A surprising IC in a LED light chain.

LED-based festive decorations are a fascinating subject for exploration of ingenuity in low-cost electronics. New products appear every year and often very surprising technology approaches are used to achieve some differentiation while adding minimal cost.

This year, there wasn’t any fancy new controller, but I was surprised how much the cost of simple light strings was reduced. The LED string above includes a small box with batteries and came in a set of ten for less than $2 shipped, so <$0.20 each. While I may have benefitted from promotional pricing, it is also clear that quite some work went...

Пасхалка в Eagle

Eagle (если вдруг кто не знает), это CAD для проектирования печатных плат, разработанный компанией CadSoft Computer GmbH, и впоследствии перекупленный и убитый компанией Autodesk.

Исследуя внутренности исполняемого файла Eagle под MacOSX, обнаружил, что даннае программа должна содержать в себе "пасхалку", запускаемую из редактора печатных плат. Какой-то информации на эту тему не удалось обнаружить в интернетах. Однако, всё оказалось очень просто - достаточно ввести команду "snake" в командной строке (что находится в верхней части окна), причём, делать это надо именно в редакторе плат, и вуаля.

Видим игровое поле, постоенное из контуров печатной платы. После...

Antenna diodes in the Pentium processor

I was studying the silicon die of the Pentium processor and noticed some puzzling structures where signal lines were connected to the silicon substrate for no apparent reason. Two examples are in the photo below, where the metal wiring (orange) connects to small square regions of doped silicon (gray), isolated from the rest of the circuitry. I did some investigation and learned that these structures are "antenna diodes," special diodes that protect the circuitry from damage during manufacturing. In this blog post, I discuss the construction of the Pentium and explain how these antenna diodes work.

November Update: Something Borrowed Something New

This month we are announcing a couple of new products including a SBC and a successor to the PineCube. We have updates to share about the PineNote and the PineDio USB adapter this month along with a talk by one of our community members Dsimic.

Introducing the Bantam Tools ArtFrame™

The plotter adventure continues at Bantam Tools!

Bantam Tools proudly announces the launch of the new Bantam Tools ArtFrame Art Machine System—designed for professional artists to create physical art from digital designs with traditional materials.

Key Features:

The Bantam Tools ArtFrame prototypes created thousands of drawings at the Whitney Museum of...

Hacking Wowme U300Q Car Camera to Actually Work

I recently came across a Wowme U300Q car camera on an auction at aukro.cz . At first glance, it seemed like a promising piece of tech, but after trying to use it, I quickly realized there was a major flaw—it didn’t rotate recorded files and it was not just an issue with my piece, also reviews confirmed it as a global problem. For anyone familiar with dash cams, this is a critical issue because, without rotating files, the camera quickly runs out of storage and stops recording.

When I first set up the Wowme U300Q, I...

Reverse-engineering a VNA ECal Interface With Cynthion

Recently I’ve been working on a little reverse-engineering project, hoping to make some of my electronics test equipment more convenient to use.

Often when doing reverse-engineering, a general strategy that I follow is to make (informed) guesses about how something might work and then I go looking for ways to prove that right or wrong. In this project, Cynthion was really useful for that process as I could use it to emulate part of the target system, so that I could quickly and easily test out theories about the protocol.

This write-up goes over some of the progress I’ve made so far and...

Азотный лазер большой мощности: так ли он прост?

Несколько лет назад я отвлекся на другие проекты, которые не связаны с основным моим увлечением — старыми газовыми лазерами. Я бы и дальше откладывал возвращение к ним, если бы не предложение, от которого грех было отказываться — выполнить ремонт азотного лазера ЛГИ505.
В этой статье будут частично повторяться материалы из статьи про азотные лазеры продольного разряда, но также она дополнена массой новых данных. Я детально опишу, с чем довелось столкнуться в процессе выполнения этого заказа и развею бытующие среди любителей представления, что азотный лазер толерантно относится к уровню его конструктивного исполнения. Среди таких любителей был и я, потому полученные в...

Neural Network Visualization

Going along with implementing a very size optimized neural network on a 3 cent microcontroller I created an interactive simulation of a similar network.

You can draw figures on a 8×8 pixel grid and view how the activations propagate through the multi-layer perception network to classify the image into 4 or 10 different numbers. You can find the visualizer online here.

Amazingly, the accuracy is still quite acceptable, even though this network (2 hidden layers with 10 neurons) is even simpler than the one implemented in the 3 cent MCU (3 hidden layers with 16 neurons). One change...

On Linux MAINTAINERS file removal of Russian developers

I sincerely regret to see Linux kernel patches like this one removing Russian developers from the MAINTAINERS file. To me, it is a sign or maybe even a symbol of how far the Linux kernel developer community I remember from ~ 20 years ago has changed, and how much it has alienated itself from what I remember back in the day.

In my opinion this commit is wrong at so many different levels:

it is intransparent. Initially it gave no explanation whatsoever (other than some compliance hand-waving). There was some follow-up paraphrasing one paragraph of presumed legal advice that was given presumably by Linux...