Have you ever designed an electronic schematic then wanted to share it on your blog? Or wanted help improving your circuit on a forum? Ever peered at a tiny/massive image of a circuit on a website and wondered why on earth there wasn’t a better alternative? I have done that quite often. CircuitBee is a →
As system speeds increase and designs shrink, circuit designers increasingly must debug signal integrity problems. Debugging common digital problems with a scope article tells how to effectively use your high speed oscilloscope to debug modern digital circuits. The ideal digital signal has fast transitions and only two states: high and low. In the real world, →
Lighting apps boost LED usage article says that in in 2011, DisplaySearch predicts global LED capacity will reach 180 billion units, and by 2013 will reach 227 billion. The total average LED penetration in lighting was 1.4% in 2010 and is forecast to reach 9.3% in 2014. →
What else can you do with our ubiquitous PC-board material? We’re all familiar with printed circuit board material, also called PC board or PCB. The most common type is FR-4, with glass-epoxy substrate (see here), but there are other materials available, such as low-cost, easily punchable phenolic. FR4 is a strong, stiff, hard-to cut, tool-dulling, →
There are many Arduino-compatible microcontroller boards nowadays. The Ruggeduino is a ruggedized Arduino-compatible microcontroller board. Features include overcurrent and overvoltage protection on all I/O pins and 5V/3.3V outputs, ESD protection on all I/O pins and USB port, total microcontroller overcurrent protection, and operation at up to 24V. There are some things a regular Arduino will →
Researchers have studied keystroke inference based on side channels, such as sound, electromagnetic wave, and timing. Since these attacks exploit characteristics of physical keyboards, they become ineffective on smartphones with soft keyboards. Attacks using sensors on smartphone raises the awareness of privacy attacks on smartphone sensors. Besides the obvious privacy concern over the GPS sensor, →
Many modern cellular phone use USB plug for charging and many places offer nowadays charging possibility. But plugging your phone into an untrusted USB cable is, indeed, a security risk according to Juicejacking – an emergency phone charge can be a security risk article. The article fortunately tells that it’s easy to avoid the risk →
Why modern high tech electronics fail? Too often the reason for that is electrolytic capacitor failure. I have had a quite high number of electronics that has failed by this reason after few years of service. I have had a quite number of devices failed by capacitor: PC motherboard, PC graphics card, set-top-box, DVD player. →
I liked the Firefox option to save tabs on exit. Every time I exited Firefox 3.x, I simply click on the Save and Quit button when I am prompted “Do you want Firefox to save your tabs for the next time it starts?”. The next time I launch Firefox, all tabs are automatically opened. When →