Or lack of safety? This example is one cheap UK-schuco adapter. First look reveals that there is no fuse in UK plug (there should be max 13A fuse). There is no grounding on adapter (just plastic pin in place of ground pin), but accepts grouded equipment plug. But there is worse problem: when plug is →
Crowdfunding campaigns or wide product announcements that do not make sense pops up every now and then. It seems that energy related “inventions” seems to be getting easily into the spotlight without proven merits: Hackaday article Crowdfunding Follies: Proof That Ohm’s Law Is Arcane Knowledge tells about a special cell phone case Kickstarter (Nikola Phone →
News beat is drumming heavily on claim that Company Extends Alkaline Battery Life With Voltage Booster. Batteriser is making its media debut, with features in all the tech blogs, an astonishing amount of print outlets, and spouted from the gaping maws of easily impressed rubes the world over: Batteriser is a $2.50 gadget that promises →
I thouhgt I wanted to try IoT with ESP8266 easily, so I got Nodemcu dev kit to the test lua on ESP8266. The kit I got was NodeMcu Lua WIFI Development Board For ESP8266 Module from Banggood. The kit contains somewhat more (around 8 Euros) than bare ESP8266 module (around $3), but promises to provide →
Modern car has network of distributed sensors and controllers. If you know how to connect to this network, you can get lots of information how the car works. On-board diagnostics (OBD) is an automotive term referring to a vehicle’s self-diagnostic and reporting capability. OBD systems give the vehicle owner or repair technician access to the →
I got a new laptop (Windows 8), but I occasionally needed to capture analogue video. What device to use with it? My older USB capture hardware was not compatible, so I needed a new one. Preferably something cheap. I found USB2.0 Video TV Tuner DVD Audio Capture Card Converter Record Receiver as suitable looking product →
I saw yesterday demo of Lauterbach debugger. It is a hardware based modular debugger that supports many processors. It is considered to be high-end debugger product for Embedded Linux debugging and is quite expensive. The company serves a niche-market of in-circuit emulators, especially on systems using JTAG, which it sells under the brand name TRACE32. →
Here are some interesting robotics video for this Friday. Renesas MCU Car Rally 2015 video tells about 1st European Renesas MCU Car Rally held on 26th February at embedded world 2015 in Nuremberg. It is a competition between 17 teams comprising some 100 university students from all over Europe who come together to test their →
A new electronics on-line component shop has opened in Finland at http://www.tronics.fi/. The shop has a selection of Arduino and Raspberry Pi related products. It has also selection of accessories, components and measurement instruments. The shop was opened few days ago. I have not ordered anything from the shop, but it looks good. The shop →
For some RF tests I sometimes need to generate different higher frequency signals than normally available from general purpose function generator. For this purpose I bought a cheap AD9850 module to generate different frequency RF signals. This AD9850 module can generate frequencies in 0-40 MHz frequency range (sine wave output). For initial testing I successfully →