There has been a hype around the small soldering iron Miniware TS100 for a while now. It is one of the few compact soldering irons that have enough power to be a reasonable coice for a portable soldering iron. I must admit that many soldering irons feel like a toy against my Ersa iCon with its 150 Watts and a heating element that is very close to the tip. With the iCon, soldering a big connector is as easy as soldering a small SMD resistor.
Welcome, Hugo!
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here. That’s partially due to my work that occupies me since three years and leaves me little time to expand this site. Also, the old ikiwiki setup that ran this site broke multiple times. That raised the bar every time I wanted to add something here. But there’s good news: Multiple things are waiting to be published here! The new version of this site should have been run with Hexo, but I discovered too many flaky or missing features.
Zoom UAC-2 Audio Converter
It’s a nice, small USB audio interface. Interestingly, it’s the same as the Thunderbolt version, just with an USB-PCIe interface bolted on. The internal PCIe bus is bridged over USB and terminates in a Windows driver that provides a virtual PCIe interface. Interfaces: USB 3 analog audio MIDI Some Chips: Freescale IMX6S5DVM10AB / IMX6S5DVM / IMX6S5 / IMX6: ARM miKrocontroller Broadcom/Avago USB 3380: PCIe-USB 3 converter (Super Speed USB) Texas Instruments PCM4202: 24-bit, 216 kHz ADC Asahi-Kasei AK4396: 24-bit, 216 kHz DAC audio interface
Reverse engineering and fixing a bug in the firmware of a "ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard with TrackPoint"
For years, I owned and liked my USB keyboard, A “Lenovo ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard with TrackPoint” (KU-1255). It is small and with its trackpoint, you don’t even need to move your hands from the keyboard to move the mouse pointer. Unfortunately, Lenovo went far beyond what’s useful: They implemented middle-mouse button scrolling in hardware, but half-broken. An annoying bug The keyboard firmware supports different modes, on of them disables or activates the middle mouse button.
Tektronix 465B
front view warning, warning The Tektronix 465B is a classic vintage analog oscilloscope. It is older than me and equipped quite well with its 100 MHz bandwith and dual timebase. It features a silent fan (yay) and immediate feedback — it’s analog. ;) At the right time base, it delivers up to 360.000 Wfm/s, much more than most digital oscilloscopes out there!
Conversion of a Power Mac G5 to microATX with a USB 3 front panel
design classic Almost 10 years ago, a friend gave me his old Power Mac G5. At that time, it was a beast, with multiple Gigabytes of RAM. Like a beast, it was also quite loud, not only because of its two power-hungry PowerPC processors, but also because it contained a lot of noisy fans. The case itself, the “cheese grate”, is nice: Thick aluminum, simple, straight, easy to open and with a big, straight air path from the front to the back.
Android Device Encryption
Just to remember how to enable device encryption on android quickly: vdc cryptfs enablecrypto wipe <password> Executed as root, this wipes your device and enables encryption with the supplied password.
Samsung Chromebook XE303C12
XE303C12, top view I got this ARM-based Chromebook for little money, so I thought I’d have a go with Linux on it. It is quite small and lightweight, almost like those Ultrabooks, but much cheaper, in every respect. Installing Linux TODO: Copying the old system, installing Debian, make Flash work TODO: my scripts Convert SD to MicroSD card slot Motivation Linux works well on the Chromebook, but 16 GB of internal storage is a bit short.
A small Pt100 Thermomenter
Thermometer and sensor Schematic I built a small thermometer based on Microchip’s AN1154, which uses the famous MCP2550. Please refer to the application note for details on how the measurement is done. The beauty of the thermometer is the big resolution of 0.01 °C over a wide temperature range. The accuracy won’t be above 0.1°C, but well. I also don’t have the means to check the precision of relative measurements, so I have to trust the application note on that.
Autobaud
Schematic Sometimes, one encounters the problem of using a serial port, but somehow got the quartz frequency wrong, set the wrong fuses or doesn’t know the used baudrate for some reason. To the rescue comes Sprite’s Autobaud: It guesses the baudrate from a few received bytes (some characters work better than others) and uses a known speed of 115.2 kBps to communicate with the computer via a FT232.