Insane Packaging
AVnet has so far been my most favorite parts supplier and I have used it quite a few times. Not only do they offer a rather comprehensive catalog, their prices are quite competitive as well and their shipping and handling…
Simple Fume Extractor Using Server Blower Fans
Breathing in fumes while soldering is not good for your health, so it is recommended that you have a fume extractor in your workshop. A typical fume extractor sucks in air and passes the fumes through layers of active carbon.…
Makefile for Arduino 1.0
A while back, I created an Arduino plugin for NetBeans so that I could use the full-fledged NetBeans IDE for all my Arduino projects. The approach I took was using the NetBeans project sample module method. Under the hood though,…
X-TRONIC 4040 Hot Air Rework/Soldering Station – II
Last time I did a pretty thorough review of the X-TRONIC 4040 hot air rework/soldering station and shared my own experience with it. Overall, it is a very good entry level rework station. I have been using it intensely for…
X-TRONIC 4040 Hot Air Rework/Soldering Station – I
I have used quite a few professional SMD rework stations before, but those professional grade ones tend to be quite pricey. So when I decided to get a hot air rework station for my own personal use, I settled on…
Temperature/Humidity Data Logger — One Year Worth of Data
I had almost forgotten about the experiment I started late last year using the data logger I built to log the temperature and humidity values in my basement lab for an entire year. The logger worked well during the initial…
Building a Wireless Temperature Sensor
I have built quite a few (1,2,3) temperature measurement circuits in the past, but none of those has remote sensing capability. So I decided to make a wireless temperature sensor so that temperature measurements can be made anywhere within the…
Simple Alexa Ranking Script
Alexa is a great tool for gathering your website’s statistics. Using its traffic rank moving average, you can see how your content affects your site’s popularity over time.
Power is Back
The power finally came back early this morning. So from last Saturday till today, we have been without power for almost ten days. Well things could have been a lot worse. Thankfully my generator had been working great without a…
Back Online Again — Finally!
The Halloween nor’easter knocked out power and internet service last Saturday. Even though I have a backup generator, the internet outage caused my site to go dark for the past few days (well almost a whole week).
STM32F4-Discovery Board
I received my STM32F4-Discovery evaluation board last week. So I setup the required development environments and did a quick test.
Thermistor Parameter Measurement — II
Last time I showed a simple circuit that can be used to measure unknown thermistor parameters. The circuit is basically just a power MOSFET using a voltage and duty cycle controlled PWM signal to drive the gate and thus generates…
Thermistor Parameter Measurement — I
Over the years, I have gathered quite a few NTC and PTC thermistors. But most of them are unmarked so it would be difficult to use them in an accurate way without knowing the parameters. So I decided to build…
Synchronous Camera Flash Trigger Using IGBT
Typically a synchronous camera flash (e.g. slave flash) is triggered via an SCR. In this blog post, I will show you a circuit that can be used to trigger a secondary camera flash using an IGBT.
Hand Soldering Fine Pitch LGA Chip
Many of the modern chips such as MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes only come in surface mount versions and many of them come in fine pitch LGA or QFN packaging. This has created a significant challenge for people who just wanted…