Archive for October 2013

Arduino Robot

Arduino news seem to be coming this week. First there was Intel Galileo board and then Arduino TRE. Third new product is Arduino Robot. Arduino Robot is the first official Arduino on wheels. The robot has two ATmega32u4 processors, one on each of its two boards. The Motor Board controls the motors. The Control Board

Runnable

Ex-Amazon Engineer Builds Library for World’s Software Code article mentions and interesting service: Runnable. Companies like Amazon and Google try to share their code with every other engineer at the company. The idea is to ensure that they never build the same thing twice. This kind of practices have created a huge discovery problem to

Safety analysis of one USB power supply

Here is the power supply that came with a cheap MP3 player. It is a power supply that takes in 230V mains power and outputs 5V at USB connector. What is wrong with this power supply? Let’s start with the electromechanical design. The mains connection pins that can be folded in and out at a

Stallman’s GNU at 30

Stallman’s GNU at 30: The hippie OS that foresaw the rise of Apple – and is now trying to take it on article tells that GNU fans have celebrated their software movement’s thirtieth birthday – a movement that started as rebellious bits and bytes of tools, and is now a worldwide phenomena. Stallman launched the

VLC media player version 2.1

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player. A new version of VLC media player has releases a short time ago. VLC is 2.1 (codenamed “Ricewind”) is a major upgrade because it includes a new audio core, hardware decoding and encoding, port to mobile platforms, preparation for 4K Ultra-HD video and support for

Video over UTP active adapters

I have written about passive methods on adapting 75 ohm video signals to 100 ohms UTP wiring at Differential video signals on UTP cable section of ePanorama.net and my postings Audio, Video and other signals over UTP, Video over UTP and Video over UTP – commercial balun circuit articles. Possibility to send composite video signals

Friday fun: Five Worst Inventions

In Five Worst Inventions video TIME senior writer Lev Grossman discusses the choices for Worst Inventions of the Year 2009. Check out the video even though it is few years old.

Arduino running on x86

Dev boards based on microcontrollers and ARM System on Chips are everywhere, but smaller boards with x86 processor has been rare. I just saw The Intel-powered Arduino article that tells about Arduino-compatible Intel Galileo board. Galileo is a microcontroller board based on the Intel® Quark SoC X1000 Application Processor, a 32-bit Intel Pentium-class system on

Video over UTP – commercial balun circuit

The secret to sending analogue video signals over UTP is to balance them well. Video balun is a device made for this. I earlier write about Video over UTP and my own experiments related to it. Here is a look wat what is inside a commercially made inexpensive video balun, in this case LLT-201 from

ELKOM 2013

I visited today ELKOM. There were very many stands there, but what I notices in the morning there were not that much people on the halls. For example on the main hall there were several presentation events going on, and each of them had only very small number of people watching the presentations. I remember