Archive for September 2019

Battery for NanoVNA

I had earlier written about NanoVNA and how the device I got came without battery. The device supports rechargeable LiPo batteries, but the batteries are not included on the model I bought because of the safety of international transportation. I also liked to have the LiPo battery installed on my device. The device has battery

Testing NanoVNA

NanoVNA is very tiny handheld Vector Network Analyzer (VNA). A vector network analyzer (VNA) is an instrument that can be used to measure antenna or coax parameters such as SWR, impedance and loss. It can also be used to characterize and tune filters. It is a very useful tool to have if you are building

Cloudflare, Google Chrome, and Firefox add HTTP/3 support | ZDNet

https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloudflare-google-chrome-and-firefox-add-http3-support/ By default, classic HTTP (a layer 7 protocol) uses TCP (a layer 4 protocol) as it’s base. To solve speed issues with TCP and encryption with it, Google created SPDY, a protocol that fixed some of TCP’s problems. HTTP-over-SPDY protocol eventually became the official HTTP/2, which is now used on around 40% of all

Micro Bit case

The Micro Bit is an open source hardware ARM-based embedded system designed by the BBC for use in computer education for use in UK. It’s use has spread to many other countries as well. It is a quite nice Bluetooth IoT experimenting platform with low barrier of entry to programming. I have few years ago

Discrete component Pong game

This is nuts old-school hardware hacking reported at https://blog.hackster.io/video-pong-made-with-all-discrete-components-cbffe6a2721d and https://hackaday.com/2019/09/17/building-video-pong-with-discrete-components/. It seems that this was a slightly masochistic undertaking. The trick is that this classic video game is made out of discrete components — it is 100% IC free. I like the beauty of it’s complex wiring! Look at the video of it: There is

Component tester case

I had earlier built Original Hiland DIY M12864 Graphics Version LCR ESR PWM Transistor Tester Kit and used it successfully. The kit worked well, but on longer term use I felt that the lack of proper case for it was sometimes annoying. I had some time though if making my own case, but it felt

Replacing electrolytic capacitors

I had one Elisa viihde base WLAN station + ADSL modem that was unreliable. I had earlier done tear-down of it that I posted to this blog. Now it is time to try to fix it, because it was making whining noise and was a bit unreliable as WLAN base station. So it looks like