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Debugging hardware is hard

If you want a very technical illustration of why, as they say, hardware is hard, follow along as I debug a communications problem between Pickup’s two main chips. Day 1 I was working on the bus interface between Pickup’s MCU (the STM32) and its WiFi radio (an ESP32) only to find that the STM32

I was working on the bus interface between Pickup’s MCU (the STM32) and its WiFi radio (an ESP32) only to find that the STM32 UART appears to be… pretty terrible, actually. Pickup’s interface between these two chips was originally designed with the (usually correct) assumption that bit errors are so rare you can just reset the entire board. The signals run right underneath the ESP32, pretty close to the antenna, so maybe they were picking up some WiFi interference during a transmission and my scopes (I have a Saleae and an oscilloscope plugged in) were just missing it?

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