[00:00.000 --> 00:11.840]  So, hi everyone, my name is Mathieu Tasse, I'm a software engineer and this talk is about
[00:11.840 --> 00:17.240]  a retrospective of my last year when it comes to hardware development.
[00:17.240 --> 00:22.560]  So my background is that I do a lot of C programming, I've been doing so for the last
[00:22.560 --> 00:31.280]  10 years, kernel drivers, libraries, mostly on Linux, so with Yocto, all of that mostly
[00:31.280 --> 00:38.960]  for profit because you get to make a living and I've also been hacking on more fun stuff
[00:38.960 --> 00:49.400]  like guide, new geeks, functional stuff for fun this time and to me up to last year hardware
[00:49.400 --> 00:55.720]  was more or less like a black box, I mean I was familiar with the surface of the box
[00:55.720 --> 01:04.280]  which are data sheets, manuals, schematics, but what's inside of it wasn't that interesting
[01:04.280 --> 01:13.160]  to me if I had something harder than finding out a GPIO number or any kind of trouble,
[01:13.160 --> 01:23.680]  I found my hardware colleague, dropped the ball and moved on, but last year almost randomly
[01:23.680 --> 01:29.800]  I discovered the world of hardware repair and micro soldering on YouTube and it's a
[01:29.800 --> 01:35.680]  fun world, there are some really really talented people which are repairing some stuff, they
[01:35.680 --> 01:43.280]  are finding the one tiny capacitor that is failing, removing it and just by buying some
[01:43.280 --> 01:53.120]  1001 cent capacitor you are fixing a burden, I found that quite interesting and I think
[01:53.120 --> 02:00.040]  that the world would be really different maybe in 20, 30 years and having this kind of tool
[02:00.040 --> 02:08.560]  set could be interesting and at the same time I had a project where I was involved in the
[02:08.560 --> 02:19.560]  design of a motherboard for an Intel CPU and the hardware guy was a bit busy, I was somehow
[02:19.560 --> 02:28.960]  against my will involved in the hardware selection and so I learned that it's more or less picking
[02:28.960 --> 02:36.080]  out ICs which means integrated circuits, it's like often a tiny black box and you have to
[02:36.080 --> 02:42.400]  pick one, you have to pick one that is not out of stock and it's challenging these times
[02:42.400 --> 02:49.240]  and once you pick two or some that maybe will ship then you need to draw the wires between
[02:49.240 --> 02:56.640]  them and it was quite a fun exercise and it gave me the motivation to acquire some tools
[02:56.640 --> 03:01.080]  because one of the difference between software and hardware is that with software, well you
[03:01.080 --> 03:06.560]  can have your laptop and work everywhere, with hardware my experience is that it's not
[03:06.560 --> 03:12.280]  only that you need some tools, it's that you need all the tools, like if you don't have
[03:12.280 --> 03:19.160]  everything you will still have something missing and you'll be oh no and so this is about how
[03:19.160 --> 03:25.400]  to turn your desk into a terrible mess, so first you need to buy a microscope, you don't
[03:25.400 --> 03:33.560]  need a times 5000 zoom, 540 is way than enough, you need some LED lightening so that you're
[03:33.560 --> 03:41.120]  able to see what's under that and it's quite a fun exercise to learn to solder on the microscope
[03:41.120 --> 03:46.240]  and it's a nice tool to use, then you need obviously a soldering iron, most of you are
[03:46.240 --> 03:51.360]  familiar with it, you need a hot air station, it's maybe even more important than the soldering
[03:51.360 --> 04:00.240]  iron, you use that to desolder some ICs, the tiny black things, we solder them, but it's
[04:00.240 --> 04:04.760]  difficult to manage because it's blowing 400 degrees air so it's easy to mess everything
[04:04.760 --> 04:11.600]  and burn your board, you need a generator to power your board, you need an oscilloscope
[04:11.600 --> 04:24.080]  to be able to see your signals, you need also a breadboard so that you're able to experiment,
[04:24.080 --> 04:32.040]  try out some things, you need some components, some resistors, some capacitors, some inductances,
[04:32.040 --> 04:35.880]  as I said it's nice to have all of those so that when you are trying out something you
[04:35.880 --> 04:41.720]  don't need to wait for two weeks, five weeks to experiment, you need a multimeter, you
[04:41.720 --> 04:46.520]  don't need a fancy one, it's like a two UUOS multimeter, the main function is that when
[04:46.520 --> 04:53.560]  you connect the probes it beeps and you can, it sounds funny but with that you can reverse
[04:53.560 --> 05:06.440]  engineer some tiny circuits, you can isolate some issues, you can do a lot of stuff.
[05:06.440 --> 05:15.400]  You need some flux so that the solder is able to flow nicely, it's probably very toxic
[05:15.400 --> 05:25.440]  and as healthy as like eating lead for breakfast so maybe you also need some kind of fume extractor,
[05:25.440 --> 05:32.360]  I need to improve mine because you need also some solder wick or solder pump so that you're
[05:32.360 --> 05:39.080]  able to remove the solder when you have made some mistakes, you need some tweezers and
[05:39.080 --> 05:46.160]  more than that you need to use them because when you are dealing with O4 or 2 components
[05:46.160 --> 05:52.920]  they like to jump to the end of the room so quite a fun exercise, you need a puff board
[05:52.920 --> 06:00.800]  so that once you have a circuit on your breadboard you can make it more permanent, you need some
[06:00.800 --> 06:06.640]  wires to wire things obviously, if you have a two dollar multimeter then you probably also
[06:06.640 --> 06:16.160]  need an RLC meter so that you are able to find the values of your components and last
[06:16.160 --> 06:23.920]  of all I felt like I needed, I have a software engineer, I did some hardware at school but
[06:23.920 --> 06:28.720]  not so much and I felt like I needed some kind of reference book and when it comes to software
[06:28.720 --> 06:34.800]  to me it's like it's SICP structured and interpretation of computer programs, it feels
[06:34.800 --> 06:40.640]  to me like a novel, it's like a Stephen King novel, I can relate, I felt so entertaining
[06:40.640 --> 06:48.560]  and I can use what's the reference book for hardware, people tell me it's the art of electronics
[06:48.560 --> 06:55.160]  so I can just say that it's a whole different deal here, to me at least, like reading more
[06:55.160 --> 07:00.600]  than two or three pages gives me like horrible headaches but it's a reference book, you will
[07:00.600 --> 07:11.400]  find some more in-depth explanations on electronics like overflow and what, and when I acquired
[07:11.400 --> 07:16.840]  all that equipment I tried to design some easy circuits so this one is a flash programming
[07:16.840 --> 07:23.360]  device on a pervboard so that you are able to put your IC on the socket on the left hand
[07:23.360 --> 07:29.320]  corner and then able to flash it with flash run, that was my third circuit then I managed
[07:29.320 --> 07:37.160]  to make a few reapers, I had a 0% success rate for like three months, then I did hit
[07:37.160 --> 07:46.920]  2% success rate by fixing my coffee machine but since then I managed to fix quite a few
[07:46.920 --> 07:54.640]  things, I also managed to hack a BIOS, it was a nice thing, I had a laptop with password
[07:54.640 --> 08:02.800]  protected BIOS, I tried to remove the BIOS which is the DIC there, I burnt it to ashes,
[08:02.800 --> 08:08.640]  I burnt another one that I still burnt to ashes, about the third one, I flashed it with
[08:08.640 --> 08:15.640]  the device you saw with flash run, put BIOS without the password, managed to solder it
[08:15.640 --> 08:22.760]  back on with the hot station I thought about, then it wasn't working because I also managed
[08:22.760 --> 08:29.040]  to blue some copper traces then I had to run some wires but at the end the notebook booted
[08:29.040 --> 08:39.320]  and it's not much but it was quite a success to me, then finally I did try to get into
[08:39.320 --> 08:46.560]  PCB design so I have a led ribbon around my desk and I tried to make it like remote controllable
[08:46.560 --> 08:52.000]  so I designed the PCB it's like the worst use case you can ever think of but you get
[08:52.000 --> 09:00.440]  to start somewhere so I designed a PCB on QCAD with a CPU that was really fun to solder,
[09:00.440 --> 09:11.800]  a regulator, a USB port, nothing fancy, I found QCAD really fun to use, I mean it was easy
[09:11.800 --> 09:16.920]  to draw the schematics to make the routing even without any experience, I mean really
[09:16.920 --> 09:27.640]  nice software, I tried LibroCAD for my next design because the name sounds appealing but
[09:27.640 --> 09:33.800]  it was quite an interesting process, yeah that's it so the takeaway message is that
[09:33.800 --> 09:38.960]  even if you are 100% software engineer and you don't want to get into hardware having
[09:38.960 --> 09:45.000]  a minimal set of equipment and minimal set of knowledge allows you to do some fun stuff
[09:45.000 --> 09:53.040]  and try to connect you to your hardware colleagues which is a good thing in my opinion, so thank
[09:53.040 --> 09:54.040]  you.
[09:54.040 --> 10:18.040]  Okay, thank you Matthew.