Every electrical engineer who does DIY projects knows that dozens of free resistor calculators are out there that can save quite a bit of tedious work. Other simple tools can be found, but traditionally the free tool arsenal would stop there. To help sort out the nonsense from the useful online tools, check this blog →
I mentioned Fritzing two years ago and now I find coming back to use this software. Fritzing is an open source software initiative that was to support designers and artists ready to move from physical prototyping to actual product. Today Fritzing is an open-source hardware initiative that makes electronics accessible as a creative material for →
I found a very cheap Arduino Nano board from Bang good web shop. I consider 5.34 Euros very cheap price for Arduino Nano, usually those cost $10 or even considerably more. Gravitech lists on it’s web page price to be $34.99. I wonder how this board can get this be built and delivered from other →
When I was designing the measurement circuit used in my How to measure smartphone power usage posting, I needed to design a RC low pass filter to it. I could have picked an electronics book and formulas in it, but instead of manual calculation I used Google to find a tool for that on-line. There →
A programming language familiar to all, BASIC, has turns 50 years old. This month, BASIC celebrates an anniversary reached by very few languages: 50 years of continuous use. Basic Turns 50 article looks back on 50 years of attracting (and repelling) new programmers. It’s difficult to imagine the computing world in 1964. There were no →
The problem: I need to measure how much power different Android applications make the phone to consume. Measurement method: Measure how much current the phone takes from it’s own battery. So I needed to somehow attack a measurement device between battery terminal and battery contact on the phone. This could be made by using a →
How about making your own smarphone? Making a cell phone or smart phone is not out of reach for clever hardware hacker. If you are planning to make a simple cell phone, ArduinoPhone project shows how you can build one. Or you can check the platforms used to build the cheapest cell phones. Are you looking →
Lytro changed photography some years ago when it introduced light field photography technology. At that time Lytro introduced pocket digital camera that has adjustable focus that you can adjust afterwards. First lit looked like just a gimmick, but it seems that the idea has got wider interest that just this one product: several smart phone →
A port scanner is a software application designed to probe a server or host for open ports. This is often used by administrators to verify security policies of their networks and by attackers to identify running services on a host. The de facto standard for port scanning always has been the venerable Nmap program. The →
One friend mentioned this: littleBits makes an opensource library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping, learning, and fun. Looks interesting. There are even instructions how to join littleBits to LEGO. All the modules are open source, check GitHub for Eagle boards and schematics for all the littleBits modules. The aim →