Welcome Michał Zalewski, AKA lcamtuf!

• The lcamtuf Substack is where Michał is writing most these days
• Chris first found and geeked out about the CNC guide on the lcamtuf original site (discussed many times here)
• Michał is interested in the craft of teaching electronics
• He recently published The Secret Life of Circuits with No Starch Press
  • Use the code AMPHOUR26 for 30% off The Secret Life of Circuits valid from June 1st through June 30th
  • It was announced on his blog here
• Deriving fomulas from basic trigonometry sometimes bugs people who think electronics should only work with calculus
• Software geeks follow the site, often getting lots of attention on Hacker News
• Row hammer DRAM
• There were no Information Security degrees in the early days, so the field was made up of folks with backgrounds in math and EEs
• Fuzzing for security
• SMBC cartoon for blming humans
• Books
  • American Fuzzy Lop
  • The Tangled Web
  • P0f v3
  • Silence on the Wire
• Security stuff (including books on the subject) ages over time, as opposed to electronics
• On the subjects of Calculators (and Michał’s collection)
  • Calculators are a footnote in the history of computing, but still intriguing
  • Dead ends in calculators
  • CRT displays on calculators
  • Nixie tubes
  • Discrete moving into logic gates into processors
  • Mechanical calculators are rare and get a high price online
• Working with transistors
• The Secret Life of Circuits start with FET based transistors vs BJT
• BJTs are often right after diode chapter because of the multiple junctions in an NPN, but that doesn’t make it easier to understand
• Projects
  • A recent project involved making a clock out of current meters
  • Woodworking and AI example
  • Want to see all lcamtuf articles in one place?
  • Sokoban
  • Sir box-a-lot

• Chris just got back from a work trip to Madrid
• He also got to hang out with Matt Venn (and coworker Mike Szczys) in Valencia
• Dave has a new data center going in across the street
• Chris enjoyed this episode of Prof G Markets where they talked about the impact of data centers on power and the rise of “behind the meter” generation
• Dave without internet for a week. Chris has had multiday losses after fiber has been cut in his neighborhood.
• Humanoid robots…on a plane!
• Chris has been working on 0201 components on a tiny Bluetooth board
• The Iran War and subsequent rise in petroleum product sourcing issues is starting to impact the PCB industry

• PCBs we are used to ordering at low cost (JLC, PCBway, etc) are normally loss leaders to get larger business later
• Chris found his low cost microscope from Florin/Voltlog trinocular video
• lcamtuf will be on the show soon, Chris bought a CNC mill because of a single webpage of his making
• TagMod board is a new breakout Chris made for injecting power through a 10 pin TagConnect cable.
• NXP devboards somehow have LEDs as bright as the sun
• Dave has been revisiting his solar analytics (update: he figured out he’s getting charged more too!)
• Chris has been working at Canonical (makers of Ubuntu, new owners of Golioth) for a few months now. That was the trip to Spain.
• Dogfooding your own product
• Chris created a backronym: “Application Level Program Optimization” or… ALPO
• Chris built a new vibe coded project for talking to Zephyr devices using Web Serial and passing firmware packages over SMP
• CI/CD
• Debian now requires “fully reproducable” builds to harden against supply chain attacks
• Veritasium video about Linux bug

Welcome back, Jason Kridner!

• Jason has previously been on the show
  • Episode 59 (!)
  • Episode 378 alongside Robert Nelson
• The BeagleY AI was the first board that mimic’ed the RPi form factor
• PocketBeagle 2 is still a small altoid tin form factor with a new processor
• The Zepto is a new product targeting a $1 price point for microcontrollers
• Many boards in the Beagle catalog now run Zephyr, and BeagleBoard.org recently joined The Zephyr Project as members and contributors
• Click Brand is the official bards from MikroElectronika that implement the open source Mikrobus
• Chris started using Mikrobus while designing early prototypes of the BeagleConnect Freedom
• The Freedom board talks over wireless to boards like the BeaglePlay
• Application spaces for different boards
• FPGA based board
• Cheeseburger robot? Well yes, but also Cheeseburger robot
• Mitchells vs the machine
• Krazam
• Click boarfds now have eeprom / ClickID as a 1-wire identifier with a uuid
• Beagleplay has 802.15.4
• Project ARA popularized the idea of Greybus
• MotoMods from Motorola was another implementation that worked on the Moto Z
• Using Freedom for prototyping
• WebAssembly
• …on microcontrollers?
• Jason says he doesn’t really like MCUboot
• Entering the linux ecosystem
• bb-imager
• Techlab is a way to easily extend peripherals for the PocketBeagle
• Known working targets
• Michael Welling designed the baconbits mini cape as a learning platform
• The BeagleBadge is a new formfactor shown in the title image for this episode. It runs on a new low cost TI part running Linux and yes… it runs Doom
• The Badge can also talk on Meshtastic
• Working with the memory shortage
• Bao – Bunie and Xobs
• Bella / Gem
• Beagle5fire
• RISC V boards
• RV32 Claire
• Find Beagle and Jason online
  • Schedule a meeting with Jason
  • There is also a Discord
  • And a Zulip instance
  • You can get Beagle merch