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Category: electronics

Ultra-Bright Blue LEDs!

Published January 9, 2010

Ever since getting an iPod Danielle’s been wanting a way to connect it to her car. While at Target today I happened across a Sony CDX-GT43IPW on clearance for $69.98, and a few hours later it was installed in her car. Installing an aftermarket stereo in a 2000-ish GM J Platform normally requires some wiring trickery so that the factory chime sounds aren’t lost, but thanks to Danielle’s car already having an aftermarket stereo I was able to simply adapt the old wiring harness to this stereo’s needs, resulting in the harness seen here.

Disassembling the dash to access the stereo was also a bit of a hassle, but easier than expected. The stereo worked on first go, and the iPod interface is surprisingly decent. The built-in menu system which manages the iPod is about as good as one can get from a one line display, and there’s another mode which simply allows the iPod to controlled directly. There’s also a standard 3.5mm Aux In on the faceplate, should she wish to hook up another device that way.

The biggest down side is the ultrabright blue LEDs which illuminate the controls on the front panel. For now Danielle just ignores them while driving, but I imagine they will get pretty irritating soon. Sometime tomorrow I’ll probably open up the face plate and check out the LEDs. Hopefully it’s easy enough to open and they are pretty easy to replace. Green or red, and much less bright, should work out well.

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Google Nexus One!

Published January 6, 2010

With Google’s release of the Nexus One it worked out very well for me to give my G1 to Danielle and pick up a Nexus One for myself. Thus far I’m quite happy with this phone. The AMOLED is absolutely outstanding and the phone is simply faster overall; the occasional quirky slowdowns when using many apps at once are gone.

It even comes with a cute logo’d neoprene case, as seen here!

I still have some service plan shuffling to do, including moving myself to an employee discount plan (via my workplace) and possibly another service plan. While I am out of contract and should be able to move plans at will, it appears that T-Mobile has a $35 fee to change plans via their website and I don’t want to pay that. We’ll see how that goes… Until then, the phone still works great, just like my old G1 but even better.

(Photographing a phone with active screen and having both parts look nice together is a very difficult task. More photos of the phone unboxing can be found here. I’m not bothering with measurement / thickness / whatever shots, as those are thoroughly addressed elsewhere.)

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Let There Be Light!

Published November 6, 2009

Today my NiteRider TriNewt headlight was returned after being sent out for repair. NiteRider actually replaced the cable which had a short, replaced the switch, and sent a new helmet mount; all under warranty and free of charge. I was a bit surprised at the switch replacement, although in retrospect I had noticed that it felt a bit odd. I’d previously thought that I simply wasn’t familiar with its operation, but it turned out to be faulty as well.

As can be seen above it was also tested, with the battery illuminating the light for 3:16:00. I presume this to be on high, and this is plenty of time for my uses. Now I can get back to riding more at night. I’ve was loaned an HID which I’ve used from time to time, but being prone to fall damage and not being my light, I was hesitant to take it out very many places. Hopefully tomorrow evening when the weather is a bit nicer I’ll be able to head out for another ride.

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Cascaded USB Hubs

Published November 3, 2009

As part of rewiring my office I purchased this seven-port USB hub from Firefold for $22.99, part number USB-7P-HUBSP. It turns out that this hub is actually two Genesys Logic GL852G hub chips, with one cascaded off of the other. The three ports shown above on the left are connected to the first hub, then the other four are connected to the second hub chip. Thus when the case is closed up (as seen here) ports 1-4 are on one hub which is connected to the hub that ports 5-7 are on. This shouldn’t cause a problem, but it’s a much cheaper design than using a seven port hub chip and having everything at the same level.

The hub also ships with a 5V 2.5A switching power supply. Having seven ports which can supply a maximum of 500mA each, this power supply cannot fully power the hub. That said, most devices never pull anywhere near 500mA, so this shouldn’t be a problem either.

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My NiteRider TriNewt Is Broken

Published October 19, 2009

Tonight was a perfect night for a ride. Beautiful clear skies, upper 50s, and a light breeze greeted us as we rode from my house to River Bends Park to poke around the new limestone path and some unofficial single track. Not long after entering the park we even ran into some other people we knew who were out enjoying the same trails.

Heading back into the woods things were going well, until I ducked some overgrown brush and caught my head light. While I stayed on the bike, my NiteRider TriNewt stayed with the brush for a bit, breaking off the mount and apparently stretching the cable to uselessness. I was then left holding a non-working head light, roughly two miles into overgrown single track trails which were frequently bench cut along ponds. Thankfully the two people I was with rode behind me, so I was able to see well enough to make it out, even if some of those points involved ensuring that the front wheel was pointed at the narrow, dark shadow in front of me.

Once we made it back to the wider limestone / paved paths in River Bends things were much easier, and I was generally able to ride along next to people, using overflow light to see by. We were then able to finish up a nice loop, totaling ~17 miles. I’m quite lucky that I wasn’t out alone tonight, as a broken light six miles from home on trails would have meant lots of walking and not-safe riding.

Tomorrow I’ll try contacting NiteRider about getting the light fixed. Per their warranty website this should cost $30 in bench time, plus a new cable and light mount. I opened up the light briefly to check for broken solder points, but everything looked fine, so I suspect the cable. Since the cable and its strain relief is not something I can easily remold myself, I think I’ll just pay them to do it. Hopefully I can have it back quickly. Until then I will probably be using a borrowed HID, which should be interesting. There’s a reason why people are moving in droves to LEDs for bike headlights.

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Corroded Bryant CES0110057-01

Published October 16, 2009

My coworker Brian’s furnace went out and during troubleshooting he came across a bunch of water deposits on the Bryant CES0110057-01 control board, as seen here (full res). I first suggested that he clean the deposits off with vinegar, but after doing so he found that one of the jumper wires on this single sided PCB seemed to have corroded in half, as seen above or here (full res).

He asked that I take a look at it, and in doing so I decided to replace it and the jumper next to it, as seen here. I touched up one other iffy looking solder point near the bottom of the board, but otherwise everything else looked good. He’s taking the board home to try now and hopefully this will fix the problem. A new control board for the furnace is $140, and it’d be best if he didn’t have to pay that.

UPDATE: I’ve been told that repairing this jumper fixed the problem. Yay!

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Tarkan Akdam’s iFlash iPod Compact Flash Adapter (mk II)

Published October 9, 2009

I use my iPod daily, both in the car and at work for listening to music. I’d also recently come across a nice little PCB made by Tarkan Akdam called the iFlash iPod Compact Flash Adapter (mk II) which allows one to replace the 1.8″ hard drive in their iPod with a CompactFlash card. This card is a very nice, basic design, and can be purchased for a very reasonable price directly from the person who came up with it.

Since the hard drive in my iPod will eventually fail, I wanted to replace with flash before this happened and sell the working disk on eBay. A few months back I’d purchased one of Tarkan’s adapters for £14.50 (US$24.45, at the time) and kept it sitting on the shelf, waiting for a good time to do the replacement. Seeing that a 32GB Kingston CompactFlash card could be purchased for roughly $76.25 from Newegg I figured that now was the time, cashed in some change at a Coinstar machine, and ordered the card. (I was originally going to purchase it with an fee-less Amazon gift card from Coinstar, but the machine couldn’t issue one and thus did fee-less change counting. I then made the purchase from Newegg, who had faster free shipping.)

I’d also considered replacing the battery at the same time, but as I still get great battery life out of my iPod, I couldn’t see the need. Opening the iPod is easy enough, so when the time comes to replace that, I’ll do so.

The 32GB CF card arrived yesterday, and since I’m home watching Danielle as she recovers from having her wisdom teeth removed, I set to work today installing it. Opening the iPod was easily accomplished using one of Danielle’s guitar picks, and after disconnecting the flexible PCB cables and removing two little gray plastic spacers, the compact flash adapter was placed in the iPod frame, where the foam rubber cusions made for a nicely snug fit. After closing the iPod it presented me with a screen indicating that it needed to be connected to a computer for restoration, which puts the OS back on it. After doing so, the flash conversion was complete.

Since there is no longer a need to wait for the disk to spin up, the UI is much more responsive now. Battery life should also be improved greatly, as flash takes less power to run. The only current downside is that the iPod now feels off balance. Previously it’d felt very evenly weighted; solid and firm, but not overly heavy. Now the top of the device, where the battery is, feels a bit heavier than the bottom. Thankfully this shouldn’t matter for me, as most of the time my iPod is sitting on a desk or in a car mount.

Later tonight I’ll post an eBay auction for the old hard drive from the iPod, a Toshiba MK3008GAL 1.8″ 30GB hard disk. I hope that it’ll fetch $20 or $30, to offset the cost of the flash adapter and card. Now, here’s to hoping this iPod has another three years of life left in the rest of it.

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Bus Pirate v2.go LEDs (and other Moblog Photos)

Published August 7, 2009

Today I finally got to poking around with the Hack A Day Bus Pirate v2.go. It’s a a nice little debugging tool which shows up as a 115.2k serial terminal via USB, and allows one to send and receive a bunch of different serial protocols to devices for testing. However, the LEDs on it are far, far, far brighter than they need to be. At my normally-lit desk in a normally-lit office, they are glaring. I’m going to consider replacing them next time I place an order from Mouser or Digi-Key.

Here’s some other recent moblog photos:

· Toadstools on the mountain bike trails at Bald Mountain South Unit.
· This morning’s coffee is made in a moka.
· Bloody nose pickings wiped on the mounting bracket for a urinal partition in one of the bathrooms at work.
· My sister’s dog Molly laying on the back porch at my parent’s house.
· Joy’s mom’s fruit Extra Easy Fruit Cobbler recipe.

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AMB Mini³

Published June 18, 2009

Today the PCB and other parts that I ordered from from the AMB audio shop arrived, so this evening I assembled an AMB Mini³. This is a rechargable battery powered, credit card sized headphone amp does a great job of driving my Sennheiser HD570 headphones.

While I didn’t take any photos of the assembly or inside of the enclosure (I just wasn’t in the mood tonight, for some reason), the assembly went very smoothly. Part of the assembly suggested that one put thermal grease on the underside of the AD8397ARDZ op-amp to help transfer heat from the chip to the PCB. Wanting to wash the PCB I didn’t want to do this, and I instead found that scraping a bit of solder mask from the heatsink trace allowed me to reflow the underside of the chip without much difficulty. After that SMT pads themselves went nicely, and everything else was through-hole. I had a few problems with battery clearance in the case, but adjusting the battery contacts slightly made everything fit comfortably snugly.

Everything was built as-specified for the high-performance version, except that I used a different knob and LEDs. The knob is a Kilo International OEJL-75-4-7 (Digi-Key p/n 226-4094-ND), which was the only 6mm shaft knob that I had laying around the house. The power LED (LED2) is green in place of the standard blue, and the rear (LED1) is a red, and matches the power LED brightness-wise. The LEDs are Mouser part numbers 630-HLMP-1790 and 630-HLMP-1790 and 630-HLMP-1700, respectively. To properly fit the LEDs, R6 and R7 were changed, using 5.1K Ω (Mouser 270-5.1K-RC) and 7.5K Ω (Mouser 270-7.5K-RC) resistors, respectively. I’m happy with the LEDs as they are visible in a normal room, but not particularly bright, even in complete darkness.

Using the iPod dock to 3.5mm (1/8″) cable that I made last week I connected my iPod to the amp and gave it a go. In short, I’m really happy with it. My headphones finally sound as they should with the iPod. Right now it’s charging on the kitchen counter, and tomorrow I’ll give it a full go at work.

Abnormal for me, I didn’t take very many photos during the assembly of the Mini³. For some reason I just wasn’t in the mood to document it as I normally do, so I only took the following three photos:

· AMB Mini³, from the front, fitted with a slightly non-standard knob and a green LED instead of the standard blue.
· AMB Mini³, from the rear.
· AMB Mini³ connected to my 5G iPod Video.

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