Kid-cam firmware modding

I got a camera for my kid. I didn't like the firmware, so I reverse engineered the thing and changed it.

Kid-cam firmware modding

I got a camera for my kid. I didn't like the firmware, so I reverse engineered the thing and changed it.

Converting hot dog plasma video to sound with OpenCV

When you ground a hot dog to an AM radio tower, it generates plasma.

While the hot dog's flesh is getting vaporized, a tiny plasma arc moves the air around it back and forth. And because this tower is an AM tower, it uses Amplitude Modulation, where a transmitter changes the amplitude of a carrier wave up and down. Just like a speaker cone moving up and down, the plasma arc from the hot dog turns that modulation into audible sound.

Тетрод, пентод — зачем триоду дополнительные сетки?

Подбираясь к изготовлению самодельного триода, не худо бы точнее разъяснить назначение и работу его электродов. Его и ближайших родственников — приёмно‑усилительных ламп (ПУЛ) с двумя (тетроды), и тремя (пентоды) сетками. Заодно, мы с тобой, дорогой читатель, окунёмся в техническую историю, выясним, что это за гиперболоид — «лампа лучевая», припомним несколько тупиковых ветвей в развитии электронных ламп. Итак, чем же вакуумный триод не устраивала одна культурная управляющая сетка и зачем ему потребовалось больше?

Оживляем самый массовый карточный таксофон двухтысячных

Приветствую всех!
Эпоха фрикинга таксофонов в России безвозвратно ушла. Все оставшиеся аппараты переведены на бесплатное обслуживание, а карты оплаты давным-давно упразднены. Но что, если сейчас раздобыть такой аппарат и попробовать запустить его в домашних условиях? Именно этим мы сегодня и займёмся.

Итак, сегодня мы разберём один из самых массовых отечественных таксофонов и посмотрим на его устройство. Узнаем, какие методы защиты в нём имеются, полазим по сервисному меню и, конечно, попробуем подключить его к линии и позвонить. Как водится, будет много интересного.

It's not that hard to stop a Trane

Six years ago, I replaced the old HVAC system that came with our house, a central forced air system installed in 19951.

The new system is a Trane XR AC paired with an S9V2 96% efficiency forced-air gas furnace. And it ran great! Better efficiency, quieter, multiple fan speeds so I can circulate air and prevent stale air in some parts of the house... what's not to love?

Well, apparently the engineering:

E-book Bellows

[Concept] Dynamically deflatable

Bauble

The Bauble is a spherical festive decoration with 16 coloured LEDs that you can program to flash in different patterns:

The Bauble is a flashing decoration based on an AVR32DD28
that can display a variety of patterns.

It consists of two identical circular PCBs that slot together to create a three dimensional circuit; each PCB contains eight LEDs of four different colours, and one of the PCBs houses the microcontroller and battery, 

The Bauble started with the idea of creating a three-dimensional circuit by combining PCBs. It is constructed from two copies of the same circular PCB that slot together:

The two boards...

Receiving WWVB with HackRF Pro

We advertise 100 kHz as the lower edge of HackRF Pro’s operating frequency range, but that isn’t a hard limit. While working on the design, I realized that it should work fairly well to pick up longwave time signals such as WWVB, broadcast at 60 kHz from Colorado, USA.

WWVB provides a stable frequency reference and time code. If you have a radio-controlled clock in North America, it probably uses the signal from WWVB to maintain the correct time. WWVB can also be used to discipline a laboratory frequency standard, eliminating the need for a local atomic clock in many cases.

The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC

The Arduino Uno Q is... a weird board. It's the first product born out of Qualcomm's buyout of Arduino.

It's like if you married an Intel CPU, and a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller—oh wait, Radxa's X4 did that.

Arduino even tried it before with their old Yún board, which had Linux running on a MIPS CPU, married to an ATmega microcontroller.

The Uno Q isn't quite a Raspberry Pi, but it looks like one when you squint at it. And it's not quite an Uno, but it does a pretty good job masquerading as that, too.