Archive for September 2013

DIY USB soldering iron

I just yesterday wrote about commercially make USB soldering iron product. But how building a DIY USB soldering iron? USB Soldering Iron article shows how to convert an inexpensive battery powered Soldering Iron into a slick USB powered soldering iron. The conversion idea is to cut USB cable and wire it to the battery contacts

USB soldering iron

Powering all kind of gadgets from USB power has become very popular nowadays. Soldering from USB power? Now there are products for this. The question is that how useful they are because of the limited power available from USB port (just few watts). The maximum power you can get from normal USB 2.0 port is

Nokia had a number of Android projects going on

Tietokone magazine writes that Nokia had a number of Android projects – Microsoft was in trouble. That was the final reason for Microsoft to buy Nokia’s phone business. Nokia was running several Android projects on both Lumia models and Asha phones, reveals the New York Times and The Verge sources. So Nokia had already been

Teach, Don’t Tell

Writing good technical documentation is hard, and that’s why you too often find yourself reading bad documentation. But how to write good documentation? Teach, Don’t Tell post is about writing technical documentation. More specifically: it’s about writing documentation for programming languages and libraries. There are many things you might want to accomplish, the writer is

Gadget Freak of the Year

Design News and Allied Electronics are looking to crown its first-ever Gadget Freak of the Year. Reader Vote: Gadget Freak of the Year article has four videos of interesting hardware hacking projects. You can vote what you think is the best.

The Data Factory

You’re the product, but when you’re sold, it’s only a lucky few who get rich. The Data Factory – How Your Free Labor Lets Tech Giants Grow The Wealth Gap article tells that technology lets big companies distribute tools that turn us into volunteers who contribute our time and data while they profit. It wasn’t

Rescue sheet for your car

Cars have become safer and safer, but still they crash too often. The increasingly safety design of vehicles presents rescuers with a serious challenge. On-board rescue sheet article tells that in particular, removing car roofs is becoming more and more problematic. Faced with high-strength steel and body reinforcements, even the most powerful cutters reach their

Build your own metal detector

Build your own metal detector article mentions a pretty interesting Diy Arduino based metal detector. The article starts with with an explanation of how most oscillator based metal detectors work. Most metal detectors uses a search coil that act as part of an oscillator circuit. When metal is put in proximity of the search coil

HOLMImpulse measures Bode plot

I have searched for some time a suitable software (preferably free) that allows me to measure Bode plot of electronics circuits. There are commercial software, special hardware and special instruments for that (network analyzer can usually do that on radio frequencies), but I wanted something that uses the hardware I already has. After some searching

Arduino and ultrasound distance sensor

I bought some time ago HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Sensor Distance Measuring Module to play with ultrasound distance measurements with Arduino Duemilanove 2009 Atmega 328P SCM Board. The working principle of the HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Sensor Distance Measuring Module when the module get trigger “start” pulse, it sends eight 40khz square wave pulses and automatically detect whether receive