Thanks for making the DEF CON badge! 10000x cooler than last year
I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
171–180 of 356 posts
Re: I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
#172Gross, the dev board uses micro-USB. It's 2024! Otherwise amazing work. Exactly what's needed to compete with the existing giants.
USB-C is way more complicated, even if you're not trying to push 4K video or 100W power through it. The interface chip ought to be more complex, and thus likely more expensive. You can still find a number of cheap gadgets with micro-USB on Aliexpress. Likely there's some demand, so yes, you can build a consumer product directly on the dev board, depending on your customer base.
You can use a USB C connector with standard USB, no interface chip required. It's simply a connector form-factor change.
Re: I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
5V GPIO is a huge deal for me - this immediately opens up a huge range of integrations without having to worry about line level conversion. I can’t wait to use this!
Be careful with assumptions though. Being 5V tolerant doesn't mean that your 3V output can sufficiently drive an input that expects 0-5V levels correctly. I ran into this problem using an ESP32 to drive a Broadcom 5V LED dot-matrix display. On paper everything looked fine; in reality it was unreliable until I inserted an LS245 between the ESP and the display.
> LS245
Do you think that would be a good IC to drive these with a RP2040? https://www.analog.com/en/products/max7219.html
Re: I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
#174This is fantastic news. Is there information on power consumption? This is something that precludes a good deal of use cases for the RP2040 unfortunately and any improvements here would be good, but maybe the RP's are just not made for ultra low power?
Significant improvements to flat-out power (switcher vs LDO) and to idle power (low quiescent current LDO for retention). Still not a coin-cell device, but heading in the right direction.
Re: I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
#175Big day for my team (Pigweed)! Some of our work got mentioned in the main RP2350/Pico2 announcement [1] but for many months we've been working on a new end-to-end SDK [2] built on top of Bazel [3] with support for both RP2040 and RP2350, including upstreaming Bazel support to the Pico SDK. Our new "Tour of Pigweed" [4] shows a bunch of Pigweed features working together in a single codebase, e.g. hermetic builds, on-d…
I hate Bazel. A build system for C/C++ should not require a Java JVM. Please keep Java out of microcontroller ecosystem please -__--
Maybe there is a way to create a native executable with GraalVM...
Re: I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has: you can encrypt your code, store a decryption key in OTP, and decrypt into RAM. Or if your code is small and unchanging enough, store it directly in OTP.
What stops an attacker from uploading their own firmware that dumps out everything in OTP?
Signed boot. Unless someone at DEF CON wins our $10k bounty of course.
Re: I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be careful with assumptions though. Being 5V tolerant doesn't mean that your 3V output can sufficiently drive an input that expects 0-5V levels correctly. I ran into this problem using an ESP32 to drive a Broadcom 5V LED dot-matrix display. On paper everything looked fine; in reality it was unreliable until I inserted an LS245 between the ESP and the display.
> LS245 Do you think that would be a good IC to drive these with a RP2040? https://www.analog.com/en/products/max7219.html
A better question might be why anyone is using a MAX7219 on a new design in 2024. There are so many other choices for displays than a 20 year-old IC from a company that's gone through two changes of ownership since.
Anyway, a 74LS245 isn't a level shifter, it's an octal buffer. It just happened to be the right choice for my needs. In your application, I'd suggest an actual level shifter. You can find level shift breakout boards at Sparkfun and Adafruit.
Re: I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And still no USB C on the official devboard. Do you live in a universe where micro-USB cables are not available, or something? There's gonna be something or other that needs micro-USB for the next decade, so just buy a few and move on. They're not expensive. [later edit: I bet it has to do with backwards compatibility. They don't want people to need to rework case designs to use something that is meant as a drop-in…
> Do you live in a universe where micro-USB cables are not available, or something? There's gonna be something or other that needs micro-USB for the next decade, so just buy a few and move on. They're not expensive. I live in a universe where type C has been the standard interface for devices for years, offering significant advantages with no downsides other than a slightly higher cost connector, and it's reasonable…
Micro-B is fine. This is such an overblown non-issue I am shocked that people are making a big deal of it.
Re: I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
5V GPIO is a huge deal for me - this immediately opens up a huge range of integrations without having to worry about line level conversion. I can’t wait to use this!
Be careful with assumptions though. Being 5V tolerant doesn't mean that your 3V output can sufficiently drive an input that expects 0-5V levels correctly. I ran into this problem using an ESP32 to drive a Broadcom 5V LED dot-matrix display. On paper everything looked fine; in reality it was unreliable until I inserted an LS245 between the ESP and the display.
> Being 5V tolerant doesn't mean that your 3V output can sufficiently drive an input that expects 0-5V levels correctly.
It's fine for TTL (like your 74LS245 is), which registers voltages as low as 2V as a logical 1. Being able to directly interface with TTL eases up so many retrocomputing applications.
Re: I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
USB-C is way more complicated, even if you're not trying to push 4K video or 100W power through it. The interface chip ought to be more complex, and thus likely more expensive. You can still find a number of cheap gadgets with micro-USB on Aliexpress. Likely there's some demand, so yes, you can build a consumer product directly on the dev board, depending on your customer base.
How are they "way more complicated?" You have to add two resistors and short another pair of DP/DM lines?
Yes, indeed, I've checked, and apparently you don't need anything beyond this if you don't want super speed or power delivery (past 5V 3A).
I did not realize how many pins in a USB-C socket are duplicated to make this possible. (For advanced features, you apparently still need to consider the orientation of the inserted cable.)