This section gathers pure project articles, i.e. everything that I documented in detail, in posts, regarding some projects of mine. These articles are different from the actual wikis (menu link immediately to the right) in what regards the structuring of the information and language (wikis are written entirely in romanian).
Today I managed to connect the Digilent Pmod I2S2 to a Raspberry Pi 4 and have all frequencies generated. This is part of an older project that I left abandoned for a while: a radio node built on Raspberry Pi and using Svxlink. As known, Raspberry boards do not have a proper audio interface and […]
This is a short video about the progress of my 3D printed antenna rotator. Unfortunately only in romanian for now, but captions will be created soon.
A couple of weeks ago during what should have been a routine firmware upgrade, my Jabra Evolve 65 simply died. Have no idea what happened and maybe that will make an interesting future project, but because this headphone is my main headset used for teleconferences and other communication required by my job, I was kind […]
Some time ago, my old Time Capsule died. It simply did not start. I read that this is an issue that plague all older (first and second generation) TCs. The culprits are four electrolytic capacitors inside the switching power supply, two 1,500 µF, one 1,000 µF and one 470 µF. The 1,500 µF were badly swolen. […]
This will be another short post. I also made the GitHub repo public, but please be aware, current design is flawed. If you use it, you acknowledge that you use it on your own risk. Today I managed to build the revision 1.0 of this power sensor, not without some lessons learned. It was my […]
I ordered the boards for this project with JLCPCB in China. This is my first attempt of working with a professional PCB manufacturer and I am extremely pleased by the results.
My first finished KiCad project is a prototype of a RF Power meter with input attenuation built around an Analog Device AD8307. An excellent tutorial about log amps can be read in March 1999 edition of Analog Dialogue. KiCad PCB: And the 3D rendering of the same PCB: The next step will be PCB ordering, […]
This is a beacon project started by my friend YO5VAE. He faced some issues while programming of the Si4463-based module and I thought I might give a hand. I resoldered the entire project on an empty Arduino shield to allow expansion of the project with some additional modules. Below are some pics, but probably the […]
For low frequency projects, a fast way to prototype is using a bare PCB and scratch some dividers that allow “manhattan” style prototyping. I am especially very fond of this prototyping technique and I believe that PCB design should be avoided in the early stages of prototyping. Jim Williams was an artist in such designs. […]
A couple of months passed since I purchased two 10 MHz OCXO modules from eBay. And, to my shame, I didn’t even tried these. Yesterday I did a quick test and the devices are spot on. Both measured on my TTi TF930 3GHz frequency counter: The OCXO needs apx 10 minutes for proper warm up […]
Some more days passed and some more finishing touches added to my MacSCPI app. It is entirely dependent on hooking the device via the USBTMC driver, but it works fine and is stable: I had some problems with buffer padding and the output it is still not 100% gibberish–free , but I assume I have to play with […]
After some head banging, I finally managed to send SCPI commands from my Mac to my Agilent (Keysight) DSOX2002A. I’ve worked on this since december last year. Almost a year, but I did not spent a sustained amount of effort. I did it just during my free time. I still have a day job that […]
This is a quick update post. The road I took with this little project is slowly getting to a dead end due to what it seems to be a lack of available crystals for 144.8 (like 48.26 or 28.96 MHz, for using the third or fifth harmonic). I believe that, currently, all APRS modules are […]
It comes a moment for any electronics hobbyist to build a power supply unit. Probably is one of the most useful and basic projects that you can go for. Well… one can easily buy those, but what’s the fun then ? However, the majority of PSUs available on the market are high-power (high-current) PSUs. With […]
More than a year ago I posted this. It was the beginning of this blog and the beginning of my personal space for hobbies and small DIY projects, a very crammed and tiny space that I have in my apartment. I cannot imagine how quickly time passed and how less and less available time I have for […]
Next steps for my dummy load prototype based on IRF830 N-Channel MOSFET, and a LM328 plus a multi turn pot.
Today I started to complete the design of the RF12B Breakout Board for various prototyping.
