posted 2010-06-20 16:32:26, link to this article

I've ordered a new toy to experiment with, the DS Brut. This is an Arduino compatible Slot 1 card for the Nintendo DS that provides IO ports to the DS using the SPI on Slot 1.

To be able to use it, I had to replace my current Slot 1 flash card with a Slot 2 variant. For a few Euros, I found a second-hand Supercard Lite, that also includes 32 MB of extra RAM!
Being my stupid self, I just had to open the card to peek inside. By doing so, I tore off a small foil cable between a PCB with the Micro SD slot and the main PCB. Oooops

30 Minutes of frustration with wire-wrap wire later, I managed to replace the torn foil cable with something a lot less professional. ;-)

Pff, those were some narrow traces. I'd like to use the occasion to thank my parents for buying me my first soldering iron when I was aged six or so.
To be continued when my DS Brut arrives!

posted 2009-12-25 00:12:43, link to this article

My JeeNode arrived today, just in time for Christmas!
The JeeNode is a small microcontroller board, with an RFM12 radio module, it is compatible with the Arduino IDE, which is a Good Thing.
For more information about this cool piece of kit, have a look at jeelabs.org.

Less than 30 minutes after arriving home, I started soldering the JeeNode kit together. I'm impressed with the quality of the PCB of these units.
Below are two pictures of my finished JeeNode.

posted 2009-11-25 22:27:57, link to this article

The video port pinout from my previous post led to some succes with my UKNC (Elektronika MS 0511) Soviet-Russian computer.

Today I made a SCART cable to connect the UKNC to my old Bang&Olufsen CRT TV. (that still needs replacement with an equally pretty LCD TV ;) )
It seems the B&O does understand the video signals from behind the iron curtain. :)

The SCART wiring is pretty simple, I've connected RGB, sync and composite-video and used a common ground on the SCART video ground line.
I think the TV is using the RGB inputs, because when I tried feeding the composite video with a cinch plug earlier, I didn't get the TV to sync.

posted 2009-11-22 23:22:08, link to this article

I recently bought a old Soviet PDP-11 compatible computer on Ebay, the UKNC (УКНЦ in Russian) an educational computer system with a formfactor somewhat like the Amiga 500.

I'm still struggling to bring the machine back to life, the biggest hurdle is that most of the documentation about this machine is (of course) in Russian only, and I don't speak any Russian at all.
Google translate is a big help, and translating to Russian to Google for information helps a lot.

This way, I finally found the pinout of the video connectors on the machine, these are 10-pin headers on the back of the machine, labeled "вм".
To document this for myself, and maybe for someone else whom might benefit from this, I've posted the pinout of these connectors here:

     ---     
  1 |o o| 2          1 - blue         2 - gnd
  3 |o o| 4          3 - green        4 - gnd
  5 |o o| 6          5 - red          6 - gnd
  7 |o o| 8          7 - sound        8 - gnd
  9 |o o| 10         9 - composite   10 - sync? 
     ---

posted 2009-10-25 17:20:59, link to this article
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Today I peeked inside a RSA SecurID token and made a little test jig to probe some test pads that are inside.

Not much interesting found so far, but hit the read link to read about my journey to the SecurID's deepest secrets... ;)

posted 2009-10-18 21:38:08, link to this article
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For the last year, up until a couple of months ago my heater was pretty unreliable, probably because of a flaky relay in its control unit, or maybe some bad capacitors, something that nowadays seems to kill almost all electronics prematurely.

Well getting bored of hitting the poor machine until it started working again about every day, I finally replaced its Econgas control unit and, of course, I tore the old unit apart.
It's a nice piece of kit, It seems to be made by a Dutch firm called Pijnenburg, a name that I only associated with a particular brand of Dutch cakes before. ;-)

Maybe more later about the internals of that unit, or maybe never, it depends on whether I find any other interesting stuff inside.
But wat got me started was its nice control panel, containing three red 7-segment LED displays, three buttons and a Micrel MM5480BN shift-register based LED driver. Something that just screamed to be hooked up to my trusty Arduinos!

Follow the read link above to read the whole story.

posted 2008-11-01 21:54:26, link to this article
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The Osram SLx-2016 displays look great, and they are quite easy to interface. I bought one to play with at Conrad some time ago. It was gathering dust for a while, but I stubled upon it again today and kludged together a small piece of Arduino code to talk to my nice and shiny green display.

posted 2008-11-01 21:51:38, link to this article
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Ok, I have a love-hate relationship with perfboard. It's easy to prototype on it, but wiring your circuit can be a very tedious job.

And because of the exposed wiring your circuit board can be a bit fragile (or this might be due to my lousy soldering, of course.)

A handy way to make your circuit a bit more durable, and lots more presentable too, you can use cheap commonly available two-component epoxy glue to encase the solder side of your circuit boards. The downside is that you can't make any modifications afterwards, but for some of my projects this is not really a problem.