theacodes

I only ever directly interacted with Kris once, and that's all I needed. She was so kind to me when I reached out for advice and support during an extremely difficult time in my life.

She will be missed so much.

Sure, it's blog.thea.codes. I write about open source, synthesizers, 3d printers, and PCB design.

As the person who implemented the -t flag and knows the horrendously sharp edge cases that it fails on, all I can say is bless your heart.

that "political spat" was actually targeted harassment towards a former PyPA member the last time someone actively working on packaging.python.org tried to be remotely opinionated. Since this ended with them stepping away and no one else has volunteered, it remains unopinionated.

Thank you for the kind words! I'm glad it was useful.

> why not get it from 24V?

There are DC-DC converters in that same family that can do 4.75~36V -> 3.3V, but since I needed the 5V anyway for the LEDs and I/Os, tossing an inexpensive and small LDO for 5V -> 3.3V is an easy call.

That one seems a bit cumbersome. Drawing schematics and drawing layouts have much different hurdles in terms of performance, it would definitely be a fun challenge. :)

Thank you! For the board layers I just used macOS's screenshot utility, though I would like to do something fancier in the future. The schematics are rendered using code I wrote specifically for this article, but I am planning to publish it as an open source library so others can use it. It needs a little bit more polishing before it's ready, though! You can follow me on Twitter if you wanna get updates about it.

I'll echo sibling's comment about just doing it. Theory only takes you so far, it's important to actually build and experiment, even if it's just in a simulator.

I can recommend Practical Electronics for Inventors as a solid base of projects to experiment with and learn from. If you want to learn how to improve circuits and optimize for specific behaviors, there is a wealth of information in manufacturer application notes. A lot of the protection circuitry used in my article follows advice found in application notes.

Hi! I'm planning on talking about that in an upcoming post. There's options - you can run 3d printer firmware like Marlin (C++/Arduino) or Klipper (Python & C), the tricky bit is getting those to talk to the vacuum sensors. Communication is via gcode commands sent over USB serial. Most folks are running their Lumen with OpenPNP on the host.

I'm actually running completely custom firmware that I wrote specifically for this board that's written in C and uses Raspberry Pi's pico SDK. It's similar to Marlin/Klipper in that the host communicates via gcode over USB serial and that movement commands are more or less done the same, but it gives me the flexibility to simplify the whole host view of the pneumatics. It absolutely wasn't necessary for me to this, I just wanted to.

Author here, thank you for the kind words! My goal is always to write the thing I would've wanted to have when I started out.

You're correct. The pulse-width of the saw wave is very dependent on the amplitude of the saw, so when there's a 1 volt deficit in the saw wave's amplitude you lose about 8% of the pulse width. It's really not that noticeable in practice, though, and if anything it adds to the sonic character of the juno.