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Nordic Semiconductor Acquires Memfault
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y agoNordic makes some good products. When I was doing hardware design for a product that uses a battery my options for power profiling were either not to do it or spend some eye watering amount of money. Then I discovered Nordic makes the PPKII, a cost effective, highly accurate profiler with quite good software. I detect good things in store for the company just based on the quality of stuff they have been putting out.
- Neywiny 1y agoLooks like it switches different ranges. ST makes something similar that has similar dynamic range without switching. They use analog circuitry (op amps and junk) to compensate for the resistor drop, so the path is uninterrupted. I've had systems where the auto-ranging on a bench meter is enough to cause it to reset. I can't find a schematic for the PPKII (haven't looked too hard though) but if it's actually switching the supply, that can cause issues to devices downstream. Especially if that switching causes a voltage drop change.
- readmodifywrite 1y agoIt switches the detection range, but not the actual power supply. You can ramp from <5 uA up to 500 mA and back all you want. I haven't noticed any glitching on the actual supply. Schematics: https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Development-hardware/Power-Profiler-Kit-2/Download https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Development-hardware/Pow...
- dragontamer 1y agoWith the onset of cheap 16-bit, 18-bit or even 24-bit sigma delta ADCs, it isn't a very hard circuit to shove a 1 Ohm sense resistor, 2.048V reference and have sensing down to 31uA (16-bit), 8uA (18-bit) or less for 24-bit ADC. SigmaDelta gets pricy if you want higher speeds though. But it's possible.
- ranma42 1y agoI have the ST one (X-NUCLEO-LPM01A), but its range is actually not enough for something like an ESP32, it goes into "overload" as the max current is 50mA for dynamic (100kHz bandwith) and 200mA for "static" measurements. Looks like the PPKII can do up to 1A.
- monegator 1y ago> Nordic makes some good products and godawful software. the SDK for their NRF52/3/4 is pure madness, i haven't even managed to set up the toolchain, documentation always out of date. They used to have another toolchain for the older parts, but good luck setting it up now.
- 5ADBEEF 1y agoI don’t think most have this experience. Zephyr is the future.
- joezydeco 1y agoI've had bad experiences with Zephyr in the past. It's been half-baked and passed around from company to company for ages. Be Linux or don't be Linux, but don't be halfway between the two. I have a lot more hope for PX5.
- machinehum 1y agoI actually disagree. We have lower power bare metal systems, think AVR/STM stuff (in the 1Mhz to 50Mhz range with 128K or less of RAM) here FreeRTOS, no freeRTOS, custom driver code and some basic application code makes sense. For simple to very complex systems. Then there's 1Ghz+ stuff with an MMU and 2GB+ RAM. Linux makes sense here. Companies are now making chips 200Mhz+, 4MB RAM, with no MMU. This is precisely where Zephyr excels, you want a full networking stack? Switch that on. A file system, easy. Driver for some more complex thing? Maybe an SDIO radio? boomboom
- vbezhenar 1y agonRF52820 is 256 KB Flash and 32 KB RAM chip. Actually it's around 150 KB flash, because you need space for 120KB softdevice blob (and some RAM too). And it's perfectly enough for many devices. They want developers to use Zephyr for this chip.
- flyingcircus3 1y ago
- readmodifywrite 1y agoThe PPK2 is one of the best pieces of kit I have and it'd be worth it at 5x the price. There's an unofficial Python library as well. I have power consumption tests running as part of my automated firmware test suite.
- phoronixrly 1y agoDo they have nice open-source SDKs for these nice products?
- vbezhenar 1y agoI'm working with NRF5 SDK. Most of its source is available (no idea if it's free software or not, but sources are there). The most glaring exception is softdevice - that's BLE implementation, it's huge binary blob, taking control over most CPU. Their newer SDK based on Zephyr RTOS, I didn't work with it, but I think it's mostly open source as well.
- Avamander 1y agoYou can use NimBLE on quite a few of these chips.
- fra 1y agoIt's all on Github (https://github.com/nordicsemiconductor https://github.com/nordicsemiconductor), but it is not technically open source as it is a modified BSD that does not let you use the SDKs with other chipsets.
- pabs3 1y agoThe BLE library at least is plain BSD-3-Clause. Most of the other ones are the same, a few don't have licenses applied though. Which repo has the modified BSD license?
- blutack 1y agoThe TinyCurrent or uCurrent can be used for this as well when paired with a scope with scpi. However, the ranges aren't dynamic which is annoying if you're using something a WiFi part where you're going from uA to 200mA. https://n-fuse.co/devices/tinyCurrent-precision-low-Current-Measurement-Shunt-and-Amplifier-Device.html https://n-fuse.co/devices/tinyCurrent-precision-low-Current-...
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y agoThat was actually very much close to my use case - ESP32 modules sit right in this range.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cushychicken 1y agoLove that most of the comments here are love for PPKII Strong agree with all those comments - it’s a great little tool at a great price!
- ffhsotsifacjafi 1y ago[flagged]
- kats 1y agoCongrats, sounds good for everyone.
- fra 1y agoThank you!
- shortsightedsid 1y agoCongrats to the Memfault team!
- fra 1y agoThank you!
- fra 1y agoI'm the co-founder and CEO of Memfault. We were in the W19 YC batch. I never thought our news would make the front page of HN! This is a very exciting day for us (after a very intense few months). We've known the Nordic team for years and could not think of a better partner to grow our platform. Happy to answer questions, if you have them.
- DaveExeter 1y agoDon't keep us guessing -- what was the bag?
- tckr 1y agoParsing the stock exchange notice [1], the three founders seem to have received 42 Million USD. If they had the same amount of shares, they received around 14 Million each. > The three founders of Memfault - CEO Francois Baldassari, CTO Chris Coleman and VP Developer Experience Tyler Hoffman – will reinvest 30% of their share sale proceeds in Nordic Semiconductor shares, totalling approximately USD 13 million. [1] https://newsweb.oslobors.no/message/649971 https://newsweb.oslobors.no/message/649971
- DaveExeter 1y agoWow! That's an impressive bag!
- mensetmanusman 1y agoHow will tariffs affect where these pcbs are built?
- pedalpete 1y agoThis is great news. We are implementing memfault, probably in September/October period, but were struggling with the pricing model for long-term growth. I'm assuming Nordic gives the company the support and reach their mission and discover a more workable business model.
- fra 1y agoHi Pete -- email me (francois at) and I'll get you early enrolled into the special deals we have coming for Nordic customers.
- jacknews 1y ago"allows customers to focus on innovation – free from the burden" Sounds great, but does it actually mean lock-in, in reality?
- fra 1y agoEvery vendor you bring in comes with switching cost, and this is no different. But we do our best to make it easy for folks to migrate off of our platform should they decide.
- billforsternz 1y ago> Throughout the product lifecycle, continuous software upgrades strengthen the security, performance, power consumption, and functionality of products in the field. This doesn't feel right to me. Back in the day when I started in embedded systems you would have to get it right before you shipped it. That had it's own problems of course, but at least you knew where you stood and if something worked well it would continue to work well until the hardware died. Also I think the right word grammatically is continual not continuous. I suspect they changed it because continual software upgrades sounds terrifying.
- fra 1y agoIn hindsight I think the correct word would be "regular software upgrades".
- ryukoposting 1y agoI have been developing firmware for Nordic chips for about 5 years now, and I have roughly the same amount of experience with Memfault. The idea of Memfault is like Datadog for IoT stuff. The reality of Memfault is that everyone just uses it to push OTA firmware upgrades through the cloud, and capture stack traces on crashes. Sometimes you bolt on their metrics later, but 95% of the value is in OTA firmware upgrades and crash reports. Nordic has started to assemble a juggernaut of a tech stack, and a collossal moat. They keep most of their Zephyr contributions outside the main source tree, in something they call the nRF Connect SDK. They've been developing vendor-specific extensions to Memfault's SDK for years. The upside with Nordic is you get a complete embedded tech stack out of the box. The downside is that, if their stack doesn't doesn't offer what you need, you have to grapple with the incomprehensibly complex SDK in the entire industry. For some companies, it works great. For others, it's an attractive nuisance. I don't know how much actually changes for either company with this acquisition. It probably isn't good news if you're ST, Infineon, or Microchip.
- borgel 1y agoLove Memfault, very happy customer. Hopefully this is a great exit for everyone and a great future for the products.
- K2h 1y agoMoved to nordic nRF52840 based system (RAK) because of the 9mA average draw to run Meshtastic for LoRa radio at 900mhz. Longest link so far from flat land is about 40 miles. Moving up the mountain to see what improved line of site can do. Nordic chip is super impressive and power efficient compared to ESP32