The markings on SMD components have been always hard to read. Besides the fact that the numbers and letters in them are very small, the number coding used on them is different than what is used on traditional though-hole components (the reason is that there would not be enough space to print any long codes →
Tietoviikko reports that Finland (my home country) is the world’s best IT country according to World Economic Forum study The Global Information Technology Report 2013. According to the study, Finland is the world’s number one country when it comes to the economy’s ability to use information technology to competitiveness and prosperity. Finland has toppled Sweden →
Twisted pair Ethernet (10 and 100 Mbit/s) uses two pairs of wires. Ethernet (10 Mbit/s works well, 100 Mbit/s sometimes) can be run on the old telephone wiring. There some years ago quite a bit of interest in reusing old telephone wiring for Ethernet connections. Reusing old installed wiring for Ethernet works usually well if →
10 Ways to Destroy an Arduino article tells how you can accidentally destroy Arduino board. Use a sledgehammer, fire a bullet at it, throw it into a pool….that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re going to show you how to electrically destroy your Arduino: Method #1: Shorting I/O Pins to Ground Method #2: Shorting I/O →
Twisted pair Ethernet (10 and 100 Mbit/s) uses two pairs of wires. 10BASE-T Ethernet was designed to be be used on CAT3 quality wiring. 100BASE-TX was designed to be used with CAT5 wiring or better. Since the early 2000s most new structured cable installations are built with Category 5e or Category 6 cable. There are →
Bartenders beware: A robotic drink-dispensing rig is aiming to steal your customers while pouring cocktail creations at the push of a touchscreen button. This Open Source Robot Bartender Pours the Perfect Mix article tells about bartender robot that the creators call Bartendro: Operated through an iPad interface, this device holds up to 15 bottles of →
A standard hobby RC servo motor is designed to rotate through only 180 degrees. They are most often used in RC applications (like steering). The servo motor controlling is done with servo control pulses (1-2 ms pulse at around 50 Hz rate). More details on the control signals can be found at Servo protocol web →
Need to monitor Linux server performance? Try these built-in commands and a few add-on tools mentioned in 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know article. Most Linux distributions are equipped with tons of monitoring. →
I had been getting some intermittent noise from my Panasonic PT-AE900E video projector after some years of usage. It sounded like a dry bearing on a fan, but it turned out that it was iris that caused the problem. I decided to take a more look at this problems when I had time to change →
EDN magazine reported just few days ago that National Robotics Week has started. There are many robotics events arranged around USA. EDN magazine page from last Friday has a list of links to interesting articles on robotics. There are for example articles on Roomba sensors for hackers and building a power supply for your robot. →