Electronics

I was reading up on the life expectancy of different building materials when I came across this gem.

Binner Makes Workshop Parts Organization Easy

You can do all sorts of nifty things when you're designing silicon. Including this abomination.

FR2 is the brownish material that many cheap circuit boards are made of. It's a mixture of phenolic resin and paper. Apparently it's quite useful to make gears out of:

Two different sizes shown. Each has two inductors (grey bits) stuck to a capacitor (middle) with some metal end caps acting as terminals. There is a third terminal underneath the capacitor. Grid in background is 1mm, pics stolen from LCSC.

This is UV sensitive solder mask resin, applied as thin as possible using a silk screen mesh. Afterwards it's heated at about 90C for 10 minutes. This makes it more sensitive to UV light by evaporating most of the solvent.

The thickness of the board beneath it gives deceptive scale. It's about 50mm tall and the toroid is 85mm in diameter.

A open source home automation mobile robot arm!

4 bit adder. Took me a few evenings this week to put together. Im quite happy that it worked first try without any bugs. Constructive criticism is encouraged.

This was my first try developing my own pcb with the toner transfer method. I did this project many years back but it works perfectly to this day.

We maintain a small fleet of RTK GPS systems (Emlid Reach RS+ units or similar). But sometimes they sit too long on the shelf and parasitic drain kicks in. The manufacturer recommends recharging every three months, but ooops, this one went too long. If the batteries are too low, the battery management system (BMS) won't charge the batteries at all when you attach the USB charger cable. In this case, the batteries were testing at 0.9V rather than the desired 3.4V.

Instrument is a Geonics EM16 VLF receiver, using in the mineral exploration industry to find buried linear conductors.

I got my hands on some really weird EL panels and did a little dive into how they work. I still have no idea where to get more but I think they may be DIY-able.

Built out my ploopy mouse today, it's been sitting on my shelf for a while. I got the self-assembly kit, had to solder on one through hole component.

A shortwave radio receiver from scratch using only cheap and easily available components, i.e. standard transistors, op-amps and 74xx logic chips. No typical radio parts – no coils, no variable capacitors, no exotic diodes.

Are you an engineer working on designing complex modern chips or System On Chips (SOCs) at the Register Transfer Level (RTL)? Have you ever been in one of the following frustrating situations?

Other side:

I picked this little scope up from the Seapac swap meet a week and a half ago for $3. It turns out that all it needed was some contact cleaner to get it working again.

A banger video about applying sintered traces to 3d printed models... BUT more interesting then that is the use of ChatGPT to "exfiltrate" unpublished formulas for the cooper plating solution.

This decade old electric cooler box gave up the ghost around 2 years ago, with the indoor outlet plug no longer working. The independent 12v input was still operational, so I kept it with the intention of *eventually* fixing it...

I've been in need of a bench supply for a while, up to this point I've been using little buck/boost boards with a multimeter to get the voltage I want when working on a project. The limitations of that started to show though, so I was after a more ideal solution.

Would anyone like to chime in. I recently made an MOT spot welder for 18650 nickel strips. I can reliably weld 0.2mm nickel. Although I do need a slit if I'm doing nickel <--> nickel (stacking for more amps).

Not my post/video. Link to mastodon.social post which then links to YouTube video.

As solder bump pitches shrink, several issues arise. Reduced bump height and surface area for bonding make it increasingly difficult to establish reliable electrical connections, necessitating precise manufacturing processes to avoid errors. Critical co-planarity and surface roughness become paramount, as even minor irregularities can compromise successful bonding.

Although you are probably not aware of them, dozens of electronic control units (ECUs) — printed circuit boards (PCBs) in metal or plastic housings — exist in your car to control and monitor the operation and safety of your vehicle’s many control systems. These units must work for the lifetime of your car, during which time they are subjected to many heating and cooling cycles. The most obvious cycle occurs when you start your car after it has cooled at night. It heats up as the car runs and then cools again when you shut it off. That’s one “ambient” temperature cycle.

Compared with traditional monolithic devices, the design and manufacturing process for chiplets is significantly different. The scrap costs associated with manufacturing traditional monolithic semiconductor devices is basically linear, including single chip cost, packaging, and assembly costs.

Many volume applications use FPGA because they need in-field reconfigurability (changing standards, changing algorithms, etc) but they want to improve their system’s competitiveness (power, size, cost). FPGAs are bulky, expensive and power hungry. Integrating eFPGA can greatly improve the economics while maintaining full reconfigurability and performance.

Topics covered in this informative video: potentiometer, electrical engineering, basic electronics, what is a resistor, resistors in series, variable resistor, power electronics, current limiting, Carbon film, carbon composite, Metal film, Potentiometer, Thermistor, RTD, LDR, Light dependant resistor, SMD, rheostat and much much more.

Using Intel CPU JTAG to dump the secret bootrom in Microsoft's original Xbox. Disclaimer: not my blog.

A simulation based on maxwell's equations and ohms law of a very long circuit, demonstrating how current can seem to travel faster then light.

High school is finally over! That being said, having chosen a technical school, I, like others, was asked to create a project to be shown during the oral interview with the exam commission. This post is meant to be sort of a postmortem for it. Now, my goal was to create some sort of PLC, capable of controlling high power loads. The plan was to make a switch mode power supply in order to power a microcontroller. With it, I would read and execute commands from a line terminal, such as turning on and off the relays that would control the HV loads. For the relays, I chose to build some solid state ones using TRIACs. My main goal was also to demonstrate how it was possible to use custom PCBs to make it all happen. Yes, I was the first one at school to "discover" the existence of JLCPCB and PCBWay (I've used the latter for the final product). Gone were the days of using our CNC milling machine (which, in its current state, can't make tracks smaller than 1.5mm!) or chemicals. During this time, I also wanted to help all others with their projects (suggesting them to also make custom PCBs). Issues didn't take long to appear while designing the circuits. Initially, I was using an RX140 board from Renesas as the main brain of the thing. Now, ignoring the fact I absolutely hated the IDE Renesas gave me (it's based on eclipse, and it was tedious to use), that board died while I was casually using the debugger. I mean, that board had ESD warnings all over, but holy f**k, I even placed it on an antistatic surface. Frustrated with the slow process known as programming for a Renesas product, I have instead chosen to use an STM32 based board, and oh boy it was a good choice to make. Of course, I had to rewrite a lot of code, but I think it was all worth with. The solid state relay board didn't give me many issues, and I was happy about it. And then... I had to make the SMPS. God. I was lucky enough to use a commercial transformer from wurth Elektronik and to find out that the initial prototype worked well. However, when the first PCBs arrived, we discovered that all prototypes kept blowing pretty violently. Eventually, after some testing, we found that the feedback loop was unstable. It used a TL431 and the only thing I can say is that, to make the board small, I made some... questionable choices with its layout. We eventually swapped it with a zener diode and everything worked well. The boards were designed using Altium designer and KiCad, and were uploaded on PCBWay for manufacturing. You can see the final flyback board on the image above. It uses an NCP1012AP10 controller (I know it's obsolete, but at this point I'm just relieved everything works), and I've tried to follow the recommended layout. The final boards arrived two weeks before the exams. Everything then went according to plan.

Succinct intuitive introduction to antenna theory.

Blog not mine. I'm just sharing.

I found this new video. Sounds interesting.. (even though i can't keep up)

Wanna reuse some old HDDs in the new PC as misc storage and I saw this on a really old drive (the PC it was pulled out of was built in I think 2008/9). Could the discoloration on E9 be because a capacitor leaked? The discoloration seems (from this side at least) to be fully contained on the circle and off of the rest of the PCB

I’m currently working on a more complex project that uses double sided assembly (and a weird USB-C connector). To practice these things a little, I ordered some low cost boards to get used to that connector and explore double sided reflow (which seems easier than I expected).

I highly recommend Ben Eater's channel. He's a good teacher, took his time and dedicated months to build quality content in video format, which is a rarity on Youtube these days.

Not my video, but a helpful one. If anyone has a lead on a starter oscilloscope, please let me know.