Micro Basics -

Google's Silicon Supply

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:30:02 -0400

In very rough numbers:

Google employs about 65 million million transistors.

That's about ten thousands transistors for each man, woman, and child on this planet.

In the time it takes you to read this one sentence, Google will have completed about 8 million billion 32 bit operations in those transistors.

That's enough to calculate pi to the 200 thousandth digit for each person on this planet.

USB Isolator for $10

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:01:15 -0500

Analog Devices makes two complementary chips that together provide one full speed isolated USB port with 0.5W of power.

Power - ADuM5000
Data - ADuM4160

CAN Goes the Distance in the 2010 Olympic Rings

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:32:57 -0500

John Dammeyer of Automation Artisans posted several messages to a CAN (Controller Area Network) mailing list (CANLIST) which go into great detail about the design of the rings and how CAN was used to automate them.

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Hi Everyone,

After a very exhausting 3 months with a few almost all-nighters here is
the result which I can now talk about.

http://www.autoartisans.com/images/RINGS2010.JPG

Sparkfun Freeday

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:59:04 -0500

The Sparkfun Freeday was a sale on January 7th, 2010, where Sparkfun, and electronics component, kit, development tools, and suppliers online store, allowed people to receive up to $100 each of free product in their order placed after 9AM MST (11AM EST).

As they announced this months ago, and it was widely reported in a variety of places, it was not expected to last long, despite Sparkfun's optimism in calling it a Free Day.

Despite recent upgrades in December, the servers started chugging under an increased load on the 6th as people shopped and added parts to their shopping cart, assuming that the site would be too busy to both shop and check out the following day.

ADSL Noise Margin and Attenuation Numbers

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:12:33 -0400

What do the ADSL Noise Margin and Attenuation Numbers mean? From http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=46156 :

Noise Margin (AKA Signal to Noise Margin or Signal to Noise Ratio)
Relative strength of the DSL signal to Noise ratio. The higher the number the better for this measurement. In some instances interleaving can help raise the noise margin to an acceptable level.

6dB or below is bad and will experience no synch or intermittent synch problems
7dB-10dB is fair but does not leave much room for variances in conditions
11dB-20dB is good with little or no synch problems* (but see note below)

Instructables moving to a closed for-pay model

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:49:20 -0400

Another CDDB for us, Eric Wilhelm announced last month that Instructables is moving to a closed pay-only community model:

Free Instructables users will not longer be able to:

1) View entire instructables at once
2) Print out instructables in PDF
3) View "secondary" images in instructable steps

This means that if an instructable has more than one image in a given step, you will only be able to see the first image, and thumbnails of the other images. If the author left important detail in the images, that information is lost.

Local tech group live broadcast tonight (Tuesday, Jun 6, 2009)

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:41:39 -0400

I am doing a smoke test of my little wireless video broadcast setup tonight at the local tech group's meeting. If you have a bit of time, I'd appreciate it if you'd watch for a bit and let me know what problems you experienced, or whether you found any value in this sort of thing.

Tonight we will likely have two FIRST robots, a live demonstration of lost foam metal casting (cheap - 5 gallon bucket furnace, etc), and a few other shorter presentations.

It starts at 7pm EDT, and should be available here:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/adam-davis

Dear SEO Scammer,

Wed, 20 May 2009 11:45:30 -0400

I get a lot of "link exchange" requests. I doubt this will prevent them, but it gives me a convenient place to put a recent response I gave to one which I can use as a template later to saver time. Generally I find out a little about both the SEO company, and the company that purchased the SEO services. I then email both the SEO scammer and the company who purchased their services.

In other words, if you are going to request a link exchange, please note that I generally contact your customer directly and tell them how lousy link exchanges really are, and that they are wasting their money on you.

One safe way to decrement an unsigned in a for loop

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:51:55 -0400

don.neufeld points out that there's only one safe way to use a for loop to decrement an unsigned int to 0:

for( i = n; i-- > 0; )
{
// Use i as normal here
}

"There's a trick here, for the last loop iteration you will have i = 1 at the top of the loop, i-- > 0 passes because 1 > 0, then i = 0 in the loop body. On the next iteration i-- > 0 fails because i == 0, so it doesn't matter that the postfix decrement rolled over the counter."

Simple C Equation Parser

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:57:38 -0400

I needed to be able to evaluate user entered equations, with custom variables, for instance lightvalue*10/(factor*1024) where the two variables are filled in by values in the software when the equation is evaluated.

Eventually this requirement was dropped, but not until after I had built a simple proof of concept program, which I'm putting here so I don't lose it again. The code below and the compiled executable (windows) can be downloaded as well, example.zip (5.5KB)

Compiles under tcc, should be straight ANSI C and is portable, but let me know if you have issues.

Twitter thoughts for businesses

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:08:10 -0400

When I squatted one of the twitter accounts, I went to the effort of setting up the twitter page to match their website palette, added their logo to the user avatar, set up the links and tagline, and so forth to see how much I could make it a part of their brand.

When they took it over, they didn't change a lot (better version of the logo, etc), so I suppose I did ok. It's cutting a fine line, though, since I am not really a representative of them. I took care not to "follow" anyone on their account, and only made tweets that linked to their website and were obviously directly related.

When they took control of the account, they asked for suggestions, and here's what I told them.

Confessions of a twitter squatter

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:48:34 -0400

I've started to squat twitter accounts.

There. I said it. I'm a twitter squatter. Sqwitter? Twuatter? Either way, according to myself, I'm the scum of the earth!

Many years ago I ran a business, and considered getting the domain name. A few months after that thought, it was purchased by someone else, and I missed out. I used a different name, but it's far from ideal - I had already built up some amount of brand recognition, and it was annoying to need to compromise.

Domains are so cheap now that if I have an idea I get the domain before thinking about it for too long - if I don't pursue it, I let the domain lapse in a year. I don't consider this squatting, as I'm not registering something that obviously points to another business/person, etc. I simply don't want to end up deciding to pursue an idea and finding that in the intervening time someone else took the name.

Jinx's static LCD drive solution

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:48:17 -0400

In a recent piclist message Jinx mentioned two methods he uses to drive static LCDs, and sent me the following to share. Click on the images for larger versions.

The 16F628 circuit is an up/down timer/clock, with optional dome bell or piezo bomb as the alarm

The two weak pull-ups on the ICM7211 data lines can be put in circuit by the user with jumpers, and those lines are read as '0' or '1' by the PIC, which then enables s/w routines if necessary.

Setting the display is simple - sequentially select digits with the 4017 and the 4-bit data on the data lines appears.

My experiments with backlighting.

Antenova Radionova RF Antenna Module

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:25:19 -0400

I recently saw a cute little, inexpensive GPS module offered at Digikey that includes dual PCB antennas (I assume, maybe it's one large antenna?). The company offering it, Antenova, focuses on antennas, in particular PCB antennas, and I expect this module mainly showcases their technology.

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Hit by TGIMBOEJ!

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:30:59 -0400

I heard about The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk from a Hack-A-Day article, and put my name on the wiki as desiring to receive one. TGIMBOEJ is best explained as follows (from http://tgimboej.org/ ):
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The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk is a progressive lending library of electronic components. An internet meme in physical form halfway between P2P zip-archive sharing and a flea market. It arrives full of wonderful (and possibly useless) components, but you will surely find some treasures to keep. You will be inspired look through your own piles, such as they are, and find more mysterious components that clearly need to be donated to the box before it is passed on again.