Cable Ferrite Beads

USB Ferrite Cable
Snap on Ferrite Core
Snap on Ferrite Core

Most of you would have seen these thick cylindrical parts embedded in USB/Power/HDMI cables around your home, right next to the ports. These are ferrite cores. Basically made of a ferrite material and consists of 2 halves clamping together around a cable. It forms an inductor and is used to suppress high-frequency noise in a cable. You will mostly find it in good-quality branded cables. This becomes important in consumer electronic cables to prevent radiated emissions, to and from the devices it connects.

There are snap-on cores of different dimensions(Hence different impedance to the high-frequency signals). These become very useful for EMI engineers to suppress cable noise and pass the electronic certification. You try on different snap-on cores(sometimes looping the cable inside the core a couple of times) and whichever helps you pass the test goes in the final product(Just the ferrite core part gets embedded in the cable). Saves you a ton of time(and money) while testing in the EMI test labs.

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ATSAMD51 Custom Bootloader

Spending the birthday playing with this beauty of a controller. ATSAMD51J19 based Adafruit Feather M4. Its a blazingly fast ARM Cortex M4(120MHz) with 512KB flash and built-in 256 bit AES crypto engines and a full USB controller from @microchipmakes. Definitely a huge performance improvement from the SAMD21 series. Real-time processing seems a breeze. Also, you can overclock this controller to 200MHz. Never heard of a microcontroller being overclocked.

Trying to build a custom bootloader for this board with a fresh chip. Seems UF2 Bootloaders from @microsoft will allow you to use it as a USB device and you can use it with Arduino and CircuitPython, MakeCode to program it with the same bootloader are a rage with this one. Reading up a lot on those. @adafruit seems to have done a great job with it. Planning a custom compilation. Anyone having experience compiling UF2 bootloader from source on Windows(https://github.com/microsoft/uf2-samdx1) do reach out. Any help is appreciated. The documentation seems to be sparse. Seems @sparkfun also has a custom bootloader for their Thing Plus series with the same controller.

Thank you again for all the warm wishes for the day. Hope you have a great day ahead.

Edit: Figure out how to do a custom bootloader. Will write a detailed blog about it soon…

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