Archive for January 2022

Battery packs for power tools

The best part about cordless drills is well, they are cordless! The worst part of them is that they have limited battery life. There are different types of battery packs for different tools. There are different voltages and different capacities (mAh or Ah). The ampere-hours (labeled Ah) denote the maximum amount of charge the battery

Parkside X20V Team battery packs from LIDL

Parkside is the tool brand from the German supermarket chain LIDL. They offer very affordable tools. Parkside tools are aimed at DIYers. Many of their tools are rebrands of Scheppach. Many if the tools offer extremely good value for money and they are more than perfect for DIY’ers or if you just need the tool

Friday Art: Space Debris

Space Debris is a famous Amiga mod composed back in 1991. This is a short story about how the composer made the song, and what it was like to make music on the Amiga at the time. If you don’t know what “Amiga” or “mods” are, no worries, just read on at https://markuskaarlonen.com/space-debris Listen to

Arduino’s Open Source Report

Arduino’s Latest Open Source Report Highlights Major Growth, Community Contributions https://www.hackster.io/news/arduino-s-latest-open-source-report-highlights-major-growth-community-contributions-08945cdbf400 New boards, new software, and a 25 percent boost in community-provided libraries among the highlights from Arduino’s 2021. The full report is now available for download from the Arduino website at https://blog.arduino.cc/2022/01/13/the-2021-arduino-open-source-report-is-out/

What engineers were watching in 2021

While the world’s chip shortage dominated the 2021 headlines, the semiconductor industry blazed new trails with the increased electrification of cars, focused AI applications, improving power/performance, better utilization of data deluges, dealing with design challenges in advanced nodes and much more focus on chip security. Semiconductor Engineering’s Tech Talks reflected these focus areas. Semiconductor Engineering’s

Audio and video trends 2022

There’s no doubt that the audio visual industry has proven its ability to survive and thrive in trying times. Global events have facilitated the rapid evolution of audio visual technologies, and these only continue to advance. Here are some audio visual trends for 2022 collected from many sources (click the link colored to text to

USB cable with light effect teardown

Cheap usb cable with light effect did not work reliably anymore (short service life cheap Chinese crap) so it is teardown time. Let’s open Inside I see three LEDs and plastic fiber optic cables connected to those LEDs. Those fiber optic cables are here not for fast data transfer fiber optic is usually known for.

The shocking power supplies

Transformerless power supplies are showing up a lot, especially in inexpensive products where the cost of a transformer would add significantly to the BOM. But transformerless power supplies are a double-edged sword. You can get yourself easily electrocuted if you don’t understand them and take proper safety precautions. Poking around in a transformerless-powered device can

Millenium DI-E teardown

Millenium DI-E is a DI Box. It is pretty much the cheapest (around 12 Euros) DI box you can find that still does it’s job acceptably. The unit is passive and has ground and ground lift. IT allows you to select to use the input with either an instrument or speaker level signal. Here is

Friday Fun: thirsty mixers

The mixers in question are Panasonic WJ-MX50 Video Mixers. The picture was taken on Assembly Computer festival many years ago. The beer and cider taps were not operational when the place was used as video control room. The two video mixers were used in the application because one was producing material to the projection screen