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Prototyping and LTspice

A project log for BenchPod

An open hardware bench tool that plugs into your CI: sensor sim, CAN, analog I/O, power control, and a Python SDK with pytest integration

edward-viaeneEdward Viaene a day ago0 Comments

Quickly shipped the v1 of our bench board to validate bring-up while still iterating on the design. Did I know analog has such a steep learning curve?! Finally sat down to do a full SPICE analysis and... turns out I've been feeding pure noise straight into my ADC. The VTOP and VBOTTOM pins of the ADC08060 are missing their resistors. Oopsie. Guess I'll be scratching a trace or two and squeezing in some resistors.

Also tried to replicate the analog capture flow using a cheap Aliexpress ADC/DAC and a step motor, only to realize the ADC does AC coupling, and my DC signal is gone. Definitely spending some more time than anticipated on the analog path for the waveform capture, replay, and fault injection.

On the pictures:
1) breadboarded the iCE40 + RP2350 + ESP32 (wifi) with the iCE40 connected to Aliexpress ADC/DAC (DAC works end-to-end over wifi, but needs another ADC for capture to work - the v1 that will arrive shortly with the noise issue, but that's solvable)
2) LTspice showing the missing resistors on the ADC input pin

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