Author Archive

Gadget Freak of the Year

Design News and Allied Electronics are looking to crown its first-ever Gadget Freak of the Year. Reader Vote: Gadget Freak of the Year article has four videos of interesting hardware hacking projects. You can vote what you think is the best.

The Data Factory

You’re the product, but when you’re sold, it’s only a lucky few who get rich. The Data Factory – How Your Free Labor Lets Tech Giants Grow The Wealth Gap article tells that technology lets big companies distribute tools that turn us into volunteers who contribute our time and data while they profit. It wasn’t

Rescue sheet for your car

Cars have become safer and safer, but still they crash too often. The increasingly safety design of vehicles presents rescuers with a serious challenge. On-board rescue sheet article tells that in particular, removing car roofs is becoming more and more problematic. Faced with high-strength steel and body reinforcements, even the most powerful cutters reach their

Build your own metal detector

Build your own metal detector article mentions a pretty interesting Diy Arduino based metal detector. The article starts with with an explanation of how most oscillator based metal detectors work. Most metal detectors uses a search coil that act as part of an oscillator circuit. When metal is put in proximity of the search coil

HOLMImpulse measures Bode plot

I have searched for some time a suitable software (preferably free) that allows me to measure Bode plot of electronics circuits. There are commercial software, special hardware and special instruments for that (network analyzer can usually do that on radio frequencies), but I wanted something that uses the hardware I already has. After some searching

Arduino and ultrasound distance sensor

I bought some time ago HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Sensor Distance Measuring Module to play with ultrasound distance measurements with Arduino Duemilanove 2009 Atmega 328P SCM Board. The working principle of the HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Sensor Distance Measuring Module when the module get trigger “start” pulse, it sends eight 40khz square wave pulses and automatically detect whether receive

SerialChart

Serialchart is an open source application for charting data sent via RS-232 port in real time. It runs on Windows. It is very suitable for a microcontroller (Arduino) project to graph the incoming data to screen. The incoming data should be in CSV format, with each point on a separate line. After some short tests

MIDI turned 30

I just noticed that MIDI turned 30 years ago just a short time ago. This 31.25kbd 10-bit, 16-channel network is still very much in use today, 30 years after its official 1.0 specification release in August 1983. I forgot to say “Happy Birthday MIDI” at the right day. The Register had an article series on

Microsoft to buy Nokia's phone business

Stephen Elop’s task on turning Nokia Mobile phones business to Microsoft compatible has come to end: Microsoft Corporation and Nokia Corporation today announced that the Boards of Directors for both companies have decided to enter into a transaction whereby Microsoft will purchase substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business, license Nokia’s patents, and license