kravitz Just gonna get formal for a second: Welcome @Bil Herd !

Shulie: @DL101 Yes lol

Sophi Kravitz @DL101 nonpuppy questions, yes please

Bil Herd @DL101 Ya the puppy thing is an attempt at a shiny object

Bil Herd So there are no stupid questions just stupid answers. >:)

Frank Buss how's your Herdware going? I think I saw something on Tindie from you

Bil Herd Puppy is eal, I have bite marks on my toes to prove it.

Bil Herd Slow, I don't really pursue it due to workload

Bil Herd Its more a way to capture people looking for custom

Frank Buss there are some impressive fast loaders

Bil Herd Also, we are releasing a new documentary at the Computer History Museum next Friday! (Sunnyvale)

Bil HerdnIts about the story arc of Nolan Bushnell starting ATari and then finally the sale to Wrane

Al Williams I keep pushing CHM to put in a Dr. Dobb's exhibit, but no traction :(

Bil Herd Warner. Chevck out 8bitgeneration.com for more info, we also did the last interview of Jack Tramiel in teh Commodore Wars story.

Jordan Bunker @Bil Herd Nice! Are you having a showing for the release?

DL101 8bitgeneration.com’s server DNS address could not be found.

Michael Welling bitbanging?

Bil Herd Hey I can try again to get you a shirt now that I know they close the shop early.

DL101 :/

Jordan Bunker http://www.8bitgeneration.com/

Bil Herd Yup, Friday the 23rd, Next Friday.

Al Williams I'd appreciate that @Bil Herd

DL101 thx @Jordan Bunker

Bil Herd So for some reason I am the narrator

Bil Herd The Commodore documentary is available on Steam and Vimeo

Shulie: We have some questions on the doc! :) @DL101 asks: Why didn't commodore keep up with the pc maket?

Bil Herd Ack, I had to refresh to see them.

Shulie: I'll post them here for you, Bil.

Bil Herd Commodore failed IMHO after Jack Tramiel left, we were rudderless without our leader. We had the exciting Amiga chip set and the PC was an overpriced IBM designed (overdesigned) behemouth. The guy that came in to run the engineering group (after I left) was the engineer on the PC JR and despised by all. He actually wropte a memo that said anyone calling one product the Amiga Jr would be fired. His first act was to cancel all ongoing projects and there were EXCITING projects involving ultr-high resolution with integral compression and multi processor, all in the late 80's mind you.

Benchoff > Why didn't commodore keep up with the pc maket?

Commodore kept up with *you*....

Bil Herd The made Greg Berlin remove Ram and an MMU from his PC based design so next year's would sell well, end result was both years were a bust.... just as an example.

Frank Buss how can high resolution with compression work? if you have the wrong image data, it doesn't compress

Marko Shiva Pavlovic Bil great job you have done back then. The little fatty was great machine.

Bil Herd PCs did well in Europe according to Chuck Peddle (6502 father)

Bil Herd But Commodore at that time was the Amiga not the PC, and they totally failed to have a strategy to include a marketing plan.

DL101 so it was just bad management?

Bil Herd Okay, the question is about 6502 updating its architecture.

Benchoff YES THIS WITH THE 65816

Bil Herd (Turns out I cant cut and paste the questions without install a Google app.... the bastards)

Bil Herd So the 65816 came out while I still worked at CBM .

DL101 i find the 65186 kinda weird cpu

Bil Herd Bill Mench, one of the "Motorola 5" had started Western Design Center with his sister. He called me and tried to sell me on that for a 16 bit processor and I informed him we were alreadey going to use the 68K motorola. He went so far as to tell me that the 816 was superior as it only had 2/3 registers to save during an interrupt and the 68K had 16 of those darn pesky registers.

Frank Buss the 68k was nice, clean and good orthogonal instruction set

sfrias1 wow...68000

Bil Herd My jaw literally dropped at this comment and I actually replied that we could just pretend to have 3 registers if that was a problem

Michael Welling :)

Al Williams I did a lot of dissection for the 68000 for Moto... if you have an actual 68000 try an ADDQ.L (Ax),2 -- about 25% of them made for a year will fail that instruction ;-)

Bil Herd He then told me I should adopt it because he just talked Apple into it.

DL101 i don't remember apple ever using that cpu?

Michael Welling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIGS

Bil Herd I am afraid I ran out of patience at this point and I was less polite of my peer than IO should have been.

Frank Buss I think ARM has shadow copies for all registers for fast interrupts

Bil Herd "You called me to tell me that I should use your product because my competitor is using it???"

Bil Herd Ya and there context switching in Sparcs, etc.

Bil Herd So the 68K worked well with the Amiga chip set as it buss shared nicely.

DL101 but the 816 is still in a 40 pin package

Bil Herd Fred Bowen also showed me that the 816 wasn't "really" compatible with our Kernal as the Kernal could not assume whether the processor was in "long" or "short" mode requiring a rewrite

Bil Herd Question is about 286/386 so here is my take on that line of processor: I called it the "shoebox" meaning you had a single box you could put a single tem in as in one accumulator. As the processor got faster it was all about prefetching and getting things into and out of the shoebox faster and faster. Meanwhile other architectures had contectual register swapping and other virtualizing stuff that could go way more parallel... but Intel won.

Bil Herd Question is about the backup sensors on cars.

Frank Buss it's like VHS and Betamax: Betamax was better, but VHS won :-)

DL101 and motorola failed too

Bil Herd In 1986 I went to work for Indian Valley owned by one of the former heads of the R&D lab at CBM. I was working on an alarm system for swimming pools to detech if aa child fell into the pool. Unlike ultrasonics in the open ocean the returns from a closed pool is a continuous stream of echo returns

Bil Herd CBM means Commodore Business Machines BTW, but we often said CBM, old habit

Al Williams If only you had anticipated Apple and come out with the iCBM

Marko Shiva Pavlovic That was a cool project.

DL101 what are you working on this days @Bil Herd

Marko Shiva Pavlovic@Al Williams then he would have destiny shared with Kevin Mitnick

Bil Herd So we found a way to lives with a hundred milliseconds of return from a ping and actually used it to our advantage, I could stick my foot in the water behind a ladder in a bean shaped pool and it would go off but not be fooled by roap slapping the water or floating toys.

Bil Herd @lol AL

Bhavesh Kakwani @Bil Herd Huh what could this be used for?

Bil Herd So I got tired of getting wet so I made a model of a dry swimming pool with air ultrasonic sensors, and it was really an easy thing using a sensor set used by Poloroid. One day I mounted it to the back of the company car, a black station wagon and went for a ride. I was using it to determine distance to the cars behind me, which strangely enough started slowing down when I slowed down being a government looking car with electronics hanging off the back.

Marko Shiva Pavlovic hahaha

igendel :-)

Bhavesh Kakwani lol

Bil Herd We pitched he idea to an inssurance company for semitrailers, I built some into the running lights and it was a blind spot detector, even powered up from the turn signal turning on.

Bil Herd Last I heard, my boss Ziembicki was in a 30 year fight with ford over the patent.

Bil Herd The worst part is when I went to buy my SUV I had to listen to the sales guys tell me all about how he thought it worked.

DL101 lol

Bil Herd Anyone could have designed it, its just it was 1986 and hadn't been done yet

igendel Wow, I got more than I bargained for with the sensors question... Fantastic story, thanks!

Bil Herd I have no short stories

Marko Shiva Pavlovic Yeap the patents big companies and lawyers that is no fun to fight. We all will be better if patents are in public domain.

Sophi Kravitz :) we know

Bil Herd To answer the question what I am doing these days, I have a consulting business for network and security architecture and of course a gig with Hackaday doing videos.

Bil Herd Also narrated a couple of documentaries that we mentioned earlier.

Bhavesh Kakwani Is your network and security work hardware or software related?

Bil Herd Cisco type design.

Bil Herd MPLS

Bil Herd So the QA manager at Commodore came in to report the sad news...

Bil Herd The newest printer had failed the drop test badely, these units were $30K each mind you

Bil Herd At one point he mentioned the parts flying across the room (I examined it sliding under the door and into the hallway)

Bil Herd I was like "wow. It dislodged from the packaging???" His response, and I shit you not, was "packaging?" They not only were dropping printers with no box from "loading dock height", when the first one shattered they went ahead and dropped the other 2

Bil Herd ensuring we would have no prototype printers for another 5 weeks.

Morning.Star lol

Michael Welling doh

Bil Herd Okay who here hates commodore or love Apple, go ahead, speak up

Bhavesh Kakwani too young to have an opinion on this

Bil Herd Lol... guess i asked for that

DL101 not me lol, i don't have anything apple

Frank Buss I have still a (working) MPS-801 in my cellar

Bil Herd So I am reminded of the whole in the wall story....

Marko Shiva Pavlovic I'm reverse I hate apple and love commodore amiga and risc based machines :)

igendel Many of the printers I had over the years deserved serious drop tests

Bil Herd hole in the wall

Morning.StarbBooo Hisss! CBM PET taught me to program :-)

Marko Shiva Pavlovic My favorite was MIPS architecture.

Boian Mitov For good or for bar I only had access to Apple ][ clones in Bulgaria

Bil HerdAfter our move to West Chester we had a new lab and I was given my own room for teh C128 emulator since it was pretty big . On the weekend the AC would be turned off and I would spray the board every 30 minutes as it would stop working from my sweat dripping on it

Boian Mitov For whatever reason that was the design they were able to steal at the time :-D

Bil Herd Then one day the guards, bless their hearts, started locking my door.

Bil Herd Problem was the contractors had never given us the keys. I crawled over the top and got scraped and that white crap all over me in teh process.

sfrias1 Multi Path Level Switching (MPLS) and DWDM. Working with a couple of years ago... :-)

Bil Herd I wrote them a nice note explaining that there were no keys and to kindly refrain from locking it.The next day it was locked again.I wrote another note only more terse. The story about what happened next was that I punched through both walls (exterior and internal) in one punch. It actually took me two. Mind you I looked like below at the time:

Bil Herd The next day the door was locked again. The note this time said "Look Assholes, there is a hole next to the door so stop fucking locking it". I finally had to take the knob off the door. We put the QA manager that destroyed the printers in charge of fixing the holes... we would get weekly reports.

Morning.Star :-))

Bil Herd So anyone have names for teh puppy?

NJMakersPodcast Tuft!

DL101 mopo

Bil Herd Cutest one I heard was Nibble, but he will grow up to be big.

NJMakersPodcast that white patch is totes adorbs

Bil Herd He does have a tuft on his head.

Al Williams Ion because he's positively charged

Bil Herd Ya, I picked him for that, has a white spot on his chin and way more intelligent than QA managers.

Shulie: Nibbler

Bil Herd Okay an Al inspired question: What flow faster, electrons or holes?

Al Williams To compute the answer you need to know the speed of dark

Bil Herd Can I tell a Trauma Center story?

NJMakersPodcast says:12:52 P

plz?

Bil Herd says:12:52 P

Inspired by Shulie's suggested name.

Boian Mitov says:12:52 P

This is an easy answer... the dark is faster... whenever the light arrives, the darkness already has been there ;-)

Shulie: haha yes, please tell ussss

sfrias1 says:12:53 P

Holes are faster :-) Because in recombinatio you have more holes at orbital positions. :-)

Bil Herd We had a young lady come in that had been riding a bike and thrown into the windshield of teh car that hit her. We had to give her dozans of stiches all over her back but the worst was each injection of Lidocain caused her to scream, it was hard on everyone. At the end we gave her a little stuffed puppy for her bravery (kids are way braver than adults) and someone asked what she was naming it.

Her reply was "Stitches!"

Marko Shiva PavlovicEnergy of the empty space or expanding universe yeap it travel expand faster the light :)

Morning.Star Holes are faster, its a hole as soon as the electron leaves it but not filled until one does... Propagation ;-)

Brian McEvoy I would say electrons, but I'm not positive.

Bil Herd Hole mobility is typically 2/3rd of electron mobility, I think its why NPN transistors tend to be faster than PNPs.

sfrias1 electron are negative haha

Bil Herd Holes don't make as straight of path from what I understand.

DL101 thats also why PMOS is slow right?

Bil Herd Ya, check out my CMOS posts, I try and hit some of the low level stuff that I learned from working in a room of chip designers.

Bil Herd Anyone playing with the $3,000-$5,000USD pick and place machines?

DL101 i which i had, soon ill have to mane a entire bunch of smd pcb-s with a colleague for work :/

DL101 whish*

Bil Herd @Shulie Tornel I see colored boxes on the sheet but nothing in the lines after the sensor

Arsenijs I played with Liteplacer recently, but we had an old version. Long story short, I couldn't get the precision up to snuff and gave up.

Morning.StarInteresting. Doesnt that depend on the material density then?

smok I'd love to. Got a project with about 200 of 0603 passives

DL101 mine are 0402, gotta do 20 boards

@Bil Herd Looks like that's all the questions we have

Bil Herd @Morning.Star lots of variable not least being doping

Shulie: Last call for questions??

sfrias1 :-)

Morning.Star :-)

Al Williams I got one... @Bil Herd When are you going to be able to afford another L?

Bil Herd There is a story behind that. >:)

Al Williams I can't say I'm surprised. Let's hear it

sfrias1 yes

Sophi Kravitz :)

Boian Mitov On a friday afternoon.... we are all on for good stories... ;-)

Marko Shiva Pavlovic yeap

sfrias1 Please Bill. :-)

Bil Herd My report cards started having William with one "L". I raised my hand being an inquisitive youth and asked why for my name was spelled in such a unique fashion.

Bil Herd The teacher replied that it was "easier for the computer"

Marko Shiva Pavlovic one byte less lol

Bil Herd That was BS of course as it was easier for the person typing it in, the computer didn't care . I responded that one "L" was easier for me too and strated spelling it that way.

Bil Herd % months later I got marked off 10 points on a Math semifinal test for mispelling my name

Bil Herd To a now rebellious youth that cemented the deal.

Morning.Star Lol. I remember a PET program at school for keeping student record. To save bytes it too the first letter and the end of a name. Poor Patrick XD

sfrias1 xD

Bil Herd Turns out I invintyed a unique handle way back when, google "Bill Herd" and you get a bunch of people, google "Bil Herd" and its only me.

Sophi Kravitz the only one BIl herd

Al WilliamsA bunch of people? Or a herd?

Marko Shiva Pavlovic Its bin herd

igendel I saw an old typewriter once, where in order to save space they used the same key for "1" and lowercase "l"...

Al Williams All the old typewriters did that... o for 0, 1 for L....

Bil Herd BTW if anyone ever heard of HErdware here is the origin:

Bil Herd Its the Easter egg in the C128

igendel @Al Williams Oh, then I was born into the age of the advanced typewriters :-)

sfrias1 :-)))

Marko Shiva Pavlovic :)

Al Williams I think nearly all manuals were like that... I learned on an Underwood from the 1910's--not that I am that old. I'm old but not that old.

DL101 whats the command for that?

Bil Herd When the programmer did this (they didnt tell me cause they knew they would never be able to bitch about not enough ROM) they found that they had to redo teh capital V in Von's name in the font ROM. The QA manager had not directed his people to press every key on the keyboard and check the results.

Bil Herd

sys32800,123,45,6

sfrias1 hahaha

Bil Herd Also the shift Q didn't work, the user groups found it the first day of sales.

Bil Herd They found the easter egg by the third day by disassembling the instructions even though it had been Exclusive Or'ed with AA

Bil Herd or was it 55

DL101 lol

Marko Shiva Pavlovi :)

Bil Herd Anyone other questions?

Sophi Kravit We're done on the sheet Please come back again Bil!

Sophi Kravit that was awweosme

Brian McEvo Thank you for speaking, Bil. I enjoyed the stories.