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FTDI chips cost at least $5 (https://www.findchips.com/search/ft232), but an RP2040 can be bought for less than $1, so it makes sense to use an RP2040.


Repurposing is also great. I have FTDI UART adapters that I've used once five years ago, and couldn't find them later, then had to buy another new one for using it (again) just once.

If I can take one of my rp2040s and use it for half and hour and then use it for a different thing, it's great


RP2040 is so cheap it is used in the debugger for the Pi Pico.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/d...


WCH CH340 USB-UARTs cost less than an RP2040 (and probably the external flash.)

https://www.lcsc.com/search?q=CH340

The reason to use an RP2040 is that you need a little bit of logic with that UART.


Doesn't the RP2040 require external qspi flash? What does that cost?

MCP2200 is ~$2.50 in single units and you don't have to deal with firmware or programming.


There's other FTDI chips than the FT232, the FT230 can be found for <$2.


hah. Drilling holes to run Ethernet through centuries-old castle walls was my favorite.


Legally it's probably fine, but as the Belgian American Radio Company has been around since the 1930s, the title of the article did confuse me: my first guess was something about how Barco was using Linux containers in their products.


Could always ask Woz for a card ?


qemu is fine if the IoT device only runs Linux; may want to look into something like https://renode.io/ for a more comprehensive approach.


Guilty as charged. Based on design validation testing, I ended up making the design choice to partially rely on a software offset, a strong fan blowing into the sensor not being a supported scenario. But the placement / air flow / multiple openings definitely took us more design iterations than we had planned for.


Can someone productize this as a service please ?



- Style using CSS: Use Pandoc to HTML, and use wkhtmltopdf or chrome headless to convert HTML+CSS to PDF.

- Style using XSL-FO: Use Pandoc to DocBook, XSLT docbook-xsl stylesheets to convert to XSL-FO, Apache FOP to convert XSL-FO to PDF.


Or HTML+CSS with WeasyPrint or Prince; the latter is free for personal use.


Back when it was $20000.


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