Electronics, photography and small green things
I am now a proud owner of this Canon X-07 hand-held computer. I found it from an online auction for an unmissable price. It was advertised as pristine condition with original box and manuals. This machine is quite rare, but has seen popularity in Finland and France. I’ll try to document this computer as thoroughly Read More ...
A Nixie tube is an electronic device for displaying numerals or other information. It is a cold-cathode tube and similar to a neon-lamp. Applying power to one cathode surrounds it with an orange glow discharge.
Modern physics, especially radioactivity has always fascinated me. How can something that can’t be seen, smelled or otherwise sensed by human have such a large part in our perceivable universe, and at the same time be deadly to us organic lifeforms? It can be bit frightening due its properties, but it still is everywhere and humans have Read More ...
Oh the irony. “Waste from electric and electronic equipment”, does this imply waste is going to China, or that electric equipment coming from China are waste straightforward? x)
Few days ago I got package from Helsinki Hacklab. Some generic component stuff and a couple Atmel xmegas and breakout boards for them.
Nice bit more powerful MCU’s than normal atmegas & attinys, but they eat only up to 3.3v, so better not to kill them with 5V logic. Luckily most 5v logics detect 3.3v as high, and their higher output can be lowered with resistor divider. Programing these xmegas also differ from their li’l brothers. Xmegas use PDI, which is kind of two wire system, constant clock signal and data I/O. I did not have expensive atmel programmer, so I improvised cheap ~2€ programmer using usbasp and avrdude using these patches. Read More …
I have had little problem with operating systems. I haven’t found any I could like or use. After Ubuntu 9.10 lost it’s support, and next versions of *buntu distros were all bloated and ugly. Back then I did not have needed knowhow to use other linux or unix systems, so I stuck back to Windows. Anyway I have been experimenting with different OS’s for while now, NetBSD(I can’t get X working), FreeBSD(I can’t get gpu drivers working), Mint(bloated), Xubuntu(still bloated and xfce is terrible) and Haiku(which seems nice but is still heavily incomplete). Only operating system I could get working and bear was Debian Squeeze, because it still have lovely gnome 2, only desktop environment I ever have liked. Read More …
Yesterday I found an old calculator from e-waste center, which caught my attention. At first glance I knew that this was not ordinary VFD or LED display desktop calculator. So I stuffed it into my bag and scurried back to home with my precious find. At home I plugged the calculator into the wall socket, which I probably shouldn’t have done. Of course it did not work. But no worries, what could I could not fix? Read More …
Firmware for clock is in publishable condition at last. Now all major functions are implemented and no bugs are (yet) found. But there will be likely future versions with slight fixes and features. And yes, it is made with basic, terrible, horrible and not 1337 at all, but it was easier and I could ask help from friend who have similarly constructed clock. There is also slight chance that I will translate this to avr gcc, but it would be big job, because it have not all functions and stuff. Read More …
Keypads are easy way to input information. I made one from old electronic calculator, and it may be used in SID synth.
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I had boring day, and was too lazy to do school works, so what else I could do but electronics? For next project I need power supply and due to poor efficiency of linear regulators, I choose to make an another switching regulator.
And there is the blurry picture. Similar construction to the nixie clock’s power supply, but this time double. Read More …
I found some old HP/Agilent LED displays. They are common anode type, and have DIP 14 packages. I haven’t seen these before in real life, and I think these are beautiful little displays.
It’s been long time since I last wrote something. I got couple weeks ago or so an iPod 5.5G a.k.a iPod Video a.k.a iPod 5th Gen Late 2006 from someone I know from Helsinki Hacklab. It is 80GB model, and came with Rockbox already installed. I updated the rockbox and made theme for it.
And beauty itself
Everybody knows old 78xx linear regulators. They are ok for many applications, but are problematic for bigger currents. They drop and regulate voltage smoothly for circuitry, but because all excess voltage are dissipate as heat, they are very inefficient. For my nixie clock I needed efficient little power supply for 5V rail, so I created this little baby:
Look how cute it is!
I uploaded some photos to my DeviantArt, made youtube video and gone pretty much viral in my first post to reddit, who could have guessed…
