Archive for August 2013

Internet.org

Internet.org seems to be on news today everywhere. Facebook Leads an Effort to Lower Barriers to Internet Access article tells that half a dozen of the world’s tech giants, including Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson, have agreed to work with the company as partners on the initiative, which they call Internet.org. The plan is to

Arduino overclocking

Liquid nitrogen (finally) makes an Arduino project cool. Overclocking Arduino with liquid nitrogen cooling. 20⇒65.3Mhz @-196°C/-320°F article has this video that shows how it is done. It turns out that you can run an Arduino UNO at 65.3MHz when it is cooled with liquid nitrogen. Arduino UNO / ATmega328P at 8V is stable at 65.3Mhz

Reverse engineering the of a ULN2003

I have many times found ULN2003 and ULN2804 transistor arrays to be very useful components when I want to control some loads like relays, small electrical motors or light bulbs from TTL circuits. I have for example used ULN2803 for many applications where I have needed to control something with PC parallel port. The interesting

Happy 20th birthday Debian!

Today is Debian‘s 20 anniversary. Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. Debian started as Linux distribution, but Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel (work is in progress to provide Debian for other kernels). Debian was begun in August 1993 by Ian Murdock, as a new distribution

Playing with high end oscilloscope

Playing with an oscilloscope you’ll (probably) never own article tells that Hackaday staff were really jealous when [Shahriar] a video he made, in which he casually explains how a $500,000 160GS/s 62GHz oscilloscope works and then starts playing with it. Looked interesting do I thought to link it to my blog as well. Experiments and

USB and ground loops

USB was originally designed for desktop use, but it is increasingly used for industrial applications. For USB to survive in those environments, it needs to be made more rugged. It means that ruggedizing USB for ground loops and using better (more protection and better locking) connectors are often needed. Ruggedize USB connections for tough environments

JTAGulator

How to hack to an embedded device? On-chip debug (OCD) interfaces can provide chip-level control of a target device and are a primary vector used by engineers, researchers, and hackers to extract program code or data, modify memory contents, or affect device operation on-the-fly. Depending on the complexity of the target device, manually locating available

Do LEDs cause blindness?

Do LEDs cause blindness? article tells that According to a study led by Dr. Celia Sánchez-Ramos, of Complutense University in Madrid, prolonged and continuous exposure to LED light might be sufficient to damage the retina. Her study, published in the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology in 2012 found that LED radiation caused significant damage to human

Contact cleaner repairs remote controls

Last weekend I repaired two unreliable radio remote controllers with contact spray. One of the remotes was for Nikko RC car and other was for mains outlet remote controlling (bought from Clas Ohlson). In the Nikko remote has small joystick like controls, but underneath them there was just small cheap buttons on the circuit board.

Linux for School Exams in Finland

Slashdot informs (and I have seen it also on other news) that the Matriculation Examination Board of Finland (Upper Secondary School Exams) has opened an international hacking contest to find flaws and exploits in Digabi Live. Digabi Live is a Live Debian based operating system to be used in the all-digital final exams by the