I recently purchased a BSide ACM03 Plus clamp meter so that I could do some high current measurements for my tab welder project. This meter can be bought on eBay for around $25, which makes it one of the cheapest…
I bought a Sony A6000 mirrorless digital camera last year to replace my Cannon PowerShot Elph 300 HS point and shoot camera for my YouTube videos. While its fast auto focusing capabilities is great for my teardown and project videos,…
A flat bed scanner typically uses three rows of CCD sensors (RGB) to capture images placed directly on top of the glass bed. When the CCD array scans from one end of the image to the other, the digitized color…
I just bought an ESD mat for my workbench. ESD mat is great when working with sensitive electronics components as it safely dissipates any charge built-up to the ground via its dissipative surface through the attached grounding wire.
I had wanted to make a spot welder for a while. Most of the DIY spot welders use a momentary switch the primary side of the microwave oven transformer (MOT). Due to the simplicity of this design, it is very…
I recently upgraded my home phone system and thus was left with a couple of old Uniden DCT648-2 handsets. Most of the components inside are probably not salvageable but these handsets use 3×16 character LCDs, so it would be nice…
I got a Wavetek 395 arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) last year. Unlike my other equipment (such as HP 8566B, HP 5350B, HP 8642B and Racal Dana 1992) which all came with high stability ovenized crystal oscillators, the Wavetek 395 only…
I picked up an HP 7044A X-Y recorder on eBay recently. This one was made in the early 1980’s and by today’s technology standard it is rather ancient. And because of this, it is very easy to interface with as…
Till recently, I have been using custom circuitry whenever I needed to backup some firmware. But the process was rather tedious as for each kind of EPROM or EEPROM I needed to study the protocol and timing requirements and then…
I got this broken Beats Solo2 BT wireless headphone from one of my colleagues. In fact, it was broken once before around two years ago and I fixed it for him back then. The issue was because of a broken…
In my previous blog posts, I did a teardown of the Symmetricom/Datum 8040 Rubidium frequency standard and modified the 1PPS output by expanding the pulse width from just around 10µs to roughly 50% duty cycle. There were some questions regarding…
Last time, I did a teardown of the Datum 8040 Rudidium standard. As I discussed, the 8040 has a 1PPS output but the pulse width is very short, at around 20µs. In this blog post, let us take a look…
I finally got my hands on a Rubidium frequency standard. I have been wanting to get one of these for my lab for quite some time now but have not encountered a good one at a reasonable price. Most rubidium…
I picked up a non-working Racal-Dana 1992 Frequency Counter on eBay a few weeks ago. The symptom is that only channel C seems to work correctly and neither channel A or channel B produces any measurements. Since the majority of…
I got myself an HP 5350B microwave counter a couple of years ago and did a teardown of it. The backlight on the LCD is pretty weak and does not provide much contrast however. So I thought I would upgrade…