By popular demand, the breakout/passthrough combination boards family now includes a 1mm pitch variant:
This version handles up to 30 signals which seems to be a practical limit of most 1mm FPC connectors. Each signal is numbered and brought to a 0.1 in spacing header for easy connection to your favorite logger/analyzer/scope. Continue reading
It’s been a while since we’ve fixed anything. But no worries- something always breaks around here! Lately, our fancy electrical dryer decided to call it quits. Continue reading
Our rooftop solar system has been operating for a full year now- time to look at the results. Other than snow covering panels, it’s been pretty maintenance free and generated many referrals for the installers from various people asking questions and wanting to learn more about it.
Front side
Here is a product whose origin lies in the pain and suffering of an actual development project. Imagine you have a shiny new display made somewhere out there in a world that comes with a demo board and some datasheets. So you take a display, hook it up to your favorite development board and try to follow the documentation. Except nothing works. And yet a a demo next to you works well, but is very tiny, has no test points and not documented. So you poke at the fine pitch flex connector with a scope for a bit, and realize you need a better way to capture what’s going on. Off you go to the lab and cobble together what is essentially a pass-through: two FPC breakout boards back to back, with a 0.1″ header in between.
Now you can hook up your trusty Saleae Logic analyzer and look at what the demo board is actually sending down as opposed to what the datasheet says it should. This board is exactly that, but made into one neat package. It can handle standard 0.5mm pitch FPC connectors up to 40 pins wide.
Warning, long rant ahead! As some of you know, we own a 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid, also called HCHII (second generation). Bought new, the car has been an absolute pleasure to drive, for about two years. And then all hell broke loose and it’s been downhill since. In this post I intend to details my dealings with American Honda and the overall unhappiness with the situation. Where possible, I include screenshots or scans of the original documents. I truly hope ACH will come to its senses and take care of the customers like myself, but if history is any indication it is not very likely.
The updated ending to this story is at the very end, if you want to skip to that. Otherwise read on!
It is now late June, time to take a look at how our solar installation has been performing over the last six months. To recap, the system is a 5.2kW rooftop installation using 22 240W Sunpower ACPV panels with integrated microinverters (see detailed writeup at http://kuzyatech.com/going-solar). It was turned on in early December of 2013 and has been pumping energy since then. So what did we produce so far?
A while back I did a teardown on a vintage multimeter- Weston 6000. The 38 years old LCD was dead, but otherwise I saw signs of life in the meter. So I figured I’d try recreating the display using modern components. Continue reading
Here is another silly hack I’ve finally got around to do and document. We have a BioBrite SunRise alarm clock at home that nicely simulates sunset and sunrise.The clock is almost perfect with one notable exception- backlight is exceptionally bright even when it dims it for the night mode. This post describes how I fixed that. Continue reading
Today we have a repair that’s somewhat off-topic for the typical posts here. But hey, it broke, got fixed- might as well document for others. Plus it has some wires inside- that counts!
Today we have two tiny multimeters to take apart and see what we can learn from how their designs progressed:
On the left is Hioki 3217 and on the right – Beckman DM78