Author: admin

  • The Internet is full of idiots

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    I love sharing knowledge. When working in a team, I can’t help but get all the exclusive understanding I have out in the open. My value to a company isn’t in the information I know, but in my approach and ability to solve problems. On top of that, I would much rather not have to…

  • Bad day at work? – How I destroyed a £2300 piece of equipment

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    admin
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    It’s been longer than I care to admit since my last post, but sit comfortably because this is a tale worth telling. It is about all the planning and thought in the world can be let down with one careless oversight. We use a fairly inexpensive HiPot tester (Clare H101) at work to check that some…

  • Everyone plays guitar (Part 2)

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    It has been over a year, and what a year it has been. Fortunately I don’t have to go into any of that here. The TV project has all but died. I still have the spare PCB kicking about, but I’ve not got the motivation to fix my BusPirate probes and try to add USB…

  • More people watch TV (Part 3)

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    This post I am going to be demonstrating how to read an I2C device using a BusPirate. The BusPirate is a brilliant little tool that provides a command line interface to various communication buses. I am using the BusPirate V4, but the theory will be the same for the V3 and V3.5. The first device…

  • More people watch TV (Part 2)

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    I have three problems that I need to tackle; USB, 3x HDMI ports, HDMI-CEC. So again, lets head to the service manual to avoid embarrassment.   There are footprints for 2 USB connectors. Even though I don’t want to plug a memory stick in, it did pique my interest as to the differences. The top-most…

  • Everyone plays guitar, but more people watch TV

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    Guitar pedals are harder than they look – at least this one has been. I’ve learnt some valuable lessons that I’ve never had to worry too much about before. The most valuable lesson is that noise is not fun. Living in the digital domain is brilliant because is it far less affected by noise. Analogue…

  • Everyone plays guitar…

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    admin
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    It has dawned on me that whilst I don’t pay a lot a month for hosting, I do actually pay something and so not keeping this blog up-to-date could be construed as a waste of money. With that in mind I have an update – hooray. I built my first guitar more than 10 years…

  • Poker Spreadsheet

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    It’s been over a year since I’ve posted anything, but I’ve got some projects in the pipeline that will feature here. Until then I thought I’d share something I put together to help sort out a Texas Hold’em poker tournament I was involved in a last year. It’s a speadsheet that helps calculate what Small…

  • Obscene Monitor for FREE!!!

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    A few months ago my place of employment and enjoyment suffered a catestrophic electrical failure. We recently installed some power factor correction equipment on our three phase mains setup – presumably to save money when powering running some of our more inductive loads. For those that dont know, power factor is the ratio of real…

  • Stereotypical beginners electronics project pt3

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    The LCM7215’s arrived as I was writing the last post, so I need to get the PCB’s cut. As I have access to a LPKF ProtoMat C60 PCB cutting machine I have designed a number of boards that fit together to give the case. The idea is that the first board sits on the underside of…