serial-bench / about
I am Ivo Kallas. I design and repair small embedded boards - motor controllers, sensor nodes, the kind of thing that sits in a cabinet for a decade - and I do it from a workshop in Tartu. Most of my working week is spent on buses that were specified in the 1980s and 1990s and are still, correctly, everywhere.
A socket here is a physical one: two or four wires and a connector. Raw means nothing is interpreting the bytes for me - no library, no decoder, just the voltage that exists on the pin during a particular nanosecond and whatever meaning the two ends agreed to give it. The whole discipline of this trade is accepting that the wire has no idea what a byte is.
I started the list in December 2024 after the afternoon described in the first entry, where I misread my own instrument for four hours. I had made a version of that mistake before and had forgotten the lesson completely. A private note would have been forgotten again; something written for a stranger forces me to check the arithmetic and to state what I did not establish.
Nine entries in twenty-two months is a deliberate pace. A write-up happens when a fault teaches something that generalises beyond the board it happened on. Most faults do not - a dry joint is a dry joint - and those go in the repair log instead.
If a number on this site is wrong I want to know, and a correction with a capture attached is the most useful mail I receive. Write to ivo@rawsocket.cloud. Please include the instrument, the sample rate or bandwidth, the probe arrangement and the supply voltage - without those four things neither of us can tell whose measurement is at fault.
Things I will not answer, cheerfully and without exception: requests to debug a board I have not seen, schematic review, anything that begins «urgent», and homework.
Quote the text and redraw the figures freely, including commercially, as long as the source is named. The diagrams are plain inline vector graphics with no licence attached to them beyond that courtesy. If you reproduce a measurement, reproduce its caveats with it - a rise time without its pull-up value is not information.