Is electronics heading to be less and less hackable? DIY site iFixit has been keeping tabs on the tech world whilst providing handy self-repair guides for popular electronics. Now the site maintainers have seen trend that electronics products seem to become intentionally harder and harder to fix in recent years. The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, →
UNDERSTANDING, FINDING, & ELIMINATING GROUND LOOPS IN AUDIO & VIDEO SYSTEMS – 2005 Generic Seminar Template is a very good collection of information on ground loop problems on audio and video systems. The writer Bill Whitlock from Jensen Transformers really knows what he is talking about. Here are some fact points picked from document: The →
Have you ever wanted to find out how strong a magnet really was, or how the strength of the magnetic field varied as you changed the distance from the magnet. Devices used to measure the local magnetic field are called magnetometers or gaussmeters. There are commercially available meters for this, but they are usually a →
I bought USB Virtual 7.1 Channel External Sound Card Adapter to build a cheap PC based digital storage oscilloscope. Sound card based oscilloscope is not new to me, I have used it sometimes. There are many free oscilloscope software that you can use. For example “zeitnitz” is a very fine program! Using an external USB →
Given the schematic for a simple circuit, make it a real circuit with the base components, some conductive thread, and a 3D printer. No solder, no etching chemicals, no sending away for anything. 3D-Printed Circuit Boards, for solder-free printable electronics Instructable is to serve as the how-to guide for a 3D-printed electronic circuit library implemented →
Power over Ethernet (PoE) offers convenience, flexibility, and enhanced management capabilities by enabling power to be delivered over the same CAT5 cabling as data. This technology is especially useful for powering IP telephones, wireless LAN access points, cameras with pan tilt and zoom (PTZ), remote Ethernet switches, embedded computers, thin clients and LCDs. The original →
The diaphragm of a condenser microphone is the movable plate of a capacitor. WHen properly polarized the vibration of the diaphragm in relation to the back plate produces an ac audio-output voltage. The condenser capsule has a capacitance of 10 to 60 pF; thus, you should connect it to an impedance converter with extremely high →
I have earlier written about grounded laptop power supply problems. Other popular laptop power supply configuration used is floating output. There are power supplies without ground, for example some Apple laptops and many other brands. The power supplies where there is no ground on connection on the mains side are for sure built in this →
Is your working desk clean or messy? Do you have a home laboratory and how messy it it? Computer History Museum honors Jim Williams and Bob Pease tells that some messy engineering working desks end up in Computer History Museum as exhibit. Both work of Bob Pease and Jim William have been a source of →
Fritzing is an interesting open-source initiative to support designers, artists, researchers and hobbyists to work creatively with interactive electronics. We are creating a software and website in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, developing a tool that allows users to document their prototypes, share them with others, teach electronics in a classroom, and to create →