Modern microelectronics assembly requires clockmaker or robotic precission; sub-millimeter discrete components or pinout of integrated-circuits is nothing unusual. Building such highly integration devices from scratch at home is a virtually impossible, sometimes though fixing them with entry-level tools is still feasible. I was proud I could replace torn-off wires in my wash-mashine or fix corroded LED lighting inside dish-mashine. I did not… Continue reading
Late in December 2011 I almost bet that I am able to design & build myself a blinking serpent of rainbow lights for Christmas tree. I did not want to spend much time on creating cables and lights themselves but I imagined a star shaped thing full of LED lights that would gently shine or glimmer in many ways. Dozen of work-hours and couple weeks later my new DIY project has seen the light of day; on nearly dry and dead tree I hung the… Continue reading
With the advent of 2nd revision of WLS experimental hardware I got nasty system freezes on ported firmware. As they happened always close to power cycling of probe section I suspected new ADC chip using I2C bus. Past experience with I2C drivers freezing system led to tests revealing bus corruption caused by non-deterministic behavior of slave during transient power rail states not isolated on time by the TXS0102 voltage shifter. ADCs: 18-bit on… Continue reading
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Encouraged by successful RAM modification I started consider extension of USB ports number in TP-Link device. Originally it contains only one USB2.0 port and if you are using extroot (file system on external storage), you effectively have no free USB port. I was thinking about print server to share USB printer at home (printers with network cards are more expensive). I planned to have external HDD permanently attached to router case and I did… Continue reading
You do not own device if you cannot open it, I read on some forum. Or more probably you just want to swap disks not breaking the case. If you are owner of this portable disk you will find neither screws nor guidance how to open it up. On the wave of opening different plastic cases, here comes my “how to“. My company laptop has SSD for system and extra HDD for large library of installers or vmware images. Having a chance to get USB… Continue reading
Winter is coming… actually it has already come bringing constructor’s nightmare. Sudden freezing cold caused unexpected and massive restarts of all field stations. All because of the same hardware reason. Reason impossible to happen. All that because circuit boards were not suited up for real harsh outdoor conditions. Two stations were flawlessly working during 2014/15 winter. Next four identical stations were deployed in 2015 to… Continue reading
IBM BPM Process Designer started migration from desktop to pure web client long time ago. While lightweight tools are enablers for everything in cloud game, it is shame how productivity is ignored. For several releases IBM has not corrected even such fundamental feature like fixed-width font to give visual aid on indentation. Fortunately this was easy to fix once and for good. Default WebPD formatting (left) can be… Continue reading
Before the age of youtube I was a fun of munobal videos (now you can find them on youtube anyway). It was very useful since it gives you different camera angles you you can learn trics stright from videos, as I do. It is good however to learn tricks on similar level of difficulty – it allows you to build necessary skills for next levels, and gives satisfaction of successful exercises, so crucial factor to keep learning going. After some… 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
London would be another short distance deployment place where I have been couple times already. Last week however stochastic processes of nature were not working for me. I faced unusual series of funny accidents that made my work week much more colorful. In Frankfurt, connection hub, I had the flight to London Heathrow. As always I quickly browsed thru the list of flight to get the terminal and gate, and proceeded. Twenty minutes before… Continue reading
