ePanorama.net

All about electronics and circuit design

LED usage increases quickly

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.

Circuit board material uses

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,

Ruggeduino

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

Keylogging using smartphone motion sensor

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,

USB phone charging a security risk?

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

Bad electrolytics now in my PC

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.

Enable Save Tabs on Exit for Firefox

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

PC 30 years old today

August 12 marks the 30th anniversary of the IBM Personal Computer. IBM released it’s first PC August 12 1981. One of the designers of PC Mark Dean blog that IBM leads the way in the post PC era. Note that IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling our PC division to