I was looking around the storage rack in my main workshop when I stumbled upon an old Lenovo laptop, specifically a T520 model. These are nicely made solid machines, rather hefty but nice to use. The keyboard and trackpoint are great, and the screen is OK as well. This got me thinking; I have two …
Retrofitting a Lenovo T520 with a Raspberry Pi CM4 – Part 1 Read More »
Super quick update to extol the virtues of some very good value side cutters I bought recently on a tip. Thanks to the Hackaday Circuit Sculpture remoticon workshop, when Mohit Bhoite was showing off his tools and mentioned these. In short, Xuron makes an excellent range of cutting tools, coming in a variety of shapes …
Pretty much anybody who does electronics prototyping needs to master reflow soldering at some point. There are a few ways to do it. The simplest is to set up the PCB with solder paste and components pre-applied, onto a preheater to get up to a starting temperature. Then, apply the additional reflow heat with hot …
Lots of timing-type instruments, such as frequency counters, AWGs, and oscilloscopes have the option to be tied to an external frequency reference, most commonly 10 MHz. This enables the correlation of measurements from different instruments, as well as vastly improving their accuracy and repeatability. Impedance and Termination It is useful at this point to mention …
Repurposing a video distribution amplifier – part 1 Read More »
I was thinking about prototyping electronics again, as I often do, and I was wondering about what might be optimal (as in most flexible) for handing small SMT parts like SOT23-3. Your choices are many, but pretty much all are bog-standard offerings derived from the original Veroboard layout (i.e. 0.1″ hole array, with a series …
