Analog and Digital, Notes and Thoughts
I was pretty surprised to find Silver Thristles / Silberdisteln in the Fröttmaninger Heide (at the northern part of Munich). They are pretty common in the alps but I did not expect them directly in Munich…
I’ve started to rework my Raspberry Pi ‘dial-up’ interface. Instead of just handling my external VPN and SSH connections I’ve extended it to also function as an intermediate file server and Git repository (both via NFS+SSH). I’ve also inserted the Raspberry Pi into a new case and added a 1 TB 2,5″ drive. I think it can handle additional load so I plan to extend its capabilities to also serve as a RetroPie console.
By the way: the case and the connector cable between the drive and the Pi are both from WD Labs. The hard drive is not a PiDrive but a refurbished USB 3.0 1 TB disk (it was a recertified My Passport Ultra) before I’ve dismantled it. For me it was cheaper that way. If you’re looking for a similar setup and need an additional power supply and SD card maybe you should think about buying a Nextcloud Box (free shipping; handled by WD). You might not need to use its ‘cloud’ functionality but still get all hardware I’ve previously mentioned which I think is a pretty good bargain.
I finally completed the free USB IR Toy v3 PCB I got over a year ago (May 2015) from Dangerous Prototypes.
It took so long because I had to order some of the parts from Digi-Key – and I wanted to wait until I’ve a longer list of parts to order.
I’ve used a PicKit 3 to program the PIC microcontroller. The trickiest part was finding the setting to power the USB IR Toy with the programmer. (I could have powered both devices via USB, but only had one appropriate cable at my hand at that time.)
So far I’ve only verified that the USB IR Toy is detected as serial device and shows its version number in a terminal window. It looks like the build was successful… 🙂
Today my kids impressed me by repurposing/hacking/misusing the toilet-occupied-light to send (morse-like) signals across a railway car. Their fingers were thin enough to press the micro-switches in the doors which normally would signal a locked door (i.e. occupied toilet). Not sure if someone noticed the strangely flashing lights… 😀
Last weekend I had to replace a 230 V fan (120 mm), a Sunon DP200A, that ‘smelled’ strange and also made strange noises. Better safe than sorry…
Well: I ordered a slightly less powerful Sunon DP201A (at Reichelt Elektronik) to replace the possibly dangerous fan. Although they look similar their connectors are completely different. So I’m now wondering if the first one (the DP200A) wasn’t an original fan at all…?
A few days ago I was able to get my fingers on, and under, an infrared camera. I had already heard before that the thermal signature of fingerprints is visible for quite some time — but what surprised me was that we were still able to see them for over a minute…
Continue reading “Thermal Imaging of Fingerprints — How to get your PIN from a Number Pad”
This short post is to document Sharp PC ROMs I’ve come across so far. I’ve used MD5 and SHA1 checksums to allow their comparison. It would be nice if you could notify me of any ROMs out there that do not match the ones documented here… In an earlier post I’ve described a simple way to dump the ROMs.
Feel free to contact me and provide me with ROM file I do not (yet) have in my collection. I will also try to make the ROM files available in the next weeks.
Half a year ago I’ve started to use KiCad for new PCB designs I’m working on. I already wanted to try out KiCad for quite some time. Its release 4.0 and the latest changes in EagleCAD (annoying ads and recently being bought by Autodesk) were enough pressure to switch. And what should I say: after dealing with the rather unhandy library management and some cryptic error messages I really now enjoy KiCads workflow.
This post is about my experience with the transition to KiCad as my new PCB designer. It is based on the newest version 4.0 of KiCad and its daily builds via the respective Ubuntu PPAs. Continue reading “I made it: I switched from Eagle to KiCad to make my PCB designs…”
