Review of electronic test and measurement equipment. Tips and techniques for electronic design. Cool projects! Tear down and analysis of LED light bulbs. Teardown and analysis of silicon.
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It would be great if someone would make a light mini generator for those on canoe trips. It would be lighter and more reliable than solar and wild rivers have fast current with campsites near rapids or falls
I prefer my olight. Stays on the mode i have it in everytime i turn it on. Have to hold power button to change brightness. Double tap power button fast to make it flash. Battery lasts forever. Brightest light ive had. Light weight and tough. WATERPROOF. Had a dim mode that lasts for 3 days if needed. Has a super bright mode that lasts 2 or 3 minutes before it auto cancels to normal because the light gets hott for a led when that mode is used.
Blinking is mosly for sos or to alert people if you are next to a busy road so they dont hit you. If its a rifle flashlight that blinks, its to stun your target
The voltage reg on there is a buck converter down to 1.1V which is the core voltage. Apparently the components for that circuit on the PCB are fairly precisely specified, seems the on-die regulator is very very picky for stable operation. (It apparently cares which direction the inductor is wound, etc.)
excellent analysis of the chip on my credit card! i started looking on youtube at those companies that transplant chips into nice gold metal cards and how they are un-glued, but ended up here knowing so much more than i needed to know! your a clever guy electronupdate!
I agree theses tools are great and powerful. Was a fan until my barely used 20V chainsaw stopped working and found they just sell the the controller in an assy motor-controller-switch at almost the price of the tool. That's a shame these days how they force people to garbage things. I found on the net that many have the same problem even some with the saw almost not used (for sure a weak component in the controller). Is an electronic king like you can help people find (if this is possible) some replacement oem controller the theses brushless motor tools?
Ppl are grateful for die images, but i wanted to thank you for running a blog. Not so common nowadays to have something valuable to read and hosted elsewhere besided big tech <3 bookmarked
The voltage regulator is integrated with the power saving circuitry - you can configure it to automatically change from switching to linear mode when entering sleep. This way you get both low quiescent current and good efficiency. That said, I doubt it will be used on many products. A discrete LDO will take up less board space, have lower BOM cost and be easier to certify for EMI (the reference hardware design is very particular about both layout and inductor part number, similar to the crystal oscillator). Also, footprint compatibility be damned, lack of USB C on the pico 2 is inexcusable.
Wait for the Chinese to get out a better board then, i have a pin-compatible RP2040 board here with the original chip but USB-C and 16 MByte of flash, it even has a frigging reset button. And a RGB LED that i won't use. 😅
Seems to me they did microUSB simply to be completely 1-1 compatible with the previous Pico. Otherwise surely the cost differences have to be getting into the low cents range, which we're already paying for the new v2 chip.
Hi Electronupdate, we were discussing the RPi on the SiloconPr0n discord managed my John McMaster. While there isn't much you've missed in your analysis, Lennert posted a partial annotated IR backside image which might interest you. You've pointed to the UL marking on the board. These markings are for the PCB itself, not the whole product. E.g. the boards are from FR4 and complies with standard UL94V-0. The CE and FCC logo do say something about the whole board, including radiative emissions testing and ROHS. While these aren't a big deal for a board without radio, I always found it odd these markings are applied very early in the design and manufacturing stage, usually long before you can say it passes the testing. (Some fields are very picky about this, and even a simple silkscreen change is not allowed.) As for the current bug bounty, the magic value is programmed into OTP and isn't in ROM. But ROM could still be interesting to read out to find a bug in the secure boot.
Excellent look into the silicon as always! The reason why they have a buck-boost PMIC is because they intend for you to be able to connect VSYS directly to a battery which may be under 3.3 V. Really wish they used USB C, the cost differences would probably 1 or 2 cents for the non-USB 3 USB C connector and the two CC resistors. Even when they were designing the original Pico it was feasible. I can only assumed they were trying to compete with the Arduino Micro so just copied the micro USB. As a result I see lots of applications that just ignore the micro USB connector and have a separate USB C connector for power on their own PCB or don't use the Pico module at all and just the DFN IC.
Nice work on this! How do you remove that top metal lower, i.e. that power distribution network? I assume chemicals so you don't ruin anything underneath it?
The voltage regulator is to provide the 1.3v core voltage. I understand it's mostly there to simplify designs using the RP2350, removing the need for an additional voltage regulator. The minimal viable RP2350 design is little more than a 3.3v regulator, the RP2350, the qspi flash chip, an inductor, some caps and some resistors.
Great video! The RP1 is the support chip on the Pi 5 (and it started being designed before the original RP2040 in the Pico) - so that with the Pico and Pico 2 accounts for three RP variants - wonder what the other one is/was?
My question is that would this Raspberry Pi chip that costs basically pennies to make, is more powerful than a Pentium 200 MMX from a white ago ? I mean raw performance because if it is, it is incredible how far we got.
A lot of it comes down to die size and process node. The Pentium was using the smallest node available at the time, and still it ended up being a big and costly die. The pi chip is using a 10 year old process node so it’s cheep. Plus the die is super small so you can fit tons of them on a single wafer.
there is always going to be the next raspberry pi , but i think its way far ahead , we currently have RPI with 8 gigs of ram and pretty powerful chip , and RPI is known for having massive increments of performance from the previous gen , i dont think they have that yet ,the pi 5 is still in its beginning stages ,to get a massive uplift i think we have to wait for 2026 (maybe) to get a compleatly new chip ,in between they will revise the design and we would probably have PI 5 with better connectivity or better ram speeds
The criticism of microusb is that for one the cost difference is shrinking to almost nothing; it's more convenient due to being reversible, and eliminating microusb is more convenient that people don't need to use different cables again. I think they're only using microusb for full footprint compatibility and because it's in their parts bin - switching to USB-C wasn't yet feasible 3 years ago. ARM microcontrollers often include internal linear regulators, to reduce external part count, so they only need to be supplied with IO voltage (3v3) which is shared with the bulk of the system which integrates the microcontroller, while a lower voltage rail is internal to the core. If Pi Pico a board for hobbyists was the only or primary product, they wouldn't have done that, but the microcontroller is supposed to be sold to electronics manufacturers to integrate into real consumer-market devices, which can be sensitive to part count, layout requirements and overall footprint. I think ARM is potentially going away in the future of this microcontroller lineage to be replaced by RISC-V due to licensing costs. The new cores are already included, just waiting for ecosystem maturity.
Awesome! We just got some STM32Us here which are on ST's new Samsung 18nm. Wish I could see the die differences. Pretty nice leap in power consumption.
the metal fill is not really for etching purposes. It is to help CMP. Without metal fill, there would be large within-die variation. Metal-fill mitigates this.
Thank you! Going to try to install an RGB light strip in the tube as the tube seems to act as a great light diffuser. Those LEDs are very bright and hard to look at when outside of the tube
seems like a good solution. but just the worth of all your engineering gear is not exactly 'poor man' 😅. anyway, i found 2 cheap metallurgical mcs: olympus and wild. now i have to learn how to use them
