Catbert59

Ssh... don't fight the symbiosis... accept your fate

Up to n100 you still can cool the passively (see TopTon on Aliexpress).

Above that they need a fan.

Please name the device.

Can't share your experience.

Sometimes stuff is missing. But that's implemented and upstreamed quickly.

All of the newer STM32s have ROM-bootloaders that support UART- or even USB-flash.

For SWD you can one of the ST-Link clones or the free open implementations of it.

We never had problems as a small vendor with ST during the chip crisis and all distributors honored our delivery contracts. Even most big companies don't deal with ST directly when it comes to the last mile.

Porting stuff to another microcontroller would be easy as we are not using too proprietary features... as long the uC has SPI/I2C and a bunch of timers the embedded developers will be happy. Thanks to Zephyr.

Most clones aren't even close compatible to their originals.

Maybe some basic stuff like usart, i2c works fine. But the the deeper you dig into the specialties the more you will have problems.

And STM32s and expensive? Maybe if you buy them from Digikey or Mouser. With the right distributor they are dirt cheap.

Most of the stuff I did was 15 years ago.I remember, Espressif really disrupted the market.

They still are.

No vendor until now was able to push out microcontrollers with a solid Wifi integration. Sometimes you can find weird 2-chip-solutions.

I still wonder why ST doesn't bring one. That device would be a multi-billion-business.

Espressif has stellar datasheets and a very good HAL (esp-idf) with an established community process.

This is more about the application running on that device.

Not really. Just very good ones.

I also work a lot with ESP32s. Their ADCs (non-linearity, and with the integrated calibration you loose resolution) don't make too much fun.

Will do. The experiment isn't yet dismantled.

Going to write the ferrite core on my next shopping list.

The second URL sounds great. Thanks for posting.

Maybe you can find something around the Copernicus project if the EU has some stuff. Or NOAA if it's from the US side.

I tried to detect lightning with a Bosch Sensortec COTS magnetometer - but failed.

Was a fun experiment: https://www.dm5tt.de/2025/07/26/thunderstorm-detector-with-m...

Raw logs, history access and APIs to weather data are usually $$$.

Like at the ECMWF: you can have a look at all beautiful charts for free. But if you want to have the data behind them they want to see big cash.

There's also Blitzortung.org which is a very interesting project.

They are receiving Sferics on the lower HF frequencies and tag them with GPS timestamps (with the PPS signal they are in the Nanoseconds precision range). A central server will then do the triangulation.

All with off-the-shelf hardware (STM32, etc.).

Their service is stable for many many years now.

(Offtopic: The STM32H7 ADC is great for many many things)

Blinking a flashlight 1200 times per second is a bit exhausting.

But most people don't learn the big CADs first, they learn Fusion. The few times I've tried Fusion, it's given me a headache. It's probably a bigger headache going the other direction.

Siemens Solid Edge also has a hobbyist version with very fair terms.

ECMWF also offers free forecast charts on their website. It's a bit more modern.

I've tested LoRa from Hill<->Hill and Flat Land<->Flat Land and 30-60km worked with plenty of SNR left.

On 868MHz with standard 5dBi omnis.

Thesis: as long you are using one of the more robust LoRa settings it always will work as long you have LoS or at least only lightly obstructed LoS.

Still used nowadays: airplane reflections are being used by ham radio dudes. There's a software around that even calculates the optimal reflection parameters based on ADS-B aggregators.

Thanks too relatively modern digital modes this doesn't need too much transmission power.

On the upper GHz bands with dishes they even manage to do reliable FM chats. But that requires a lot of gain and active steering of the dish.

No really.

If you want to learn embedded you should try to understand the example codes the vendor supplies.

Any files or data you upload Any generated code or data”

That renders it entirely unusable for us :-(

We work a lot with heavily NDA'ed datasheets/sources.

ESP32 works okish with Gemini/GPT5 and Claude.

They offer a lot of public example code and documentation. LLMs inhaled that.

But they still produce a metric ton of unusable hallucinations.

Problem is that most our embedded stuff is heavily NDA'ed and will never (and isn't allowed to) end up in LLMs. So we will be sticking to hand-writing most stuff.

At work we have access to the latest LLMs (Claude, Gemini, Open AI) and they are not really usable. The code looks great (which makes it extremely hard to debug) - but produce too much hallucinations.

Like all military stuff: 60 years old chassis to avoid recertification but stuffed with latest tech.

That's weird.

The company I'm working for has its own EMC chamber (maintaining that huge room fully calibrated and standardized is ultra expensive... just looking at these EMC test receivers that go up to 40GHz my me cry in $$$$) and we invested giant engineering effort into our products to be far below every radiation limit norm in the world.

Shouldn't satellite companies have even better stuff and more strict regulations or are these unintended effects maybe caused by the harsh environment?

Private stuff: gitea on a cheap VPS. Will most likly migrate for Forgejo in the future. That stuff runs on a toaster.

Public projects: Github. Having no problem with it. Also makes me happy poisoning LLMs with my shitty code.

If you can put everything behind a Wireguard or other VPN tunnel.

Thank you for the recommendation.

Will move to that fork in one of my future private infrastructure reconstructions.