Самодельная лазерная установка «Lightsaber» — как это было, часть 1

Приветствую всех, в данной статье пойдет речь об одном из моих самых сложных проектов – самодельной установке с лазером на парах меди. Оговорюсь сразу, что проект выполнен успешно, доведен до полностью готового изделия и оправдывает то название, которое я ему дал. Я считаю нужным рассказать во всех подробностях, как он осуществлялся и с чем пришлось столкнуться на пути к его осуществлению. История создания установки довольно длинная, поэтому её придется разделить на несколько частей.
И ещё один небольшой дисклеймер: этот проект был осуществлен из-за моей большой любви к искусству получения лазерного излучения, во многом ради процесса его реализации, посему попрошу не задавать...

Crony Capital

There has been an increase in business behavior lately known as regulatory capture, where in principle, government agencies are intentionally and carefully corrupted to further private interests. More...

The Best Op-Amp in the World

Ever wonder what the best op-amp in the world is? Wonder no more, it is the IC01 Ideal Operational Amplifier! Good luck buying one — they seem to be having some lead time issues.

MPU-IMC Clone

Here’s another cloned card for your retro PC: may I present the MPU-IMC clone! (The what?)

It’s a clone of an old card that Roland made for interfacing PS/2 computers (MCA bus) with MIDI equipment like musical keyboards.

Files may be found at GitHub.

Don’t get too excited though because it’s not complete. Well, the board layout and schematic are fine, but there are two chips on the board that are special.

Crème Brûlée Camp

We decided to go big at Toorcamp this year and make a jar of crème brûlée for every single person that attended. Delicious? Yes. Too ambitious? Maybe. Open source? You got it.

Image via Patch Eudor

Harnessing the power of GreatFET, we were able to connect a temperature sensor, LCD screen, and some bucket heaters, and cook up a very large amount of crème brûlée inside an average sized cooler while at camp, and it worked… but there were some rough spots. The problem wasn’t necessarily in the cooking process, but in the preparation stage: the cooler was able to fit 120 4oz jars...

Comments on the Recent USTR Tariff Action

In September I made the following public comment on the Office of United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) Proposed Modification of Action Pursuant to Section 301: China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation.

Thank you for requesting comments on the proposed supplemental action in response to China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation (USTR-2018-0026).

As the founder and owner of Great Scott Gadgets, a Colorado small business that puts open source tools into the hands of innovative people, I urge you to refrain entirely from imposing any new duty increases. Additionally...

Fernvale Kits - Lack of Interest - Discount

Back in December 2014 at 31C3, bunnie and xobs presented about their exciting Fernvale project, how they reverse engineered parts of the MT6260 ARM SoC, which also happens to contain a Mediatek GSM baseband.

Thousands (at least hundreds) of people have seen that talk live. To date, 2506 people (or AIs?) have watched the recordings on youtube, 4859 more people on media.ccc.de.

Given that Fernvale was the closest you could get to having a hackable baseband processor / phone chip, I expected at least as much interest into this project as we received four years earlier with OsmocomBB.

As a result, in early 2015, sysmocom decided to order 50...

ESP8266 Home Automation Projects - Errata

After the ESP8266 Home Automation Projects book was published, the wunderground.com service is not offering free services anymore, so the code presented in the Getting data from the internet part need to be reviewed.
There are two options in here: either you are subscribing to the wunderground.com service, paying a monthly subscription or you can choose other provider like OpenWeatherMap.org
Go to openweathermap.org an create an account. After login you will find your own API Key that will be used later in the code.
Now the code for getting current data is:
#include <ESP8266WiFi.h>
#include <ESP8266HTTPClient.h>
const char* ssid = "YOUR_WIFI_SSID";
const char* password = "YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD";
const String OPENWEATHERMAP_API_KEY =...

Wireshark dissector for 3GPP CBSP - traces wanted!

I recently was reading 3GPP TS 48.049, the specification for the CBSP (Cell Broadcast Service Protocol), which is the protocol between the BSC (Base Station Controller) and the CBC (Cell Broadcast Centre). It is how the CBC according to spec is instructing the BSCs to broadcast the various cell broadcast messages to their respective geographic scope.

While OsmoBTS and OsmoBSC do have support for SMSCB on the CBCH, there is no real interface in OsmoBSC yet on how any external application would instruct it tot send cell broadcasts. The only existing interface is a VTY command, which is nice for testing and development, but hardly a scalable...

Seamonkey's gradual showdown

Finding and testing alternative web browsers and email clients to Seamonkey. An in-depth critique of Firefox, Thunderbird and many more.