171–180 of 180 posts
How are these people finding VGA cables in the street :S I needed like 10 or so VGA cables recently for an art installation and asked everyone I could and nobody had any lying around... I ended up having to buy new ones which seems a shame considering how many are thrown away!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A hill I will die on is that tech products should just stop bundling cables, for anything, with the possible exception of unit-specific power adapters. A while back I purchased a KVM switch - it came with 3 DP cables, which went straight into my e-waste box. I've also seen office fit-outs where mountains of cables that came with monitors went straight from factory to landfill because they were the wrong length. I und…
> possible exception of unit-specific power adapters No. Unit-specific power adapters should not exist. Either put a USB-C or a 120v/240v AC connector on the device, depending on power requirements. It's really not that hard. Note: it must be connector, not a fixed cable. I.e. an IEC C8 or C14.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> possible exception of unit-specific power adapters No. Unit-specific power adapters should not exist. Either put a USB-C or a 120v/240v AC connector on the device, depending on power requirements. It's really not that hard. Note: it must be connector, not a fixed cable. I.e. an IEC C8 or C14.
This might apply to (most) IT devices. But there are devices that require 24 V, or 48 V, or any other voltage that USB-C can't supply, and that for various reasons (space, EMI, possibly even compliance with some safety regulation) can't contain an integrated power supply unit from 120/230 V mains. Of course this should be an exception and most consumer devices can definitely work with the regular voltages and current…
Sounds like a job for Power-over-Ethernet :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nyet, comrade. She was at the front like some sort of living maidenhead while I leisurely rowed at the back with the entrenching tool that I kept in the car, one evening at an outdoor music festival somewhere in the Midwest. It was all very beautiful; the girl was beautiful, the sky was beautiful, the music was beautiful, and the place itself was beautiful; everything was approximately perfect. There was such a profo…
* figurehead (A maidenhead is quite a different thing.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mine was pretty easy to fix - I was surprised how simple it was. IIRC, there's an inlet valve, a circulating/heater pump, and an exhaust pump.
Dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, threadmills, all have common issues and fairly simple fixes, if spare parts are available. I'm actually surprised there aren't general purpose boards, electric motors, heaters pumps etc out there that could be just swapped in. As long as the enclosure is in presentable state, that is
* Circuit Board Medics, but I understand there are others.
I had a Saturday job at a computer shop when the Mac came out, and we got one as a demo. I remember just staring at the genius of those rounded corners in the corners of the screen, and thinking how beautiful it was that they'd thought of that.
In case you haven't read it - https://folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, threadmills, all have common issues and fairly simple fixes, if spare parts are available. I'm actually surprised there aren't general purpose boards, electric motors, heaters pumps etc out there that could be just swapped in. As long as the enclosure is in presentable state, that is
I recently came across a slew of replacement boards that basically completely take over your washing machine and runs it. Some Chinese generic stuff that is meant to install in any machine missing its original control board.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would be surprised how much trash there is in the city around us, that you suddenly start noticing when you have a diy project. Let me share you some moments of my own with you. I was leaving university campus with my buddies, talking about building magnetic card reader to check contents of my campus library card. Just as I was explaining magnetic heads to one of the guys I see a random cassette player few meters…
> Mid sentence I stop, grab and smash the radio open on the curb, pull out the magnetic head and continue talking about the said magnetic head. Guys were bewildered. In what world is this acceptable to take some trash and make the trash situation worse by bashing it apart in the street?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would be surprised how much trash there is in the city around us, that you suddenly start noticing when you have a diy project. Let me share you some moments of my own with you. I was leaving university campus with my buddies, talking about building magnetic card reader to check contents of my campus library card. Just as I was explaining magnetic heads to one of the guys I see a random cassette player few meters…
This is becoming less common among electro-trash as SMD rules the day instead of larger, more discrete, more easy-to-separate components. For example, try pulling anything useful - camera lens, buttons, memory, ICs, anything - from any mobile phone tossed away.
This is a really impressive project! It was a fun read. Thanks for sharing! I like this writing style. > As an aside, I try to create a dual-target build for all my embedded projects, with a native host build for rapid prototyping/debugging I find myself doing the same thing on my embedded projects, including at my job. I actually find myself using the PC build much more frequently than the hardware for my day-to-day…
How would you go about setting this up? Do you mock out low level calls or are you running some sort of emulator?
I typically put all hardware-specific code for one platform into its own directory. Then I can have multiple directories for different hardware implementations, like MCU #1, MCU #2, and PC. I just implement the same API in all three. It's basically just a HAL. Each build only compiles one of those directories -- the one that matches the architecture I'm building for.
For example I might have a function that does an SPI transaction. On the two hardware builds it will actually communicate with the SPI peripheral in the MCU, but on the PC build it will talk to something I've written to pretend to be the SPI device. So it does take a little bit of up-front work writing code that pretends to be the various devices. In some ways you could call that an emulator, but not in the way you were asking I think.
You can make it as simple or complex as you want to. You could do a full-fledged object-oriented SPI class in C++ (or "class" in C), with different class implementations for different hardware builds. Or you could just make a single function that does SPI stuff and reimplement it for each hardware build.
In one case I have a Qt GUI that pretends to be the UI for the device so the PC hardware-specific code ends up providing its own main() and runs the actual shared codebase in a separate thread. So that particular codebase has a provision to rename the shared main() to not actually be main() on the PC build so it plays nicely with Qt needing to actually provide main().
One downside is you won't catch certain bugs on the PC. There have been a few bugs that slipped past because the hardware build was 32-bit but my PC build was 64-bit for example. But those errors are fairly rare. I probably should be doing the PC build as 32-bit to make it more similar anyway. Still, it wouldn't catch every little problem that might pop up on hardware. It definitely accelerates my productivity though!