Thursday, August 4th, 2016
Mare writes: Here is my solution to this problem. First clamp the Ic to vise or ask your wife to hold the tweezers with the chip Next, use your sharpest soldering tip and apply some solder to the pads. Please keep in mind the chip has 0,5mm raster between pads....Tags: tips and tricks
Posted in techniques | 3 Comments »
Saturday, July 23rd, 2016
Vasily Ivanenko writes: In numerous RF synthesizer chips lies an inverter with input and output pins for making a reference crystal oscillator clock. I built some discrete chip inverter xtal oscillators with 74HC series logic gates to better examine them. You'll quickly recognize the oft-used Pierce oscillator topology with 1...Tags: Inverter crystal oscillator, tips
Posted in techniques | 1 Comment »
Thursday, May 26th, 2016
Paulo has developed a free RC snubber calculator, an Excel-based calculator eases the design of RC snubbers in power switching applications: In power switching applications, a designer often has to contend with spurious oscillations. These are the result of parasitic capacitances and inductance on the board and behave like the...Tags: calculator, RC snubber
Posted in techniques | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 16th, 2016
Jarrett has written an article describing a technique of using Altium for a DirtyPCBs order: This is a pretty rare combo: using a premium PCB package with the budget board house. Kinda funny. Generally these small run PCB houses provide DRU and CAM files for EAGLE design rule checking and...Tags: Altium, how-to, tips
Posted in DirtyPCBs.com, techniques | No Comments »
Friday, February 26th, 2016
Sjaak shared some tips when sending PCBs to the fab house: I usually collect a few PCB designs before sending them off to the PCB fabhouse. I prefer to use dirtypcbs.com as I know Ian from dangerousprototypes.com for a long time and think he provides good quality, and fast turn...Tags: pcb, Tips & Tricks
Posted in PCBs, techniques | 10 Comments »
Thursday, December 31st, 2015
Ken Shirriff has written an article describing a technique he used for making high resolution integrated circuit die photos: Have you ever wanted to take a bunch of photos of an integrated circuit die and combine them into a high-res image? The stitching software can be difficult, so I've written...Tags: integrated circuit die, tips
Posted in how-to, techniques | 2 Comments »
Thursday, January 1st, 2015
According to AMSAT-UK, "a new paper has been released by Dr David Morgan 2W0CXV on using the RTL2841 DVB TV Dongle as a SDR processor with SpectrumLab. The paper 'Techniques for using the RTL Dongle for Detecting Meteors' covers the setting up and use of the dongle to receive meteor...Tags: amateur radio, AMSAT-UK, meteor detection, RTL-SDR dongle, SDRSharp
Posted in SDR, site, techniques | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 26th, 2014
Ever wonder what data is being sent out by your Android device? Here's a post from LinuxJournal outlining how to monitor your device's WiFi traffic. The technique involves setting up a man-in-the-middle Wireless Access Point (WAP) on your Ubuntu Linux box, then connecting your Android device via WiFi to this...Tags: packet sniffer, traffic analysis, Wireshark
Posted in Android, Linux, security, software, techniques | No Comments »
Thursday, May 29th, 2014
Martin Kumm writes: This page provides documents about a cheap SMD solder station built as an Arduino shield (Arduino UNO). It supports active soldering tips from Weller (RT series) which contain the heating element as well as a sensor and provides a standard 3.5 mm jack. Together with the corresponding...Tags: Arduino, SMD, soldering
Posted in techniques, tools | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 30th, 2014
Courtney Lancaster gave this talk at Shmoocon 2014 outlining the types of information available from vehicle infotainment systems "This talk will take an in-depth look at infotainment technologies and how to forensically acquire the data associated with the functionalities that exist across various manufacturers. Furthermore, we will cover the challenges...Tags: automotive data, infotainment, Shmoocon, vehicle data forensics
Posted in security, techniques, Videos | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2014
[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjOxhnDGb9k[/embed] boldport has written an article describing a technique he’s used for removing the header cleanly: Know that sinking feeling after realising that you've soldered that 40-pin header on the wrong side of the board? I've come up with a technique that works for me for removing the header cleanly and...Tags: desoldering, pin header
Posted in how-to, techniques | 3 Comments »
Monday, December 9th, 2013
Petros Koutoupis at Linux Journal posted detailed information regarding hard drive caching techniques. Users of traditional hard drives who've been considering a switch to a solid state drive (SSD) should find this particularly interesting. Petros describes, Even today, the consumer SSD cannot compare to the capacities provided by the magnetic...Tags: caching, hard drive, SSD
Posted in Linux, techniques | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 29th, 2013
At last year's Blackhat Europe con, Philip A. Polstra, Sr. from the University of Dubuque gave a presentation detailing how to protect your USB security drive toolkit from auto erasure by the target machine. He describes the design of an open source USB flash drive write blocker based on the...Tags: Blackhat Europe 2012, forensic tools, USB write blocker
Posted in open source, security, techniques, USB | No Comments »
Thursday, October 3rd, 2013
In this presentation from the iSEC Open Security Forum, September 12, 2013 in Palo Alto, CA, Balint Seeber, Applications Engineer and SDR Evangelist / Ettus Research, provides an introduction on how to analyze and hack RF communications systems using open source software and cheap radio hardware. He describes, "The focus...Tags: Balint Seeber, iSEC
Posted in RF, SDR, techniques, Videos, wireless | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 7th, 2013
Travis Goodspeed has been experimenting with remote satellite tracking over the internet. His setup uses a satellite dish originally used with a mobile earth station on maritime vessels. Movement of the dish is accomplished with servos and an EiBotBoard" wired into a BeagleBone. Travis describes further, "My initial build using...Tags: BeagleBone, RTL-SDR, satellite tracking
Posted in SDR, techniques | 1 Comment »
Monday, June 3rd, 2013
Vinod has been experimenting with mounting an SD/MMC card connected to the parallel port of his Linux desktop machine. He recounts, "For the last few days I was engaged on a mad project; I was trying to access as SD card directly via parallel port of my desktop PC with...Tags: parallel port interface, SD/MMC
Posted in code, how-to, Linux, techniques | No Comments »
Sunday, May 5th, 2013
Ryan Fanelli and David Hartino, students in Cornell University's Electrical and Computer Engineering program, have written a detailed explanation of their ATmega 644 based VGA adapter. The pair developed this "homemade video card" as their final project in the program, pushing the envelope on MCU clock cycle optimization using only...Tags: ATMega 644, VGA
Posted in AVR, project logs, techniques, tutorials | 1 Comment »
Monday, April 22nd, 2013
Andre shares this short article on how to make homebrew solder paste stencils from 0.1mm brass plates. Via the contact form.Tags: SMT stencil, soldering
Posted in skills, techniques | No Comments »
Friday, March 29th, 2013
Paulo shared an Excel-based transistor amplifier calculator. 'Besides the basic gain and biasing calculations many others implement, this calculator can also estimate noise which is a bit more involved': ..Because this is a circuit I use frequently, I decided to make an Excel spreadsheet to ease the calculations. The spreadsheet...Tags: amplifier, calculator, transistor
Posted in techniques | 7 Comments »
Monday, March 25th, 2013
[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j7qxM8EN4M [/embed] Tips & tricks to sort and rework surface mount devices (SMD): I’m a member of the Superstition Amateur Radio Club (SARC) and each month we have a presentation on a ham radio related subject. I volunteered to record and upload the club’s monthly presentations. There were two presentations...Tags: SMD, tips
Posted in how-to, techniques | 12 Comments »
