Electronics FAQ

I have talked out my Floor Lamp ( Ikea Orgel Vreten Floor Lamp ) and how I got a Jugaad Plug-in Dimmer made for it. I had an Arduino Yún lying around and had just read up on Temboo . That's when I realized I could use the Arduino to control the lamp from the internet very easily. I noticed that Temboo could fetch tweets and so I got an idea - I could program the Arduino to dim in and dim out the lamp whenever  @ZeniaIrani mentioned me in her tweets. I call the project "The Zenomaniac's Lamp" Here is how I got it done: Configured the Arduino Yún to connect to to my WiFi. Installed the latest version of Arduino IDE on my PC. Bought a 5V cell phone charger Brought the digital from Sunrom:  http://www.sunrom.com/249 Assembled the circuit and installed everything in a plastic lunch box. I used white three cored cable used for electric irons for the AC input and AC output - they are long lasting and look nice. Installed 2 pin socket and plugs on the ends of the w...

My cousin sister left me an awesome Floor Lamp ( Ikea Orgel Vreten Floor Lamp ). Since, the lamp was bought from USA, I had to modify it by installing alternate holders for the bulbs available here in India. Indian bulbs had different threading. The Floor Lamp Once that was done, I started thinking of ways to neatly install a dimmer for it since I couldn't find Indian equivalent for the American/European ones like this one here . I tried to stick one to the plug - it worked - but looked really ugly: First try Then one day, I remembered to  ask Rohit Garg, if he had a better way of getting this done, and he did. He used an adapter casing and installed a dimmer inside it. He also added a metal knob to make it look even better: Plug in Dimmer made by Rohit I got another brainwave to use the white three core ironing cable to replace the lamp's existing black one to match the white walls. Ironing Cable Floor Lamp with the jugaad dimmer installed As an...

WorldSpace is no longer operational. But I had a receiver lying around from when it was active. I opened it up and here is what I found in it: Antenna Unit Front Panel Inside of the front panel Main Board Mainboard with the various sections marked out STA001 – RF Frontend for Digital Radio Single chip receiver for satellite digital transmission Supe...

If you are plagued by having to put up with an Internet Service Provider that insists that you login through their webpage everyday before you use the internet, then read on for an solution. I use Reliance Broadband in Mumbai, India. Whenever you try to use the internet,you need to first login through their portal page - no matter what URL you type, you will be first redirected to their login webpage where you type in your username and password before you can begin surfing the internet. Even Windows will complain with a "Additional log on information may be required" popup. Also Reliance insists that you login again 24 hours later. To overcome this PITA, I flashed my Linksys router with DD-WRT and added a startup command to login automatically. That method wasn't as effective as I desired. Its described here . Reliance Broadband's Web Login I thought of writing a script and adding it as a cron job to DD-WRT. The script would ping a known good server like www...

After putting up my home weather station  (blog post here ) using TL-MR3020, I spend some time thinking if I could continue using this pocket router for future projects, here are my thoughts: In India an Arduino Yún ( INR 5903 from rhydoLABZ). But if instead of that if you go for the combination: TL-MR3020 Pocket Router ( INR 1395  from flipkart) + Portronics Combo USB and Card Reader ( INR 299 from Portronics) + SanDisk Cruzer Blade 8 GB Pen Drive ( INR 304 from flipkart) + Arduino Micro ( INR 1820 from rhydoLABZ) Total come would come to INR 3818 which is 35% cheaper than the Yún. The combination can do everything the Yún can do and much more: Linux Processor: TL-MR3020 has the same CPU (Atheros AR9331) as Yún and runs the same OS OpenWRT Microcontroller:  Arduino Yún has ATmega32u4 on it, same as the one on Arduino Micro SD Card Reader: TL-MR3020 can use the one on the Portronics hub WiFi & Ethernet: Both have that Power Supply...

Developers working embedded systems have a perpetual woe - they end up wasting a lot of time debugging avoidable hardware issues like loose connections, broken wire, ESD during dry winters, broken pins etc. Much of the damage is caused because of the perpetual mess our desktop is in - in shuffle around to reach to one thing, you might end up messing something else. Even if you unclutter your table top, there is always a very real chance of your circuit board or power supply adapters or extension boards falling off of it thereby causing loss of multiple days of productivity. And no matter how careful you are, your colleagues might not be as careful as you or worse still, the house keeping staff might disturb your setup during the cleaning hours when you are away . The cleaning staff man handling your equipment (TWHS! hehe) is a very real problem in India. At one of my ex-workplaces, we were out weirded when an unusually high number of keyboards started turning up bad. It seems tha...

So I wrote code to perform SHA256 hashing on a single block on data using the TM4C129DNCPDT  running off a 16 MHz Crystal. I performed the hashing first using software C code  and then using the Tivaware Library function which make use of TM4C129x's "Hardware Accelerated Hash (SHA/MD5) advanced hash engine that supports SHA-1, SHA-2 or MD5 Hash computation". I assigned 2 GPIOs for measuring the time taken for each method (the software one and the hardware one). I toggled the GPIO before and after hashing for each of the two methods. The Oscilloscope shows the pulses observed on the two GPIOs. The results are as below: Software SHA256: 1.216 milliseconds or 1216 microseconds. SHA256 using Hardware Acceleration: 28 microseconds (4200% faster) Amount of time take to perform SHA256 in Software (Channel 2) and using Hardware Acceleration (Channel 1). 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 ...