How to replace your damaged notebook or laptop LCD screen video will show you how to remove your damaged or non-functioning notebook or laptop lcd screen.
Archive for April, 2010
Laptop screen repairs
Monday, April 19th, 2010Inside LED bulb
Sunday, April 18th, 2010TESS, a Taiwanese manufacturing company, recently introduced a 7W LED bulb that, at 560 lumens, can serve as a replacement for a typical 500-lumen, 40W incandescent bulb. Tear-down: inside a 7W LED light bulb article shows you what is inside that lamp. This LED lamp bulb holds seven 1W LED packages (a package of multiple LED chips). The HB-LED-driver IC is an MIP552 from Panasonic.
The LEDs have advanced so much that in the future such builb could be built using only one LED. According to Prosessori magazine news article a single Cree XLamp XM led can produce 750 lumens (equivalend to 60W bulb) with 7W of power. 160 lm/W is expected from cool white variants.
For DIY LED experimenters here are some tips:
Home Built LED Lighting article tells the basics of LED light circuits.
Ultra Bright LED Lamp article show a circuit of a ultra-bright white LED lamp that works on 230V AC with minimal power consumption. This circuit uses 16 LEDs and a capacitor for LED current limiting.
Efficient LED power supply has battery backup article shows a highly efficient and reliable design for emergency LED lighting at 3 to 6W. The circuit’s input is 12V ac.
If you don’t want to build the LED driver circuit from components then you can buy a good selection of LED driver modules from Dealextreme.
Money saving fonts
Friday, April 16th, 2010Did you realize you can actually cut printing costs just by choosing another font? Printing Costs: Does Font Choice Make a Difference? article tells that you can save environment and money with right printing font choices. The article says that it is possible to save 31% on your ink cartridge costs just by picking the right font. The popular Arial font uses a lot of ink. Arial sees such widespread use primarily because it’s the default in programs like MS’s Word and Internet Explorer. Sanserif fonts like Arial are grand for headlines, not so good for the body of the text anyway.
Century Gothic is a modern font that comes standard with MS Windows, and it even beat Ecofont which was specifically designed with efficiency and cost in mind. Times New Roman is for those who require a more traditional look and some savings. One article comment says that setting your printer to “draft output” can save lots of toner while usually giving just a slightly less perfect result than normal printout.
Besides print cost consider also the readability. If you are printing something important or worthwhile, then don’t make readers suffer to save yourself a couple of cents. Using tiny little sans serif fonts makes text hard and slow to read for older people with not so perfect vision. Those little tails, the serifs, on fonts like Garamond help lead the eye along according to one article comment. If you want to use a serif font, you’ll notice from the chart that Times New Roman (a serif font) handily beats out Arial in efficiency. If you’ve just printing tons of crap and you don’t think it matters if anyone reads it, then think again if you really need to print it.
IE9 and HTML5 demos
Thursday, April 15th, 2010Windows Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive page intended to give Web developers an early look at the Web platform technology coming in the next release of Internet Explorer. The page shows developers the progress in IE and give ideas to start planning if and how they want to support new HTML5 capabilities in the future. The Test Drive site demonstrates the use of new Web technologies like HTML5 and SVG. Those web technologies are brand new on IE platform, but has been supported for some time on the other major web browsers. With IE9 Microsoft tries to catch up with the other competing browsers.
The Windows Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive page contains many HTML5 demos. These demos are intended to be an early look at what’s developers can do with Internet Explorer 9, and the demos are works-in-progress. There are many demos, mainly concentrated graphics and animation. There is even SVG–oids game. It is a re-creation of a classic 1979 arcade game shows what can be done with a little bit of SVG, JavaScript, and programming skill.
It seems that Microsoft is finally following the official web standards more closely, because all the demos I have tested worked also well with Firefox web browser. And I also tested some of them with Google Chrome and they worked well on that as well. It seem that HTML5 features are coming to all major web browsers and they are implemented in standard way even by Microsoft. Now it is time to start learning HTML5.
Pixels video
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010New York invasion by 8-bits creatures! Old School geeks will simply love this new Amazing Pixels Video for Old School Geeks which combines many of the vintage and retro video game classics, characters, looks and feel into one amazing music video. PIXELS is Patrick Jean’ latest short film, shot on location in New York. This is amazing awesome entertaining video.
Manager’s guide to digital design
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010Manager’s guide to digital design article from EDN magazine is for all those hardworking engineering managers who just want a simple, one-page summary of everything they need to know about digital design. Here are some picks from article:
GROUND: mythical electrical object that absorbs unlimited quantities of electrical current. Ground exists in Spice but nowhere else. Radar engineers in the 1930s discredited the concept of ground as anything more than a good place to grow carrots and potatoes.
EQUALIZER: the Chuck Norris of serial-transmission circuits. An equalizer improves the odds of success for all good bits by knocking out the bad artifacts. Just saying you have an equalizer makes investors swoon.
ROHS (restriction-of-hazardous-substances) Lead-Free Solder Initiative: Evil plot by Luddites to rid the world of computers by first rendering all electronic products flaky and unreliable. The initiative may precipitate the collapse of Western civilization. Until then, just smile and go along with the scheme like everyone else.
LED light ring for macro photography
Monday, April 12th, 2010For good macro photography you need to have good light. Getting nice light nicely to location near camera lens can be sometimes hard. Some photographers use special Macro Photo Studio. Some macro photographers use two flashes mounted on opposite sides of the lens. Some prefer to use ring lights. After some experimenting I thought that light ring would be an useful addition for my digital camera.
There are ready made right lights and also plans to build one. After some thinking I decided that I would get good results most easily by taking some inexpensive ring type LED lamp and modify it for my needs. After some searching I found T10 15-LED White Light Car Angle Eye (60mm Diameter) sold by Dealextreme ($4.03). It looked light pretty suitable. So I ordered it. This product is designed with 12V DC car power source (typically in 12-13.5V range). I connected 12V transformer to this light and it worked well.
After some experimenting I found that the wire from 12V transformer is annoying. I would like to make this light mobile with some small power source. But 12V small portable power source is not too common. 12V made from AA or AAA is quite big and heavy. Smaller button batteries or tiny 12V batteries had too low capacity. I would prefer to use normal 9V battery. I tried using 9V battery, but there was very little light output compared to 12V power source. So something needs to be done.
I did some measuring and found out that this device takes around 80 mA of current from 12V DC power source. The circuit inside this light consists of five LED sets. Each LED set consist of three while LEDs wires in series and in addition there is around 150 ohms resistor for current limiting (resistors did not have markings in them, the value was measured with multimeter). With 12V power the resistor has around 3V voltage drop and LEDs about 9V. For 9V operation there was no voltage drop left for any current limiting resistor or circuit.
Could the LEDs (three in series) could work directly from 9V battery without any current limiting resistors? Generally it is not a good idea to run LEDs without current current limiting series resistor, but some small LED lamps use white LEDs that are directly powered from 3V battery.
The LEDs used in this circuit I was modifying had fortunately such specifications that they worked nicely (three in series) from 9V battery power source without any current limiting resistor. It took some experiemting and measuring to be sure that this would be a safe way to go. The solution to operate the circuit from 9V battery was to short circuit all five resistors on the back side of the circuit board.
With this modification the circuit took around 30 mA current from 9V battery and gave about half of the light as unmodified circuit from 12V power source. I just added 9V battery connector and my macro ring light electronics was ready.The light output was enough for it to be an useful digital camera macro photography light.
Here is a picture what kind of light you get from this (note that there is some blue lens flare on the picture):
All I need to figure out now how to keep this nicely in place in front of camera around the lens. The small rubber like pads I glued to this light are not the most reliable way to attach it to camera objective. I am still trying out different options for that. Also a battery holder for that 9V battery would be nice to include to the holder.
Other ideas and information related to macro photography can be found at the following pages: MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY, How To: DIY $10 Macro Photo Studio and Macro Photography: how to take close-up pictures of small things. It is also worth to read Shedding Light on Machine Vision.
Useful time protocols
Friday, April 9th, 2010The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a protocol for synchronizing the clocks of computer systems over packet-switched, variable-latency data networks like Internet. The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers providing reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients. Unfortunately NTP cannot be used everywhere without problems. NTP uses UDP on port 123 as its transport layer, and that could be blocked by the firewall in many places.
HTP Time Sync is one alternative way to get correct time to your computer. It uses the HTTP protocol for time synchronization. Every Web server runs HTTP and, by definition, Web servers always respond to HTTP requests with their current date and time. The current time and date information is available on the HTTP header text line that starts with text “Date:”.
You can use whatever suitable tools to write a simple script that gets that time (tip: you can connect to web server with nc or telnet instead of big bew browser software) or you can use ready made software you can find at HTTP Time Protocol / htpdate web page.
Math Class Fun
Thursday, April 8th, 2010April Fools: Math Class Shadow video shows an awesome prank by a math teacher Professor Matthew Weathers from Biola University. This prank mixes a pre-edited video with live action.
2009 Halloween Math Class v2 is a another funny video of a specially prepared math lecture from the same professor to honor of Halloween.
Look inside iPad
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010The iPad The iPad is a tablet computer developed by Apple Inc. Since the announcement of it in January 2010 it has been one of the most talked about technology gadget. Understanding the iPad’s Industrial Design article tells that iPad is the culmination of Jon Ive’s quest for the ultimate industrial design, a search for the minimal minimalism, reducing an entire mobile computer to just a screen with no keyboard. What’s inside the iPad and what it can do article give you an idea what kind of computer hardware iPad has inside it. Inside the iPad: Apple’s new ‘A4′ chip article tells about the CPU used in iPad. iPad’s A4 CPU chip (souped-up ARM Cortex A-8 processor) runs iPhone OS at 1GHz, compared to the estimated 600MHz of the iPhone 3GS.
If you are a hardware hacker, you might want to see what is inside iPad and not just read about it. When looking for information on new mobile devices, the information on FCC site is usually has information about any new gadget, you just have to find it. The problem in finding the information is that the name used on FCC documents is often very different from the marketing name for the device. FCC ID ‘BCG-E2381A’ documents give you some detailed information on iPad hardware, including some inside hardware pictures and EMC test results. The iPad’s Not So Revolutionary Inside article contains an interesting video that point out some interesting design choices that Apple has made, and shows off all the insides.
Image sources: Apple iPad page and video
