Thunderbolt that hits near a long cable line can induce spike of hundred of volts. Budgetary RS-485 driver will not protect circuitry from damages caused by over-voltage and over-current. While scorched prototyped device makes constructor sad, failure to bunch of production-grade devices leads to financial impact: loss of hardware, maintenance time and penalties from SLA breaches. My first considerations focused on choice of right cable – I p… Continue reading
Freezing cold, snow outside and less than 3 weeks to New Year’s Eve means no more outdoor inline skating in 2012 at least in Europe. Autumn was good though, I would even say b*est since it matches to B{udap}est and B{uchar}est, two beautiful cities conquered at the turn of October and November. 15km skating track I have been to Bucharest some time ago. Caught by volcano’s ash cloud I regret I did not take my skates with me that… Continue reading
Years ago I have been in electronics world, while never seriously touched digital techniques. I dropped electronics in favour of computer science and become sofware specialist. Now getting back to electronics I see the power in programming integrated circuit to control fixed electronics assembly around. I am really attracted by microcontrollers. I was quite ignorant before I started digging into μC world. Now, wherever I look, I see these tiny… Continue reading
Here comes my completely subjective view of Pittsburgh/PA, the city “between Chicago and New York”, best known to Americans from its steel industry history. A view taken from urban skater perspective, that is making wikipedia description more complete, as well as half-a-day-tourist visiting Niagara Falls (off skates for that purpose if you are curious). As regular visitor from Europe you will find Pittsburgh quite typical North… Continue reading
At night before my travel back home, I have watched the report on Iceland volcano eruption. It was mid of April 2010 and I was nearly 1000km from home, in Romania. I deluded myself the ash cloud will neither get to Romania nor to Germany, my connection point. I hope I would be able to fly back next day early afternoon. Vain hope. Next day I got short notice from my travel agency that my flight was cancelled, as thousands of others. The idea on… Continue reading
Measuring water level is fundamental goal of WLS experiment, hence its code-name (Water Level Station). Early summer 2014 hardware and software system had enough base services to make addition of entry-level pluviometer easy. Prior to PCB redesing for chinese factory I blueprinted and bread-boarded extra input circuitry in couple hours. Software part took me couple more days and my balcony-mounted station started measuring precipitation mid… Continue reading
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When I read about hardware modifications of unextendable home-targetted routers, I thought, nerds! On the other hand, doubling RAM memory size for pennies, is attractive perspective for anyone, who plans switch firmware to embedded linux and host services far beyond than typical network functionality. At that time I already had cheap amateur PT-936 soldering station, just for simple repairs. To replace memory chip however, SMT element must be… Continue reading
With the advent of IBM BPM 7.5 I was invited to US for internal training in mid of June. So far Chicago was a connection point travelling to other places, this time I had one week to hang around. Most impressive part was that I could not easily predict short term weather conditions – one cannot see much of the sky covered by skyscrapers.Another immediate consequence of blocked sky was problem with maps to navigate through the city; GPS… Continue reading
Even though I would not give up on Android powered smartphone, when it comes to details, little irritating things are coming out. Do not get me wrong: overall usability and general consistency is undoubted and makes the user comfortable most of the time. It is even more powerful with custom firmware. However, over long period of time I have noticed some quirks, collected most of them as a list of issues specific to my needs, and attempts to fix… Continue reading
After almost 12 years of marriage with Nokia brand I decided to try something else. I wanted to have phone with portable GPS with a screen big enough to see maps while driving a car. Anything more was an option I thought. My ignorance ended up right after I started to play with smartphone of my colegue. Out of sight, out of mind. It is a toy, I agree, but processing power and its usability gave me quick rationale for new buy (like everyone I… Continue reading
