Maybe someonw can explain me, but I never understood the appeal of GPIB for modern instruments (legacy instruments are of course "excused"). Electrically is a terrible interface that introduces ground loops with the control computer. Speed are laughable and it requires exensive and exotic adapters with complex sw stack (I wish this projects good success, it's needed!). Ethernet in comparison tick all my boxes. It's electrically decoupled by default (just use UTP cables), crazy cheap, very fast and with sane sw stack thanks to vxi-11. You can even bypass visa if you wish and open a plain TCP socket, no need for any library. What am I missing?

> What am I missing?

Not much, but consider latency: You can use the Group Execute Trigger (GET) to simultaneously trigger multiple instruments with both very low latency and very low latency dispersion. Think, easy-to-use sub-microsecond synchronization.

Ethernet and USB 4 may have orders of magnitude more bandwidth, but can’t achieve the same multi-device synchronization capability without side channel signals.

Now, sure, you can add the same capability with a programmable pulse generator connected via coax to the trigger input of all your instruments, but GBIP lets you do that with just the data connection (and you don’t always have a spare trigger channel). The only other protocols I know of with similar capabilities are PXI and PXIe, which are “PCI(express) in an incompatible form-factor, plus some extra signals for real time synchronization”.

sub-microsecond triggering should be doable with a level-2 cut-through switch and an ethernet broadcast no? I admit that ethernet is not really designed for that as the Phy is then the latency bottleneck.

If you buy used equipment which doesn't have Ethernet or your company wants you to ise the stuff that is in the Lab since 10+ years there's simply no other choice. Or companies that see Ethernet as a potential security attack vector. It's indeed not that GPIB is better than Ethernet. In tiny aspects that's argueable, but as general statement true.

> Or companies that see Ethernet as a potential security attack vector.

It's sad how true this is. VXI gets corporate IT all prickly. An airgapped lab network would be safer but somehow they hate that idea even more.

GPIB isn't even on their radar. Test to your heart's content. It's not a "network".

Nothing, other than perhaps just much high-quality legacy equipment is out in the field that still works fantastically.

Not at all, it depends on the residence permit. With a C permit you can buy and rent properties, while with B you can buy only your own home

God, I hate so much these videos. My son son used to ask for these when he was younger, they were so bad...

with a bonding machine :) doing that manually can be tedious, nowadays for IC that are bonded and not flipchipped it's all automatic. Manual bonding is still very used in research.

these prices are like airplanes: no one with volume pays list prices, it's something else. moreover, this FPGA is very peculiar. it's used to simulate ASIC during validation, so it's not really the typical FPGA that gets used in a project

Same issue, but instead I convert the USB-C signals of the laptop to HDMI/USB-A plus charging port with a cheap adapter. Then a KVM with HDMI/USB switching

Funny how the manufacturer proudly claims that the protocol is encrypted, but completely forget to mitigate replay attacks,thus making the encryption completely useless

Which raises the question whether the OP now unknowingly also controls the heater in the apartment next to his...

Unlikely. This kind of wireless thermostat has two parts: the thermostat itself, and a separate receiver box that's directly connected to the boiler. There's usually a pairing process that you can go through where the two parts negotiate a shared value used in the protocol; this prevents one thermostat unintentionally controlling other boilers. You can see this described in the Installation Guide for the thermostat linked from the article (it's called 'binding' in the guide).

Probably not otherwise the original would also potentially run that risk

Good point!

The thermostats are paired, if my setup was able to control another apartments boiler then the original thermostat would also do that

And so the heat-stroke-killer was born, offing his victims with rapid changes between coldest and hottest setting, natural death has never been this human-made.

Ah yes, the classic problem of people using crypto primitives without fully understanding the problems they're trying to solve. Anyone even remotely interested should look into a full protocol like TLS or PGP to see how many primitives like block ciphers, hashes, etc. are involved and why.

In fact I'm quite surprised by this announcement. Gl.inet is famous for claiming that their os is based on openwrt, while it can be some vendor SDK that is based on some decade-old version of openwrt and have little in common today

Only for simple pcb. If you are making multi-layer pcb with complex stacks, pcb manufacturing and soldering (with associated tooling setup, validation and so) are easily 2 months of turnaround

Well to be fair if you add "validation" the turnaround for any noncomplex piece of software can reach months pretty quickly as well.

But yeah I'm not gonna argue that sw isn't faster than hw in 99% of the cases.

Up to 4 layers is pretty standard these days. It's more than 8 where you start running into issues.