Well, that and a cold, which fortunately was one of the short ones; had me quite useless Friday through Sunday, but I'm almost back to normal today.
Anyhoo: current project for the toaster company is returning to life. There's a moderate bit of high-priority follow-on work for the Italian job, and there'll likely be a bit more beyond that. (The gadget will be going into production! Soon!) Other business remains dormant, but could revive at some point.
(And there's the fixture-repair job; I haven't found the Necromancer yet.)
And I spent a fair bit of my useless time in front of the computer anyway, designing a cool module to piggyback a smallish FPGA and a bunch of analog stuff atop one of the Freescale FRDM eval boards, for reasons I choose not to mention at this point.
A problem with the FRDM boards arises: they have weedy little 3.3V regulators, which may become an issue, 'cause the simple approach to this puppy will try to suck near half an Amp when the ADC is enabled. Powering the FPGA with a linear, probably OK; powering the high-speed ADC, not so much... but that's exactly the part for which I want a linear regulator. Oh, well. Maybe a tiny high-frequency switcher and lots of filterin'. Got to look at the practicalities of stepping 3.3V (or maybe 5V) down to 1.8V these days. And I need to generate some negative voltage anyway.
So, as usual, lots of stuff, some of it even for money.
And I just ordered a copy of Haddock Hatchet Turbot Ax. Ugh. Even at a substantial discount, ugh. With the 15th coming up, I gotta review my guesstimated tax payments from last year (which might have been a reason to buy the software last year and get the numbers poked in extra early, but it's not like I would actually have gotten around to that).
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