SMD stands for Surface Mount Device and they are components that you solder on the surface of a circuit board.Soldering them is somewhat different from soldering “traditional” through hole mounted components. There are many SMD soldering tutorials, for example How To Do SMD Soldering Using a Soldering Iron and Sparkfun Surface Mount Soldering Tutorials. Youtube →
I have earlier posted about soldering irons. Here is a continuation to it with a set of interesting soldering iron tear-down and DIY videos from YouTube. Inside the cheapest soldering iron on ebay. How To Make a MINI USB Power Soldering Iron Hot! Hot! Hot! Weller ROBUST Soldering Gun, BEB #21 Homemade Soldering Gun How →
I have earlier written about USB soldering iron and DIY USB soldering iron. The question is that how useful they are because of the limited power available from USB port (just few watts). The maximum power you can get from normal USB 2.0 port is only 2.5W (5V 500mA), but some special “charge” USB ports →
I have played with software defined radio using cheap DVB-T stick for some time. Receiving radio transmissions is interesting, but it works also for other applications. By reading RTL-SDR Tutorial: Measuring filter characteristics and antenna VSWR with an RTL-SDR and noise source article I understood that I could use my RTL-SDR stick for many RF →
Solderless breadboards are one of the most fundamental pieces when learning how to build circuits and prototyping simple circuits. A breadboard is a construction base for prototyping of electronics. Breadboard are the ideal way to check out small bits of circuitry that you’re not sure about. Originally it was literally a bread board, a polished →
RF attenuators are a universal building block within the RF design arena. I neeeded some RF attenuators for my electronics lab. I found this cheap product DC-4.0GHz RF Fixed Attenuator from Banggood. They seemed to have pretty good specfications and features considering that the price is just slightly over 7 Euros for three attenuators: Frequency →
https://opensource.com/article/16/12/notepad-text-editor?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY Question “Vim or GNU Emacs?” From those my answer is Emacs. But more and more I use other editors. One of my favourites on Windows is Notepad++. Notepad++ is easy to install, licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL), and the source is available on GitHub. If you’re comfortable with Windows Notepad or WordPad, the Notepad++ interface will be →
Few days ago I read The remarkable evolution of modern fiber-optic connector inspection probes article tells about the current state of fiber inspection. Especially with multifiber connectors such as MPO, MT, and MXC microscopic connector endface dirt and debris cause light reflections and attenuation – the enemies of optimal optical signal transmission. Thankfully there now →
I have written earlier about Low-Cost Logic Analyzers – and mentioned there Saleae and USBee. I was looking yesterday situation on USBee product because I had potential need for device that had possibility to play back recorded signals. When I landed to USBee web page, I noticed the following announcement (that had been there for →
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/all-aboard-/4458627/Home-reflow-sees-the-light?utm_content=bufferc24a7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer There are lots of claim to be workable solutions out there to reflowing boards at home – mostly involving kitchen appliances like toaster ovens and various sorts of hot plates and skillets. An interesting approach by David Sanz Kirbis uses a halogen shop or flood light as heat source and enclosure. More info: David’s project write-up Controller →