Reddit:Electronics

These came from an AT&T plant that worked on submarine data systems. All officially inspected. Just wanted to share for anyone else who nerds out on this stuff.

If any of you remember or came across it, a few weeks ago I posted about making my own radio into a pcb. I couldn’t have done it without your advice.

The pcb had some hiccups but it works amazingly well. I used the antenna and speaker and I could hear it all so cleanly it was really exciting. (I may grab a video next time).

About the hiccups… 1) On of the Ic pins was floating, in the design it was supposed to connect to the 9V plane but it didn’t as the plane there was an island (I thought DRC would get it and also I avoided islands because of this…). Small issue easy fix the pin was just deciding about the volume being a bar or 1 Led.

2)The banana connectors refused to connect well while screwed in and had to get soldered.

3) My fault again, while screwing in the 9v connection I accidentally scratched the gndplane at the bottom and when soldering they shorted…. (We love current limited power supplies that didn’t kill everything)

4) The pin footprint for output was 1.00mm and th pins I had were 1.27mm (like the footprint for input)..

What I learned and my advice for anyone that wants to make their own: 1) TEST POINTS have some test hooks or pads in places you’d want to test (just get the breadboard and while making it write down which points you test alot)

2) Gerber viewer and be really careful about (kicad) small blue lines showing that something isn’t connecting.

3) Choose right footprints…

4)Good grounding. I could see on my oscilloscope that if I didn’t use the middle ground and just had the antenna one, the noise from on/off leds made audible clicks.

That’s all thank you very much for your advice at the early stages!

My college Electronics class final was to simply solder on parts of a pre-made circuit, and in my case it was an LED Christmas Tree. After soldering 36 TINY AS HELL LEDS, I tested it and there was no lights turning on…. Decided to test an extra LED and turns out the legs were manufactured with the long leg as the negative side and the short leg as the positive side. I’m so cooked

I'm making a FOSS racing datalogger after I got into kart racing a few years ago and saw how expensive dataloggers were

I had to make the GPS laptiming Library, the datalogger itself, designed and printed the case, and recently started on a dataviewer

Well all of that took a year to perfect, the laptiming is within 0.002s of the official laptiming, I can do track/course selection, laps, pace, and even split-timing on-device.

Now sure, it logs data, but it's not a datalogger without more data. Most other sensors are easy to implement... Engine rpm tho... what a nightmare

I'm a software guy, never made hardware before, barely have any idea what I'm doing but i'm making progress. Right now I'm dealing with SD cards being corrupted so I finally gave in and bought a scope to learn more, managed to build a drastically cleaner circuit than I had before and I got some hope.

(Yes vibration kills, but this is a new problem with adding the tachometer, and I haven't even gotten to testing that on track yet)

(I must do this weird capacitive dance like the "real" ones do, but I also don't have one to take apart so we're gonna just keep winging it baybe)

No I don't want to talk about how much money I've spent at this point, I'm making an open source, and cheap, datalogger

I probably should have went to school for this but hey, I've gotten this far on nothing but hopes and dreams

20 year SWE brute forcing myself into hardware

I got into kart racing a few years ago and got pissed off at how expensive dataloggers were($500++), so I went to build one, only to find no ones ever really released many if any public libraries for gps lap timing.

So I made one, and then I needed a logger for it, so I made that, then I needed a case, and made that too, and recently cive-coded a data-viewer but that's another rant (20yoe swe)

Well all of that took a year to perfect, the laptiming is within 0.002s of the official laptiming, I can do track/course selection, laps, pace, and even split-timing on-device.

Now sure, it logs data, but it's not a datalogger without more data. Most other sensors are piss easy to implement... Engine rpm tho... My god what a nightmare

I'm a software guy, never made hardware before, barely have any idea what I'm doing but by God I'm making progress. Right now I'm dealing with SD cards being corrupted so I finally gave in and bought a scope to learn more, managed to build a drastically cleaner circuit than I had before and I got some hope.

(Yes vibration kills, but this is a new problem with adding the tachometer, and I haven't even gotten to testing that on track yet)

(I must do this weird capacitive dance like the commercial ones do, but I also don't have one to take apart so we're gonna just keep winging it baybe)

No I don't want to talk about how much money I've spent at this point, I'm making a damned open source, and cheap, datalogger so help me God

I've got GitHub links for everything but don't wanna get yelled at dropping links in a first post or something

I probably should have went to school for this but hey, I've gotten this far on nothing but hopes and dreams

Hi Reddit,

While reading the Charles Petzold's great vulgarization book CODE : The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software I told myself that it would be a cool educational project to animate the book schemas to vulgarize how computers work down to the transistor level.

So I created an electronic circuit engine to help discovering how electronics and computers work. You can check the demo here.

This is a starting open source project and all comments and feedback are very welcomed !

How the fuck would this even work lmao🤣.

my rotary tool broke and I needed to use it. So I upgraded it with speed control while I was at it. Anywho I’m now interested in learning and understanding electronics.

Well ain't AI getting good. I'm in this project deeper than my own knowledge could've taken me. I'm working on a non running dirt bike I just bought with no spark. Chat GPT helped me go through the entire electrical system until we zeroed in on the ECU by eliminating everything else, and found the exact transistor that went bad. The ignition coil driver, (on the right with the little purple mark on it.)

At logic level, it looks like it's still working. It still switches, but it's rated for 15A continuous and its only able to sink enough current to barely illuminate an LED. That's not gonna drive an ignition coil.

So I'm gonna try to replace it with a better one and see if I can find out why it failed, to hopefully prevent it happening again. I've done similar jobs on guitar amps before, but never a computer. I don't know if you can tell, but you're not supposed to be able to work on these things. It's been a bit of a lesson in archeology, unearthing this thing. Fortunately the potting compound is quite soft and tears/slices pretty easily, and, though it took a few hours, I've been able to remove it easily enough with a knife and my thumbnails.

Fun little project. If I can manage to fix it for the $2.50 of a new transistor, and maybe a couple resistors, awesome. If not, well it's technically scrap in it's current state, anyway, and definitely worth a shot at potentially saving the $800-$1000 for a replacement ECU for this bike 😵

Needed a tool so made a tool

I got tired of searching for circuit board pattern graphics to use on website/social posts, as this pattern when designing anything embedded related is used quite often.

AI generated looked bad for me, so I made a tool to generate one, featuring shapes, text and gradient fills

If you need any pattern or just to play:

https://hacod-tech.github.io/Circuit-Board-Pattern-Generator/

This is an SoC Camera sensor and controller from an old webcam likely manufactured in the early 2000s hence that chip is manufactured in 2004 (the year i was born in lol) i found this camera in my grandparents house a decade ago i grapped it as a kid and thought it was cool and disassembled it and through it in a big plastic bag along with my cool junk collection.

A decade later i found it's pcb (the shell is no where to be found lol) and desoldered it's components and found that SoC chip that i thought it's pretty cool!

Not sure if this is a normal way to use these cores as i have no knowledge about it. But i came up with a way to get 2 isolated outputs from 1 input. The input windings go in the middle so from hole to hole and the 2 other windings are on the sides. This specific core gave 5.4v on output with 5v input but it was just put together with scraps to see if it works and it did really well.

Hey everyone. Just wanted to kinda quickly introduce myself.

My dad was always fixing radios, and was a generally great with electronics but he never thought about teaching me (probably because I was always more into art and music idk). Now I'm in my 40's and I decided to get into it, as a kind of connection to my late father, whom I really miss.
So I took an old soldering iron and tried to replace USB port in my midi piano.. and I totally botched it - ripped of the paths. The tip was too hot (I guess). Then I ordered a proper station, wire, glue, UV light etc etc and watched a lot (like A LOT) of videos about fixing PCBs. I also got a BBB and breadboard (and managed to light up a LED on it hell yeah).

Last Saturday I fixed my instrument and I bought a DYI tetris handheld and I will teach my son.. or rather we'll learn together.