Most of the time if you want to add a USB interface to your project, you’ll have to get an FTDI chip, or one of those similarly operating knockoffs. But those chips require additional external circuitry that you may not want to fool with (I know I don’t). This Hackaday blog post introduces a neat little chip, the CH330. This is a barebones chip which takes power, ground, D+, D- and renders a TX/RX pair on the other side for your project. A couple of problems arise however. All the data sheets you can find as of this time are in Chinese, but Google translate does an okay job of translating them. Also, I couldn’t find them for sale yet on AliExpress, which is where I expect to see them first. Go over to the Hackaday article for all the juicy details about this new-to-market chip and how you can incorporate it into your next design.

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I’ve purchased a Creality Ender 3 printer from Amazon in the past month or so. I grabbed the printer, along with a roll of grey AmazonBasics PLA, and decided to try my hand at 3D printing. My “all-in” budget was around $250, shipped.

Now this printer is unique in several ways. It has a heated print bed, which is a nice upgrade. It features SD card printing, as well as a USB interface. The most unique aspect however, is that it comes as a DIY kit! That’s right, the unit flat-packed “Ikea-style” and you put it together yourself. I’ll admit, it made me a bit nervous because everything has to be “just-right” to print successfully. I’m happy to say that things went swimmingly!

The installation manual is mostly diagrams, but they are very well done. I spent about 3.5 to 4 hours putting it together one Sunday afternoon, and printed a Benchy Boat that evening!

I’ve been tweaking the settings in Cura (the slicer they recommend) and I have only one issue remaining, that appears to be related to Cura and not the printer. I am very happy overall and will post more of my prints when I get them going!

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Multi-service architectures surround us daily. Our computing needs are served from many different independently operated services, and all implemented using different underlying technologies. When these independent units bring only one small service or set of services, it is called a microservice. While there is still some industry discussion about the exact properties of a microservice, one thing can be agreed upon: microservice-based systems enforce modular design by default. This begs the question, if my services are decoupled and modular, how do they communicate effectively to create an entire system that performs something useful?

Enterprise Service Buses and Middleware

The solution to this problem is a connector software which acts as a message routing bus. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), often simplified as Middleware (although Middleware is not always an ESB), allows these decoupled services to talk to each other in a language and medium-neutral way. For instance, if you have a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) comprised of services written in different languages, with a few plug ‘n play components, but they all need to share data, a language-neutral ESB is in order.

Many of the commercial ESBs are written as a publisher-subscriber (PubSub) system. This allows the individual services to subscribe to the types of messages it is interested in knowing about. The ESB or Middleware is responsible for managing the “channels” and relaying the published messages to the right subscribers. The Middleware or ESB provider will usually provide a connector for many languages making it easy to interface your services to the ESB. If the connector is not provided, the specification will usually be provided so that you can implement your own connector. This allows an SOA system to communicate without worrying about the transport mechanism of its messages.

It’s easy to see that ESBs can be found nearly everywhere in technology. In fact, many of the most common services we use today can be loosely classified as an ESB. Perhaps I’ll start a project soon to build an ESB and see how it goes?

Thanks for reading!

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School

I am wrapping up my final few classes and getting ready for graduation! This semester I have taken several rather applicable classes to my upcoming work situation. My favorite class has absolutely been Embedded Systems. This class goes from the question What is an embedded system? through What are the considerations when designing an embedded system? all the way to considering individual pieces of embedded systems: peripherals, memory architectures, processor types, and more. This class has piqued my interest in RTOS’s and I will definitely be researching that more as I find time.
I also have been taking a PLCs class, as well a class title Numerical Linear Algebra. That class is all about the algorithms that popular Algebraic systems (like MATLAB) use to solve or approximate the answer to all kinds of problems. 

Other Stuff

All my recent work has been wrapped up in Capstone Design recently. I do however have a post to write (I will post immediately after this one) about how I trained color sensors to recognize discrete colors based on RGB and Clear value feedback.
Thanks for reading!

The post It’s been a while again! appeared first on Jacob N Calvert.

School

I just finished up the semester and finals were rough, but I came out with great success. I really enjoyed a few of my classes. Namely, Computer Architecture, where I studied how the MIPS32 ISA was designed, and then implemented several hardware versions of it. The second best class was Digital Systems Design where I was introduced to VHDL and was able to, with a lab partner, design and implement a 16 microcontroller, with assembly language, assembler, linker, and loader! That was a very good learning experience. The best class though, and most definitely the most difficult was a mathematics class. Boundary Value Problems was all about partial differential equations which model basically every physical process we can measure. The heat, wave, LaPlace, and other conservation equations and methods to solutions were discussed in this class. It really opened my eyes to a new way of viewing physical processes such as the vibration of a rectangular membrane, or an in-compressible fluid traveling in a pipe where there is wall-friction in the inner walls.

Other Stuff

Last night, I modified an old ATX power supply to work as a desktop bench power supply. I basically opened the unit up, removed wiring I did not need, and routed out the wire I did need. Then I ran to a local RadioShack and bought a few things:

• LEDs with mounting hardware
• Switch (SPST)
• Project box
• 12 pin connector (male and female)
• Small pack of resistors
• 6 binding posts

I drilled all the necessary holes for the LED indicator, switch, binding posts and connector, and soldered/wired the project box components. I wired the mate to the connector on the ATX power supply end and *boom* I have a desktop power supply on the cheap. It generated +12v, -12v, +5v, -5v, +3.3v and GND nodes for use. Check out the pics below!

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The movement is funded by ExxonMobil and supported by an array of various engineering associations and institutions that are pushing for expanded engineering education. The site contains all sorts of information on multiple engineering fields as well as the stories of some of the most famous innovators of our time. I agree wholeheartedly with this mission of advancing the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects in our classrooms early in college careers to give this generation a competitive edge to do something great. One of the most intriguing points this site makes is the push of cooperative education for engineering students while in undergraduate studies. I found my co-op position to be more valuable as a learning experience than any of my classes. Through my structured cooperative education experience, I found out what fields I am really interested in, and I found my love for embedded systems design. This has helped me immensely by allowing me to focus my studies on a directed path that will lead to my eventual success (I hope!). I’ll finish with a quote from the site:

Are you a dreamer? A practical achiever? Or do you just have great ideas? You can #BeAnEngineer in an area that interests you. With the right tools and education, and a dedication to your profession, a bright future in engineering is within reach.

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