I’m happy to report that, so far, the market has responded positively! I wanted to learn about USB. I wanted to test my ideas with a market, and see how the market responded. I wanted to try my hand at selling a product. Why? Because I’ve never sold a thing in my goddamn life, and because I’ve spent so much time on Hacker News that I’ve been brainwashed into believing that entrepreneurship is the answer to all of your problems. I was hoping that I’d be able to go to the conference and sell a few of these boards to people who needed a cheap little function generator to stimulate circuits they build. My original goal for this project was to prototype and build it in time for OSHWA Summit 2020. I wanted to try starting a (very) small business. I figured that this was another opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. It was time to scratch that itch again.Ĭoincidentally, I’ve been hanging out in a lot of corners of the internet that really, really like ST Micro’s STM32 series of microcontrollers. I haven’t gotten a lot of chances to program lately. I view this project as a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone - give the maker community some better tools, and give them a tool that they can learn something from. Many makers lack the understanding to know why they need these tools.Many makers lack access to decent, affordable test equipment, and.My hypothesis for making bFunc is really twofold: I’d have to imagine the same is true for a good chunk of hobbyist electronics makers on the internet. I sure don’t have $1500 to shell out on a Keysight function generator. I would also posit that many people can’t really afford name brand test equipment. Doesn’t anyone care about frequency responses of their circuits? What about phase response?! There’s a lot of people who make projects without bothering to share really basic operational characteristics of their work. Moreover - there are so many of them who don’t seem to understand why it’s necessary or useful to have test equipment. I’ve seen enough workbench shots on /r/electronics to know that there are so many makers online with very little proper test equipment. (More on the embedded programming front in a bit.) I’m not the only hobbyist maker without a function generator. Fortunately for me, this project scratched several itches: the need for a function generator, the desire to use a DDS chip, the will to do more embedded programming, etc. Scratching my own itch seemed like a pretty surefire way to motivate myself to complete this. Eventually, I decided “This isn’t that complicated.” So I started building a function generator based on a DDS chip. I’d also been tooling around with some benchtop circuit designs, but without a function generator, I had a hard time comparing their performance to LTSpice. I’d started learning about direct digital synthesis chips a few months ago, and I thought they were cool. Unless, of course, you work in some really niche field of physics, where you have no choice but to make your own test equipment. This, on its own, is a terrible reason to make your own test equipment. These are great, but I’d say 99% of their use and usefulness comes from those original three waveform types. More expensive function generators can do fancier things: noise generation, arbitrary waveform generation, and even RF modulation schemes (OOK, ASK, PSK, FSK). If you’d like a demonstration, this YouTube video from the University of Nottingham is a great introduction into what function generators do. Having a known source for those kinds of waveforms is extremely useful in a laboratory setting. ![]() Those three types of signals are the bread-and-butter of a lot of electrical engineering concepts. At a very basic level, they are used to generate the most common types of electrical waveforms: sine, triangle, and square waves. It’s just as important to have people in your life that don’t know what function generators are, as it is to have people who do know what they are.įunction generators are really common pieces of electrical test equipment. I take that as a sign that I’m leading a very balanced existence. I’ve gotten this question a lot - mostly from my friends and family members who aren’t electrical engineers. This is my writeup for my work so far, and a little preview of what’s in store for the next phase of the project. ![]() I also got a little obsessed with direct digital synthesis chips, and I needed an excuse to use one in a project. I’ve had a longstanding itch to design some little piece of open source hardware, and I needed a function generator for my own bench. I’ve spent the last two to three months working on bFunc, an open source function generator board.
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