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