EP#28: Dissolving Energon Cubes

Podcast Notes

• Stephen has been running tests on the Energon Cube for the SSPS. So far everything is working great. Check out Stephen's blog post update:  Super Simple Power Supply "SSPS" Design (Part 3).
• The FX Dev board enclosure arrived and it looks great. See Figure 1 for some sweet powder coated goodness.
• Parker has been working on streamlining all the MacroFab Engineering Github Repositories. Most of them should look consistent in layout and information now.
• All the Eagle footprint libraries have been updated with MPN and Populate attributes. Check them out here. Should be adding these features to DipTrace and KiCad footprints by next week.
• Releasing MF-CON-2.54mm-01xXX pinheaders. Check out the house parts section on the MacroFab website.
• Parker had an article come out earlier this week about Eagle Part Attributes. This way designers and engineers can easily add the MPN and Populate field to their own parts.
• In Episode 26 of MEP, Parker had a hacked together USB Type C prototype. Now Parker has a full on development board he designed using a FTDI FT230X and a Parallax Propeller. See Figure 2.
•  ‘Transient electronics’ research develops dissolving battery. Basically is a battery that has a polyvinyl alcohol-based polymer casing that swells causing it to dissolve, except for some nanoparticles, in around half an hour after contact with water. It supposedly can power a laptop for 15 minutes but Parker did some napkin math and found out it was a bunch of crap.
•  PokeBall Wiggles when Pokemon are Nearby. Cool project that uses servos inside a 3D printed pokeball to wiggle when it finds pokemon nearby for the Pokemon Go App. Uses Particle IoT's "Photon" hardware and the Pokemon Go's API.

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro theme!