The Quarky Engineer

I think I am going to have to skip the caffeine for the next few days to hand solder this SOT553 package. The entire package with 5 pins almost fits inside an 0805 pad. It makes those usb pads look huge!

Good Morning! What a fantastic Portland day! Fire in the fireplace, a thick fog that quiets the city, and a cool rain on the roof. For some people sunshine is the key, but I love these rainy days.

Thank you to everyone the happy birthday notes! Yesterday was my 50th birthday, which in a more normal year might have called for some kind of celebration, but the world has other plans! On the positive side I have made it 50 years without breaking a bone, without ever having antibiotics, serious illness, or a hospital admission. 50 more?

I decided to spend the unplanned day doing whatever crossed my mind. Descriptions in the pictures. It was a good day.

If all else fails…

It is amazing that for $50 I can have 5 copies of 4 different PCB made and shipped to me in a week.

I have made some progress in getting things in my office setup. The PC I have under the desk ( dual Xeon 20 core ) was running Windows, but I switch that to Linux and put the windows image from the machine into a VM with a GPU passthru. I was surprised at how well that went given I was restoring the windows image from a backup.. but it worked great. VirtiO devices, QXL video, and performance is pretty good.

I also have a windows gaming box down in the datacenter room and that box is sending HDMI up to a monitor here, and I also have USB going down there for keyboard/mouse/flight stick. The USB over fiber works really well, and doesn’t seem to have significant latency.

I also got the 6 upper monitors correctly connected to a 6 DP output video card in my VM server in the DC with PCI passthru to a VM as well as a second USB extension with passthru. That too worked better than I thought it would. The USB passthru required a bit of hacking since I was trying to pass through native MB USB devices, but a few ‘quirk’ flags got that done. Next up I need to work on my Grafana screens which will be displayed on these monitors.

Still more to do, but getting better every day.

You can tell a lot about someone from their electronic parts collection. I suspect I might have a few friends who could tell you the function of every item in this picture without even having to google them.