Improving Bitcoin price metrics highlight bears’ dwindling confidence in sub-$95K BTCBitcoin’s open interest has dropped to a two-month low, indicating limited downside risk for BTC price.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 814: The Banksy SituationThis week, Jonathan Bennett and Rob Campbell talk with Alistair Woodman about FRRouting, the Internet routing suite that helps make all this possible. But also business, and how an open source project turns the corner into a successful way to support programmers.

FRR https://github.com/FRRouting/frr
https://frrouting.org/
Erlang Ecosystem Foundation
https://erlef.org/

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Claudia Brant: Songwriting SavantWhen she first moved to Los Angeles from Argentina almost 40 years ago, Claudia Brant was writing three to five days a week, building a catalog that now includes over 3,000 songs in various genres, written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Shares Brant, “I don't remember the titles. I don't remember the words. It was a lot.” She signed to Warner Music at age 22, releasing South American albums Claudia Brant and Tu marca en el alma, and when her focus shifted to working directly with artists, she began doing two sessions and an average of two singles a week, jet-setting between Miami, Spain, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere. 1,200 of her songs have now been recorded in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean. As SESAC’s Latina Songwriter of the Year for three consecutive years (2007-2009) and ASCAP’s Latina Songwriter of the Year in 2012 and 2015, Brant is the West Coast Vice-President of the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame and has served as a Trustee of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for over twenty years, remaining a Governor of the Los Angeles Chapter. While she still writes music, her main priority now involves mentoring young songwriters to help them on their way.Brant’s mentorship momentum grew when the chair of the Songwriting Department at Berklee College of Music (he is now the Dean of Professional Writing and Music Technology), Brant’s good friend (and previous writing partner), Rodney Alejandro wanted to add a course on Latin songwriting. Enlisted (she was already teaching songwriting online) to lead the charge, Brant soon realized how much talent there was. “I would give them homework they have to deliver,” she says. “There were some of them whose delivery was incredible [and] I started thinking, my God, I have to do something with these kids?!” Adding that it took her five or six years to get her first label manager meeting, Brant says that, while she had some help from ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, she didn’t understand how to interact with the executives she needed to meet. “[I] couldn’t really sit down with these people, play them my songs, and tell them, ‘hey, I think this would be good for your artist.’” As an established writer, she now only has to pick up the phone to make things happen. Brant wants to use her access to help talented new songwriters get opportunities they might otherwise have available.With a pipeline of new talent through her Berklee songwriting class, Brant joined forces with Warner Chappell to help develop young artists through her publishing company, ChaChaCha Music Publishing (instagram.com/chachachamusicpublishing), and she is committed to helping her writers be seen and heard. “Warner Chapel has 500 writers. I have five, so I'm on it every day,” says Brant. “I would be very happy if one of them got an ASCAP, SESAC, or BMI award. I would be delighted if they got a GRAMMY nomination as writers. They don't want to be artists, so that kind of recognition is really important.” While Brant says the process and structure of songwriting for Latin music versus mainstream is mainly the same, she has been analyzing top Grammy nominees for Record of the Year and Album of the Year and concludes that they generally all lean towards pop (except for Jacob Collier, who is more jazz sounding). The same cannot be said for Latin music, however. “On the Latin side, you have pop, alternative, salsa, regional Mexican, bolero, cumbia, reggaetón, trap. There are so many genres,” reveals Brant. “I try to teach my kids to be a chameleon. You should be able to get into a session in whatever genre and survive. There are way more genres in the Latin market.”Starting out writing mostly pop songs herself, Brant never shied away from a mix of genres or languages, but admits that the key to any good songwriting endeavor is careful collaboration. “I worked in genres not so familiar to me,” she says. “When I write regional Mexican, I never do it without a writer from (…) from Mexico that really knows the words [and] how many chords we should use. They know that, and I don't because I come from pop, so whenever I write for that genre, I try to do it with someone who can teach me or train me.” Making calls to top collaborators to help her writers, she says the feedback has been incredible. “They have all called and thanked me because the collaboration will help bring a young flavor to their songs,” she says.To create the best possible co-writing outcome, Brant also emphasizes the importance of limiting the number in the room to four people maximum (except in co-writes with bands, in which case she considers the group as one of the writers). “What I don't like—and I'm absolutely opposed to,” says Brant, “is the ‘birthday party’ writing session, which means ten people in a room. Even when that happens, it's not even good? You don't need more than two or three people to write a wonderful song.” One of Brant’s writers recently had five people show up for a session and Brant advised her to stand up and say that she is taking 33.33%, and not splitting it six ways. “She did, and that was it. No one argued,” says Brant. “You have to put your foot down early.“ Admitting that industry splits can still be an issue (her last challenge was as recent as six months ago), Brant shares that, “In those moments, I lose my patience, my drive, and [am] really disappointed, but I just grab my guitar and the melodies and the words keep coming in, so I guess I should not stop?”Songwriting is all about “the craft of coming up with a unique melody, something you have never heard, that takes a completely unexpected turn, [combined with] the use of the words,” says Brant. “We know that amor rhymes with color and I don't want to hear that. Give me something else. You don't want to hear a song that's called “I Love You,” “I Miss You,” “Without You,” or “I'm Lonely.” Please give me issues. Give me “Ironic” by Alanis Morisette. How many ironic songs are there registered at ASCAP, BMI or SESAC?  None.  Titles are so important.” In addition to being prolific in their writing, Brant finds her best prospects by looking at “how they name their songs, the words they use, the twists they do with words, the turns of the melody that are unexpected,” adding that, “those are the things that catch my excitement about a song.”Agua TintaRising mentees, Latin songwriters Agua Tinta (instagram.com/aguita_tinta) and Laura Prias (instagram.com/lauraprias_) had nothing but praise and gratitude for their experience so far. “Being able to work with Claudia is amazing because she's a songwriter herself,” says Tinta (who is based in Los Angeles). “She's been through what we're going through, so she understands us, supports us, and guides us. Almost no one in the industry as a publisher does that for the writers, so working with Claudia is the best thing that could have happened to me.” Adds Prias, “It's a dream come true. She has a life of experience in this industry. If she sees that magic, that talent, she is going to put all her effort in to help you and let you know you're doing well, or [that a] song needs more work. Not everyone has this help. It’s a blessing to be working with her. It's an honor. I'm living the dream. What's next is already happening.”Encouraging her writers to step out and introduce themselves, Brant says she had an innate drive from a young age and is hoping to support her mentees to build that muscle. “When I want something, I just go for it. That’s something some of my kids need to learn; to believe in themselves. When they have five cuts each on major labels, they're going to be able to go for it. That's a bit of what happened to me, but that drive was always there.” Her mentees are very aware of the opportunities that are opening up and are soaking it all up. “I'm so grateful for all her help and the faith she has in our work,” says Prias. “We just had the Latin GRAMMY week and being at her side, looking at her being so versatile with people [saying] ‘look, this is my new writer.’ Knowing that Claudia Brant is saying that was amazing [and] working with her in an actual session blew my mind.” Shares Tinta, “One day we decided to have a session and she was having breakfast. I had just rung up. It was emotional. We were talking and she was like, ‘so what are we going to write about today?’ In one second, she had the chorus. Once she started singing the chorus with the lyrics, that blew my mind. It is one of my favorite moments – it was very chill, but I learned so much.”Laura PriasBrant says that choosing which projects to work on—and her collaborators—is also about the right energy. “When I first got here [to Los Angeles], and maybe for ten years, I used to write with whomever, whenever, whatever. Now, there has to be some kind of particular connection,” she says. “I have a partner I produce with. [He sometimes someone comes into the studio, we look at each other and we're like, ‘no – this is not going to happen.’ Sometimes we want to do the entire record of the person. There's this particular connection that happens with some people.” For Brant, success comes down to hard work and connections. “It’s a combination of both,” she says. “If I'm going to take you to a meeting with a big label, you need to play this person three songs that are going to blow his mind, so then he thinks, ‘this girl is good - I'm going to ask her for more.’ [It’s] the quality of the song, plus the relationship you have for five minutes with this person, and you build it from there.”As her writers begin to be invited into bigger rooms, Brant expects at least one of them to land an artist session very soon. “When you get in the room with artists, the chances of getting the song recorded are way higher than just writing for pitch. That’s something I want them to achieve,” she says. “I'm teaching again in January, so I'm going to have another 25 kids. They're like my children. My children are in college, so I adopted some more.” Speaking about her current mentees, Brant says they “have such a bright future ahead. I want [them] up on stage with an ASCAP award and nomination for best GRAMMY Original Mexican or Best GRAMMY Urban Pop. Sometimes it takes five years, sometimes seven, and sometimes [just] one. It takes time, but it's going to happen because their way of writing [is] very unique. They use words that I wouldn't use.”“When I first started, five cuts in a record could still sell 10 million copies,” says Brant. “Now we need to have the single and get paid by streaming services. [To work] as a songwriter now, write as much as you can to amplify the possibilities of getting a cut. The songs have to be catchy, with a title, words, and melody that are unique so that they have a chance of becoming a single. If you have a single and 2 billion streams, it’ll make a little check. Collaborating, co-writing in the studio with artists, and having as many songs as possible on a record, that can help. That’s the goal.”With 11 Latin Grammy and Grammy nominations as a songwriter, artist, and producer, Brant’s songs have been recorded by artists including Camila Cabello, Carlos Santana, Barbra Streisand, Josh Groban, Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Demi Lovato, Paola Guanche, Teo Bok, and many others. Ongoing collaborations include Bruno Mars, Dianne Warren, David Foster, Danny Elfman, Julio Reyes Copello, Walter Afanasieff, Desmond Child, partner Josh Cumbee, and Lil’ Eddie Serrano, to name a few. Winning a Latin Grammy for 2009’s Song of the Year for “Aqui estoy yo” and 2019’s Grammy for Best Latin Pop Album for Sincera, 2014’s “I’m not the only one” (as recorded by Frankie J.) was the title track for Pantaleón/Lionsgate film “Spare Parts” starring George Lopez and Marisa Tomei. Brant was inducted into the Latin Songwriter’s Hall of Fame in 2016. “I was talking to a friend at the Latin GRAMMYs who won Songwriter of the Year and Producer of the Year,” says Brant. “Six or seven years ago, I was in a recording studio and he was serving coffee. What happened?! We don't know. I always say one song can change your life. One.”In addition to ongoing songwriting credits, Brant spends the majority of her time giving back through classes, workshops, and mentorship across Argentina, Mexico, and the United States. For more on Claudia Brant, visit: claudiabrant.com.The post Claudia Brant: Songwriting Savant first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

2024 Brought Even More Customization to Boxes.pyIf you have access to a laser cutter, we sincerely hope you’re aware of boxes.py. As the name implies, it started life as a Python tool for generating parametric boxes that could be assembled from laser-cut material, but has since become an invaluable online resource for all sorts of laser projects. Plus, you can still use it for making boxes.
But even if you’ve been using boxes.py for awhile, you might not know it was actually an entry in the Hackaday Prize back in 2017. Creator [Florian Festi] has kept up with the project’s Hackaday.io page all this time, using it as a sort of development blog, and his recent retrospective on 2024 is a fascinating read for anyone with an eye towards hot photonic action.

In it, he describes a bevy of new designs that have come to the site, many of which have been developed either by or in conjunction with the community. For example, a new tool for generating IKEA-like pegboard is sure to be useful for the better organized among us. The last twelve months also saw the addition of a parametric air filter box, LEGO sorters, storage bins, book holders, bird feeders, and plenty more.
At the end, [Florian] has some interesting thoughts on how the community as a whole has developed over the years. He notes that in the early days, any code or designs proposed by users for inclusion in the project usually needed work before they were ready for prime time. But now that everything is more established, the pull requests he’s getting are so well done that they rival any of the original work he put in.
We’re glad to hear that the community is coming together to make this already fantastic project even better. It sounds like [Florian] is even getting some help to track down and eliminate the remaining Python 2.x code that’s still lingering around.
Here’s to many more excellent years for Boxes.py!

What’s Your Legacy (Drones, Orbs, and the Dylan Movie)?So it seems we are just 17 days away from a US TikTok ban.

VSL launch Duality Strings (FX) The latest addition to VSL's innovative dual-ensemble string library series focuses on a range of unconventional effects techniques.

The 2024 AllMusic Readers' PollOur 2024 year in review coverage ends with the top 10 albums of the year as voted on by the AllMusic community. Respondents from all around the world made their choices, and we're excited to share the top 10 results as voted by you, the AllMusic reader.

Elon Musk’s pro-Trump critics claim they’re being censored on XConservative activists claim X is censoring them for being critical of its owner, Elon Musk.
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Vitalik Buterin donates $170K to Tornado Cash developers’ legal fundMany in the crypto industry have criticized US authorities for sanctioning Tornado Cash smart contract addresses and charging developers with money laundering.

Doomscroll Precisely, and WirelesslyAround here, we love it when someone identifies a need and creates their own solution. In this case, [Engineer Bo] was tired of endless and imprecise scrolling with a mouse wheel. No off-the-shelf solutions were found, and other DIY projects either just used hacked mice scroll wheels, customer electronics with low-res hardware encoders, or featured high-res encoders that were down-sampled to low-resolution. A custom build was clearly required.

We loved seeing hacks along the whole process by [Engineer Bo], working with components on hand, pairing sensors to microcontrollers to HID settings, 3D printing forms to test ergonomics, and finishing the prototype device. When 3D printing, [Engineer Bo] inserted a pause after support material to allow drawing a layer of permanent marker ink that acts as a release agent that can later be cleaned with rubbing alcohol. 
We also liked the detail of a single hole inside used to install each of the three screws that secure the knob to the base. While a chisel and UV-curing resin cleaned up some larger issues with the print, more finishing was required. For a project within a project, [Engineer Bo] then threw together a mini lathe with 3D printed and RC parts to make sanding easy.

Scroll down with your clunky device to see the video that illustrates the precision with a graphic of a 0.09° rotation and is filled with hacky nuggets. See how the electronics were selected and the circuit designed and programmed, the use of PCBWay’s CNC machining in addition to board assembly services, and how to deal with bearings that spin too freely. [Engineer Bo] teases that a future version might use a larger bearing for less wobble and an anti-slip coating on the base. Will the board files and 3D models be released, too? Will these be sold as finished products or kits? Will those unused LED drivers be utilized in an upcoming version? We can’t wait to see what’s next for this project.

Thanks for the tip [UnderSampled]!

Nature, fatherhood, synthesizers: Tycho’s eternal balancing actIn the project’s third decade, Tycho has never looked more confident. As the four-piece live band, the brainchild of mastermind producer Scott Hansen, steps onto the Pier Stage at Portola in September 2024, tens of thousands of festival-goers roar with applause.
Hansen, now 47 years old and dressed in white chinos and a pink shirt, takes to his cockpit of synthesizers, MIDI controllers, guitars and outboard effects. Meanwhile, Zac Brown — in an effortlessly cool auburn suit — picks up his Gibson Les Paul; Rory O’Connor sits behind the drums donning yellow-tinted Tony Stark-style shades, and Billy Kim positions himself for bass and rhythm guitar duties with a zipped-up parka jacket, looking like a chillwave Oasis member.
“It’s good to be home!” says Bay Area-based Hansen on the mic after mesmerising performances of Phantom — a four-to-the-floor, nu-disco-style track from his new album Infinite0 Health — and fan favourites Hours and A Walk from the acclaimed 2011 album, Dive. These ethereal tracks may differ from the dance tracks Justice, Jamie xx, LP Giobbi and Disclosure will later belt out on the same stage, but the crowd is rapt. It’s as if this once-niche chillwave artist had transcended into an electronica rockstar.
Tycho. Image: Malcolm Squire for MusicTech
When we talk over the phone, Hansen is more placid than rockstar. We geek out on plugins and synths, reflect on the challenges modern tech has brought for musicians, and joke about how parenthood has brought an end to his post-midnight studio sessions.
“I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old,” Hansen says. “It’s amazing. But it also, of course, compresses your time. There’s the normal workday — 8 am to 5 pm is basically what I do — then we make dinner and get the kids down, and then I can maybe go back and work for a couple more hours.”
Infinite Health by Tycho
Hansen’s current routine is certainly more rigid than when he first rose to prominence in the late 00s. Some tracks on his most revered albums — 2006’s Past Is Prologue, 2011’s Dive, and 2014’s Awake — were made during free-flowing stints with no curfew.
“I was actually digging through the older songs…Awake, for instance; I looked at the timestamps of the recordings, and it’s like 2 am, 4 am, 5:30 am…[The song was made] in like a 10-hour period. I had the energy and resilience to pull that off, but now I stay up past midnight and almost feel sick [the next day],” Hansen says with a laugh.
Image: Malcolm Squire for MusicTech
The producer revisited these earlier works ahead of creating Infinite Health, partly to update their performances for his 2025 live tour in North America, Europe and Japan starting in January, but also to channel elements of his earlier workflow.
“The goal for me was to get back to how I made music in the early 2000s, that led up to [2011’s] Dive” Hansen says. “At the beginning of Tycho, I was more like, ‘let’s write a song with synthesizers, and then maybe we’ll layer drums and guitars later.’ Infinite Health goes back to that bedroom electronic production style; trying to make the foundation of the song out of just electronic tools.”
Hansen cut his teeth making music primarily with digital synths, workstations and samples, which you can hear, for example, in his debut EP in 2001, The Science Of Patterns. As his style and live show developed, physical instruments became more of a focus, particularly with the recording contributions of Brown on guitar and O’Connor on drums. Returning to his earlier workflow didn’t mean omitting these crucial real-world instruments and performances — the album also sees drum performances from Kaelin Ellis on Totem and vocals from Cautious Clay — but it did mean that Infinite Health became more of a “plugin album” than previous albums, Hansen says.
Image: Malcolm Squire for MusicTech
In 2023, Hansen partnered with music gear marketplace Reverb to auction off $160,000 worth of his equipment that he felt was just “rotting away” in his studio Everything sold, and Hansen subsequently connected with buyers and talked with them about how he used each piece of gear and some of its history. The studio clearout also encouraged him to use more software — a plugin emulation of the Oberheim Four Voice rather than the hardware version he sold, for example. This change in workflow meant he could alter elements of each track throughout the creation of the album, whereas previously he would record each take, complete with effects, directly into his DAW, at which point it was tough to make delicate tweaks.
“Sometimes,” he says, ‘“you’ll make a sound or tone selection that makes sense and gets you pumped up and inspired in the moment. But when it comes time to mix the record, it might actually sound quite harsh.” Hansen adds that, with the plugins he used, he had more freedom to swap signal chains around — “put a delay before the amp instead after”’ — and change how much an effect could be heard in the track.
“Of course, there are special, magic sounds here and there on the album,” Hansen caveats. “The intro sound on Consciousness Felt — I just don’t think I could have created that with plugins. That was a real Sequential Prophet-5 going through an Elektron Analog Heat. There was just something about the way the filter was set up perfectly.” Elsewhere, the Moog Minimoog, Prodigy and Matriarch synths are a staple of the Tycho sound, along with a plethora of effects pedals.
Image: Malcolm Squire for MusicTech
Hansen has been making music since his youth in the California capital of Sacramento, leaning heavily into synths since the beginning. Among his first electronic instruments was the Roland MC-303, which wasn’t so well-received upon its 1996 release. Still, Hansen says that it got him “stoked” about making electronic music.
Other synths Hansen used on the album include Softube’s Model 84, a plugin that emulates the Roland Juno-106, and which sparked the idea for the album’s title track. He lauds the software as “one of the best soft synths ever made…It’s just like a real synthesizer. It’s crazy. I don’t know what they’re doing over [at Softube] but their synth plugins seem way ahead of everybody else’s.”
Producers, musicians and beatmakers often seek out the piece of gear or technique that will help them create a particular sound and debate whether to use digital or analogous gear. It’s an easy trap to fall into, particularly when there are so many tantalising products on the market. But Hansen has a tidbit that might help:
“You don’t need every sound to be magical and have all that character…The most basic DAWs have enough tools in them to be able to make, like, 90 per cent of all music ever created. So now it’s just down to you learning how to use it, not the lack of access, which I think is so powerful.”
Image: Malcolm Squire for MusicTech
Hansen has spent most of his life learning how to use technology to make art, whether for his visual work as ISO50 or for Tycho. Sometimes, he says, that’s ended up with him “burning the candle at both ends,” and he used Infinite Health as a means to express a plan for “a more sustainable way of going about all this and being able to envision myself doing this in 10 years.”
Keeping healthy and getting outside to connect with nature is one way Hansen finds balance — he’s actually speaking to us while walking around his Oakland neighbourhood (“I always use my breaks to take walks”).
“I grew up in what was a rural area of rolling green hills and ranches, the river and all these beautiful open spaces, natural areas,” explains Hansen. “Then I moved to the Bay Area, San Francisco, and now live in Oakland. I don’t really tend to interact with nature on the same level as I did earlier in my life, and I just always worry, like, ‘What’s the impact of that?’”
On a more existential level, he says Infinite Health is also about making peace with mortality, or “understanding that you’re sort of on this continuum. A lot of people came before you, and a lot of people are gonna come after you.”
“I guess, since having kids and just seeing new life come into the world, you realise that you’re not the centre of the universe and there’s something more important than you.”
Image: Malcolm Squire for MusicTech
Hansen’s also finding balance in his online life. Artists and musicians are under more pressure than ever to directly connect with their fans through social media platforms — thankfully, he’s accustomed to this, cultivating an online presence since the early 00s on blogs and filesharing sites. But even he struggles with giant platforms such as Instagram, a place which he once thought was the “best outlet” for communicating with like-minded people and fans.
“Man, being an artist and putting yourself out there these days…That’s been an interesting thing to watch shift,” he says. “Just to see the dialogue change over time on those platforms. I feel like [the Tycho] fan base is so cool and accepting and understanding, and they’re just along for the ride. But on other people’s pages and on YouTube, I see people paring things down, and being so opinionated and so negative. It makes you start to believe that the rest of the world has this negative tone. But then you go into the real world and talk to people, and people are really cool, kind and caring. So [the online world has become] this ugly, funhouse mirror of what people are really like.”
To mitigate the negative online experiences on his pages, Hansen set up the Tycho Open Source Community in 2022. Here, fans get exclusive access to new music and content, plus early ticket and merch sales. Tycho’s recent Where You Are EP, released this December, was made available to Open Source members a day ahead of release. A Discord server is also open to members, where fans can chat with Hansen and get direct updates.
Image: Malcolm Squire for MusicTech
“The Open Source channel is just a place for cool stuff. It feels like [those communities] have been lost with the gating of social media,” Hansen says. “I think the ability for individuals, especially artists just starting out, to access those audiences is becoming less and less because the platforms are essentially becoming like networks to serve advertisements and boost things that already have legs and not really helping develop new ideas or new artists. I’m not saying that’s something they’re supposed to be doing, but that’s what you used to be able to leverage these tools for. I just feel like you can’t do that in the same way you once could.”
“I just want to directly connect with fans, know who they are, and give them access to things as a thank you.”
Hansen will likely soon be meeting many of his fans in real life, too, as he embarks on the 2025 Devices tour across the US East Coast and Canada, and the Infinite Health tour in Europe. Having already played a string of 26 shows across the US in 2024, plus over 15 years of prior performances, Hansen’s well-accustomed to setting up for a live show. But it’s still a challenge.
“I always get reminded of that when it’s time to start learning parts for the live show. Because I’m like, ‘Wait, I’ve played this part literally once!’ Almost everything you hear on any Tycho album is the first or the second take. There’s none of this learning it and playing it live and really understanding it…It’s definitely a collage.”
Listening through Tycho’s discography, you’ll notice that almost all of the tracks sound like a collage of sounds and instruments. Hansen says that the serene fan favourite track, A Walk comprises “at least two” separate tracks. Piecing together all of these elements is no easy job, and you’ll no doubt be impressed when you hear it all come together at a show.
Image: Malcolm Squire for MusicTech
As the sun sets on 2024 with six albums under his belt, a young family by his side and a lot of live shows on the horizon, we wonder whether a point will come when he stops making records as Tycho.
“Well, if I was looking at it that way, that would make me think I’m trying to get to some finish line, and I absolutely do not want to be at the finish line. I still love doing this. I don’t know in what capacity I’ll be doing this when I’m 60. But I feel healthy and in a good place with it. I still really enjoy it, and I still feel inspired and excited about the songs that I’m making. So, if that’s still happening, I don’t see why I’d ever stop.”
For more info on Tycho and the upcoming tours, head to tychomusic.com.
The post Nature, fatherhood, synthesizers: Tycho’s eternal balancing act appeared first on MusicTech.

Sony Vaio Revived: Power, The Second 80%A bit ago, I’ve told you about how the Sony Vaio motherboard replacement started, and all the tricks I used to make it succeed on the first try. How do you plan out the board, what are good things to keep in mind while you’re sourcing parts, and how do you ensure you finish the design? This time, I want to tell you my insights about what it takes for your new board revision to stay on your desk until completion, whether it’s helping it not burn up, or making sure the bringup process is doable.
Uninterrupted, Granular Power
Power was generally comfortable to design, but I did have to keep some power budgets in mind. A good exercise for safeguarding your regulators is keeping a .txt file where you log consumers and their expected current consumption on each board power rail, making sure all of your power regulators, connectors, and tracks, can handle quite a bit more than that current. Guideline: increase current by 20%-50% when figuring out the specs for switching regulators and inductors, and, multiply by 10-20% when figuring out conversion losses going between downstream and upstream rails.
I did have a blunder in this department – not accounting for track current early on enough. I laid out the board using 0.5mm wide tracks for power – it looked spacious enough. Then, I put “0.5mm” into a track current calculator and saw a harrowing temperature increase for the currents I was expecting. At that point in routing, it took some time to shift tracks around to accomodate the trace width I actually needed, which is to say, I should’ve calculated it all way way earlier. Thankfully, things went well in the end.

Apart from this, the power rails are a crucial aspect for bringup. How are you going to bringup your board? Which power rails need to be powered on so that the board can boot? Which signals do you need for every power rail, and what power rails do those signals depend on? What are the minimum required parts for the board to “boot”, and how quickly can you test every part before getting the next revision? My strategy was: I flash the EC with MicroPython, and hack at the code part by part I go. It worked surprisingly well for lowering the debugging entry level, and I will tell more about it later.
A lot of bringup preparations are done during design, though. You have to think about typical usecases, and think how your hardware is going to react to them. What kind of state will the board enter after you insert the battery, or apply power from an external charger? Will you need to find a charger after you swap the battery? Is battery hotswap possible? The best way to understand all of it is to look through fundamental blocks of the circuit, and ask questions about their behaviour.
The questions can be pretty simple. Is the EC always powered no matter the input source? Can you detect when the power sources are too low, or too high? What’s the default states of the EN pins of every switching regulator, and what are the default state of GPIOs that control your regulator EN pins? Are any of these pins connected to GPIOs that might oscillate during your MCU’s boot? Is the input DC-DC enabled by default? What about the battery charger?
In the end, I went through all the switching regulator datasheets, taking note of the EN pins. Closer to the end, I’ve noticed that I’d need to invert the EN pin of the input DC-DC with help of a FET if I wanted that regulator to be powered on by default – otherwise, I’d get a chicken-and-egg problem if I were to try and power the board through its charger with missing or fully discharged battery. The FET barely fit on the board, but I massaged the tracks until it did.
Double-Sided Assembly
Here’s tips for bringup – you want to make sure you can access your EC at all times. In my case, I decided to mux the EC RP2040’s USB onto the external port, allowing for a “debug mode” with a USB A-A cable – a cool feature, but I have definitely regretted restricting myself with it. Essentially, I locked myself into USB plug-unplug cycle during the early development, and it was hell to solve problems as a result. My advice is – plan for an extra USB-C connector or just USB testpoints on your board, so you can have a permanent unshakeable USB/SWD/UART/etc. link during the period while you’re not quite sure how well your board works. In the end, I had to tombstone the two 0402 D+/D- resistors of the RP2040 EC and pull an external “debug” USB-C connector on three magnet wires – a finicky endeavour, worth avoiding if you can.
Other than that hurdle, the bringup has been seamless, in no small part because I used the MicroPython REPL to probe through the board as I enabled parts of it. The REPL flow let me enable/disable power rails and query GPIOs dynamically during early bringup, mocking up code on the fly and immediately testing it on my hardware, and dynamically debug features like onboard shift registers, or buttons and LEDs on the Vaio’s case, wrapping them into code and putting them into the main.py file – the EC firmware grew larger and larger as I experimented. There’s something special about having a list of power rails at your fingertips, switching them off one by one, quickly tying program states into switches/buttons/LEDs as needed – it was a joy of a bringup experience.
How do you assemble such a double-sided board – really, how do you even stencil it? I planned for stenciling it from the very beginning, and, I distributed the components in a way that one side had way less components than the other – including more intricate components, like multi-pin ICs. One thing that’s really helped, is using the JLCPCB stencil shipping cardboard to make a jig for the board with cutouts in it, letting me stencil the less-populated side once the more-populated side already had components soldered onto it. In a different life, I used to lasercut frames for this kind of endeavour – KiCad SVG export should be all you need.
The more-populated side got assembled using one of those tiny $20 hotplate, in the comfort of my home – I’d hot air it, but my hot air gun fell and broke. I did have to borrow a hot air gun for assembling the second side, though – and assemble it very carefully. The main problem was the plastic connector on the less-populated side – I had to hot air it from the bottom, through the RP2040 EC and its supporting circuitry.
Learning, Achievements, Expansion
I’ve had some fun failure modes happen on this board. One, the failing 5V boost with subpar layout, which I’ve already described in the switching regulator patch board article a couple months ago. Fun fact – it’s also verified a RPi SD card corruption theory of mine, confirming that noise on the input power rail easily propagates into the 3.3V rail powering the SD card, and results in SD card corruption; if you’re getting SD card corruption issues, make sure to check the DC-DCs involved in your project!
Another one was specifically the output pin of the 3.3V EC regulator not getting soldered properly – somehow, it had a cold solder joint, and the EC was getting powered with around 1.23V, again, somehow; it might’ve been due to my incessant multimeter probing, in hindsight. I’m glad that this was the cold solder joint I had to figure out – as far as cold solder joints go, this one was seriously easy to debug, since just moving the probe between the 3.3V reg leg and an EC power capacitor was enough to find the spot the voltage drop happened.
Again, any burnt components on such an assembled board get expensive – not just monetarily, it’s also that you don’t want to repeat the assembly effort. So, keep all metal and solder away during bringup, check all the connectors for accidental solder blobs many times over, and be very careful to. Tempted to hotplug internal connectors? Don’t do it unless you’ve designed them to hotplug, or if the original manufacturer has – there’s always pinout and connector considerations you have to mind. This goes doubly for high-current and high-voltage connectors.

Expansion slots are wonderful if you can afford them – there’s usually leftover GPIOs and some power rail capacity that you might want to later tap, and in my case, there’s also heaps of free space inside of the laptop. I managed to fit two FFC sockets on this particular board, which have plenty of high-current power rails and GPIOs – my plan, personally, is to make a board that takes SATA or NVMe SSDs, and maybe even has expansions like GPS or extra WiFi – the case internals are spacious enough for all of those.
Looking to put a new powerful motherboard into an old lovely chassis? Chances are, you can certainly do it – even if it takes time, trial-and-error, and help from some friends or internet strangers. I hope this project walkthrough can help you lots along the way, especially in being comfortable to take the first steps! Got a project stuck on the mental shelf? Get on with it – you will learn new cool things, and find new tricks to improvise. Me, I’m getting a friendly device to carry in my pocket, and that alone is a wonderful experience.

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