Fluke 196B Handheld ScopeMeter repair

Teardown and repair of a Fluke 196B Handheld ScopeMeter:

In this episode Shahriar goes through the teardown and repair process of a Fluke 196B Handheld ScopeMeter. This unit, which has been purchased as a “dead” unit from eBay, is examined for faults. During the teardown, various PCB components, architecture and design is presented. The performance and functionality of the unit is verified with a few brief experiments. Finally, the schematic and block diagram of the Fluke 196B is explored for the finer details of its design and operation.

Via Hacked Gadgets.

Si4707 weather radio

015a55b39279f4682022bd666dbaf441bfa69e7f81

Charles has been working on a Si4707 weather band radio project:

Right now on the bench the PIC powers up, resets and powers up the radio, then tunes the radio via I2C to 162.55MHz. It finishes up by reading back the status and then dumps the Tuned Frequency and RSSI ( Received Signal Strength Indicator ) on to the LCD… then off to infinite loop land. In the next few days I plan on having my seven buttons for “quick tune” to the common frequencies (.40, 425, .45, etc..) and one additional monitor/standby switch. My radio will normally be silent and once it receives a weather alert it will un-mute the speaker and alert the LCD. The Standby/Monitor button will reset my alert.

Shenzhen workshop April 3-5, 2014

ShenzhenChina

Have you ever wanted to visit Shenzhen, home of the world’s largest electronics market? This year, just prior to the Shenzhen Maker Faire, join us for a soldering workshop and market tour for hardware hackers April 3-5, 2014.

The main event is a two day soldering course at Shenzhen’s cell phone repair school. They’ll teach us how to solder tiny QFN and BGA chips using minimal tools, just like the cell phone repair shops in the market.

We’ll also tour the Huaqiangbei electronics market with a group of pros who source tools and components there on a regular basis. Meet freight shippers as well as companies shipping cars cross country who can box your treasures and send them home at amazing prices. If you send us Gerbers and a BOM we’ll make your PCBs and try to locate suppliers of all the components.

Each day starts with a talk relevant to navigating the ins and outs of Shenzhen, covering essentials like how to bargain, what to eat, getting around, import/export logistics, and even finding a place to settle once the city hooks you in. During one session, a fascinating discussion unfolded around betting sites, a booming industry here with a rapidly evolving tech landscape and growing acceptance of crypto. The insights on how these platforms operate in regions with relaxed regulations were eye-opening, shedding light on unique opportunities and the risks involved. Each day then winds down with a group dinner at an authentic local spot, capturing the true flavors of the city.

Cost is yet to be determined, but a sample budget is:

  • Workshop cost: ~$250 (repair school, discussion rooms, goodies, PCBs)
  • Group hotel (Jie’en) 4 nights: ~$60-$100 (total)
  • Food: ~$25/day
  • Transportation: ~$10/day

If you’re interested in joining please comment below or hit us up via the contact form. We’ll be in touch with final details in about a week.

Registration is now open.

1 Week prior

Submit PCB gerber files and Bill of Materials

  • You’ll get 10 copies of the PCB on the first day of the workshop
  • We’ll make an effort to locate part sources during the market tour so PCBs can be completed before the end of the workshop
  • 2 layers, maximum 100mm x 100mm

Optional- DAY 0 (02/04/2014)

Optional day for early arrivals. See some cool non-electronics stuff that’s easily made in Shenzhen:

  • Tailors in Louhu Commercial City. Meet Jery and have a suit tailored and ready to pick up in a week for less than $200
  • Sign makers in Dongmen. Shenzhen’s biggest single source of glowing, blinking, molded, laser cut, and generally cool outdoor signage. A custom sign can be made in a week for $50 and up. Includes a trip to the Dongmen food street and soup dumpling man.

DAY 1 (03/04/2014)

Start with an introduction to Shenzhen and a tour through the Huaqiangbei electronics market. Get to know your fellow workshop hackers.

First day greeting 10am-12am
A light and simple welcome to help you navigate Shenzhen.

  • Simple language lesson
  • Neighborhood and food overview
  • Get a bank account
  • Quick subway map intro
  • How Ian bargains
  • Huaqiangbei sourcers introduction
  • Hand out PCBs
  • Hand out Seeed Studio Huaquiangbei map

Hacker Lunch 12am-1pm
A group lunch following the first day introduction. Try Southern Chinese food in a local canteen. Cantonese food is almost never spicy and vegetarian options are available.

  • Cantonese restaurant on Songling Rd.

Huaqiangbei Tour 1-6pm
Hit the world’s largest electronics market with a group of pros. Find out where to buy tools like soldering irons, hot plates, reflow ovens, even a pick and place machine. Check out the components buildings selling a huge range of parts, connectors, and other electronics supplies. Even see the sketchy cell phone building selling random clone, look-alike, and bizarre custom cell phones. Meet shipping agents who can box up your goodies and send them home for unbelievable prices.

  • Tools and components buildings
  • Shipping agencies introduction and overview
  • Ghetto cell phone buildings
  • Find parts for PCBs

BBQ 8-12pm
End the first day with a group dinner at the local barbecue place. Vegetarian options, spicy or not.

  • Songling Rd Barbecue place
  • Shaizi lesson. Learn an extremely popular dice game played everywhere in China. A great way to make friends with Chinese people – even if you don’t speak a word of Chinese!

After party
Jetlagged and still awake after BBQ? Grab a drink and talk at the local bar street. A short metro ride or 25RMB ($4) taxi ride away.

  • Drinks and lots of fun @coco park

DAY 2 (04/04/2014)

Part 1 of the advanced soldering workshop at Shenzhen’s cell phone repair school located near Huaqiangbei. Learn more about setting up your own shop and working in China.

Second day greeting 10am-12am
Get down to business. Interested in working from China? Learn how to import and export goods, and how to start a business to secure a work visa.

  • Import/export talk
  • China work visa and Hong Kong/China business formation overview
  • Labour supply for small scale and short term kitting

Soldering workshop 2-5pm
The main event – part 1 of the soldering workshop. Learn how to solder tiny QFN and BGA chips from the pros at Shenzhen’s cell phone repair school. Everything is provided, just bring yourself.

  • QFN, BGA reballing, mounting, removing and soldering, etc.
  • All of the equipment and parts are provided, just show up

Hot-pot dinner 7:30pm
Finish the day with a group dinner at the best local hot-pot joint.

  • Cook your own fresh vegetables and/or meat in metal pot of soup heated by charcoal. Mix your own dipping sauce at the sauce bar. A traditional Chinese style of eating.

DAY 3 (05/04/2014)

More soldering goodness, and learn what it’s like to make the move to Shenzhen from local expat geeks.

Third day greeting 10am-12pm
In love with Shenzhen and ready to move here? Find out what to expect when looking for an apartment and office in Shenzhen. Local expat geeks share their experience living in Shenzhen.

  • House and office hunting
  • Living in Shenzhen

Soldering workshop 2-5pm
Part 2 of the soldering workshop continues.

  • QFN, BGA reballing, mounting, removing and soldering, etc.
  • All of the equipment and parts are provided, just show up

Hacker BBQ Dinner 7:30pm
Closing hacker BBQ on a local food street. Lots of hackers from around the world will be in town for the Maker Faire, they’re invited too! Bunnie might even play ”Chip Girls” on the guitar while Akiba breakdances on the street. Not to be missed!

  • Hacker Shaokao at Window of the World with all hackers in Shenzhen. Mingle with Maker Faire participants, hackerspace members, and workshop participants

Latest information will be updated on the wiki page!

RTL_FM_Python: An API and web interface for controlling RTL_FM

RTL_FM
Here’s an interesting piece of open source code known as RTL_FM_Python for controlling the RTL-SDR dongle. “This is a Python library built upon the RTL-SDR project and allows you to use the RTL-SDR dongle to tune in arbitrary stations either with a simple web application running on a built-in server, or programmatically with Python or any language using the REST API provided.”

The code is available on GitHub.

Via RTL-SDR.com.

SSD1306 and Python with the BeagleBone Black

ssd1306-beaglebone

Ethan Zonca of Protofusion writes:

The SSD1306 is an OLED display made with SPI and I2C interfaces. With a simple Python library I adapted (a modified version of py-gaugette), it is easy to render text, images (from bitmaps of pretty much any format), progress bars, etc. This guide is a bit on the long side, but should walk you through the whole process.

Strobe guitar tuner r2

tuner

Neil has been working on a strobe guitar tuner project:

I’ve learned a bunch about making circuit boards at work recently, so I decided to re-do the ol’ strobe guitar tuner project from 3 or 4 years ago.  The original still works… sort of.  I have to power it from a 3x AA battery holder that’s clipped to the power terminals with alligator clips.  It doesn’t tune the low E string properly for some reason.  The input’s inflexible, and it’s hard to reprogram.

GPS for graphing calculators

gpsfix

Kerm Martian from Cemetech has documented a GPS for graphing calculators project build:

Graphing calculators are nothing less than powerful pocket computers, capable of doing many of the same things as smartphones, desktops, and laptops. Given that they have reasonably fast processors, a display, memory, and ports to interface with the outside world, I set out to making graphing calculators capable of determining their location using standard GPS hardware. I started with the TI-84 Plus / Silver Edition series of graphing calculators, which have a 15MHz processor, a 96×64-pixel monochrome screen, rudimentary timers (as well as one 32KHz crystal timer), and perhaps most importantly, two ports to interface with the outside world. One is a USB OTG port, a mini-USB port capable of acting as either a host or device, and therefore capable of producing 5V for peripherals. The other is a “serial” I/O port with two bidirectional TTL-level data lines. For my project, I chose to use the USB port for power, and the I/O port to communicate with a TTL serial GPS module. I created both the hardware and software necessary to make the project a reality, then suffered through two weeks of trying to get a GPS fix amid the metal canyons of a major US city.

Drag soldering for surface mount chips

This video by Steve of Big Mess o’ Wires demonstrates how to solder a 44-pin chip in a typical TQFP package using the drag soldering technique:

The process begins by applying a liberal amount of flux to the pads, then positioning the chip on top. I use a pencil eraser to hold the chip steady while I tack down a couple of pins with a blob of solder from my iron. If some pins accidentally get bridged together while tacking them down, it’s OK. Next, I apply more flux to the sides of the chip, wetting both the pins and the pads underneath. The final step is to lay a few millimeters of solder onto the pins at the edge of a row, then use the iron to melt it and drag the molten solder blob horizontally across all the pins in the row. It seems as if that should bridge every single pin together into a giant mess, but with enough flux the solder will magically stick only to the pins and pads, without creating any bridges between them. It’s fun to watch!

project ECHORD – Riverwatch


Eduardo Pinto informs us that the Riverwatch crew has finished the first phase of their project ECHORD – Riverwatch and have posted a first version of their site. The project is developing a Marsupial Surface-Aerial Robotic Team for Riverine Environmental Monitoring. One of the main goals of our project is to make everything open source and since we are using ROS, make available at our site the bags of our experiments.

This project is the work of faculty and students at UNINOVA – FCT Campus, Caparica, Portugal.

Via the contact form.

LEWE: the biometric wristband

mano-500x182

Boris Landoni from Open Electronics writes about a new open source project the LEWE, a wristband that reads biometric:

The Lewe project aims to collect and use available technologies to make a low cost idea that is applicable to all sectors using sensors for data collection. This project goal is the development of a communication protocol, named Jack, able to transport data reliably making communication between multiple devices easier and real-time.

All this could be found in a wristband that reads biometric to be sent via bluetooth to an Android smartphone and, through it, to an online cloud for data storage and organization.

Use an LED as a sensor

img_4840

Michael Beyhs shows us how to use an LED as a sensor:

How the code works:

  • Configure all analog inputs to outputs and pull low to turn on all red LEDs.
  • Turn one analog input pin into an actual Input and read the amount of light that is reflected into it.
  • Turn that input back into an output and continue on to next.
  • After all inputs have been read adjust the PWM of the blue LEDs according to the amount of light that was measured.
  • loop forever…

Via Hacked Gadgets.

DiyouPCB low-cost PCB printer for photoresist


Charlie and Victor from Diyouware write,

About a year ago my brother and I engaged on a quixotic project to build from scratch a low-cost PCB printer for photoresist.

Finally we did it using a Blue Ray optical pickup (PHR-803T) and his UV laser/electronics to sensitize Dry-film.

The optical pickup is used through his own connector without any modification. We deduced the pinout using reverse engineering and designed a driver for an Arduino UNO to control it. Basically, we can adjust the laser power, turn the laser on/off, move the focus lens servo and read the photodiode array signal.

The control of the pickup allowed us implementing a laser auto-focus algorithm based on the astigmatic method. Is the same method use it to focus the laser beam on the Blue Ray™ disc.

The mechanics is an X/Y Cartesian table which moves the pickup with two Nema 16 stepper motors and T2.5 timing-belts. Most of the printer framework has been printed with a 3D Reprap printer, so it’s replicable.

We also developed the Arduino UNO firmware, based on 3D printer firmware Marlin, and the server side software which send the HPGL commands to the printer. Eagle Cadsoft complete the “tool-chain”. It supports HPGL in his CAM processor, so is easy to design the circuit with Eagle, generate the HPGL file and send it to the printer.

DiyouPCB is a prototype and it’s still not perfect: we have some resonance and vibration issues that affect the quality of printing, but it’s a first step to have an alternative method to indirect methods as the famous toner transfer. Our next project will be to build an UV resin 3D printer using also the PHR-803T.

Project build infomation can be found at Diyouware.

Via the contact form.

#FreePCB via Twitter to 2 random RTs

probecable-yellow

Every Tuesday we give away two coupons for the free PCB drawer via Twitter. This post was announced on Twitter, and in 24 hours we’ll send coupon codes to two random retweeters.

Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:

  • Hate Twitter and Facebook? Free PCB Sunday is the classic PCB giveaway. Catch it every Sunday, right here on the blog
  • Tweet-a-PCB Tuesday. Follow us and get boards in 144 characters or less
  • Facebook PCB Friday. Free PCBs will be your friend for the weekend

Some stuff:

  • Yes, we’ll mail it anywhere in the world!
  • Check out how we mail PCBs worldwide video.
  • We’ll contact you via Twitter with a coupon code for the PCB drawer.
  • Limit one PCB per address per month please.
  • Like everything else on this site, PCBs are offered without warranty.

We try to stagger free PCB posts so every time zone has a chance to participate, but the best way to see it first is to subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.

Latest ‘New Year’ release of AnalysIR with full support for USB IR Toy

AnalysIR using MSP430F5529

The AnalysIR crew has announced the the latest ‘New Year’ release of AnalysIR with full support for USB IR Toy:

A major highlight of this release is full AnalysIR support for USB IR Toy from Dangerous Prototypes (V1 & V2 hardware) for decoding and resending IR signals at all common modulation frequencies. In our opinion, AnalysIR is now the premier GUI supporting DP’s IR toy, not to mention the Arduino, RPi, MSP430 F5529 LaunchPad (beta) and more. A selection of enhancements in this latest release, include….

Via the forum.

NRF24L+ library for XC16

NRF24L

Arhi writes:

I ported some NRF24l+ library long time ago but was having lot of problems with it trough time, it was not easy to use and had some conceptual problems that could only be solved by a complete rewrite so I looked around and found a very well written library for NRF24l+ made for Arduino so I decided to port that one too. I’m very very very happy with how this one works, porting was not a lot of work so .. here it is if anyone wants it available for free at source forge xc16 nrf24l+ library page

Here are also the original Arduino library getting started link and original arduino lib github page as this guy (manicbug) did all the work, I just converted his C++ code for Atmel into C code for XC16 microchip.

Via the forum.

HP 6181C DC Current Source Teardown

pcb1

Kerry Wong did a teardown of an old HP 6181C DC current source:

HP 6181C is a lab grade 0 to 250 mA current source manufactured back in the late 70′s and early 80′s. There does not seem to be any pictures on the Internet for this particular model so I thought I would do a teardown here.

Before doing the teardown, let’s take a look at some of its key features. HP 6181C has three output current ranges: 0-2.5 mA, 0-25 mA and 0-250 mA. The output voltage limit can be set from around 0.5 V to all the way to 100 V. The output current can be adjusted via a 10-turn potentiometer and has a set resolution of 0.03% (under 1µA in the 0-0.25 mA range). The output current stability is rated at around 100 ppm, while not top-notch by today’s industry standard but remains quite impressive for hobby use.

Testing switch mode voltage regulators

switch-mode-regulators

Bajdi did some tests for switch mode voltage regulators:

There are different types of DC-DC regulators. The most common are linear and switch mode regulators. Everyone that has tinkered with electronics has probably used a 78xx series linear regulator. They are easy to use since they don’t need any special components. With most linear regulators you just put a capacitor on the input and one on the output and they will work.

A development board for Lua programming update

luaboard-soldered-20140201_

doub posted an update on his Lua board we covered previously:

Today I soldered a second one, and it looks much better. Here is a picture.  I just plugged it on my PC while pressing the DFU button and Windows recognized it as a “STM Device in DFU Mode”, and properly downloaded the drivers, so I guess it’s working alright. Now I have to write some software for it and check if the SDRAM works OK (this is my biggest unknown).

Daisy chainable I2C splitter PCB

i2c-splitter-pcbs

Tom shared his 1-3 I2C splitter he made in the project log forum:

One of a series of modular expansion boards for the I2C bus: a 1-3 splitter for branching I2C signals.
This is the first of a series of boards with compatible headers for modular expansion to the I2C bus. The boards all have the same shape and dimensions, 0.925″ square with radiused corners and 1/8″ standoff holes. All can be used with polarized or unpolarized headers that can be soldered on either side of the board. This one is a simple 1-3 splitter with 0805 pad for an optional capacitor. The picture above shows a chain of splitters joining hacked voltmeter displays to the I2C bus of an Arduino Uno.

The design files are available from Github.

Via the forum.