Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and just about every electronic device manufacturer are jumping on the bandwagon of connected devices. They promise us the ability to turn on our toaster from another room, unlock our doors just by shouting at them from outside, and change the channel on our TV through perfectly enunciating a sentence instead…
The Anxiety of Open Source: Why We Struggle With Putting it Out There
You’ve just finished your project. Well, not finished, but it works and you’ve solved all the problems worth solving, and you have a thing that works for you. Then you think about sharing your creation with the world. “This is cool” you think. “Other people might think it’s cool, too.” So you have to take…
Is It On Yet? Sensing the World Around Us, Starting With Light
Arduino 101 is getting an LED to flash. From there you have a world of options for control, from MOSFETs to relays, solenoids and motors, all kinds of outputs. Here, we’re going to take a quick look at some inputs. While working on a recent project, I realized the variety of options in sensing something as…
Bilexa Bass
Yes, it has been done before, but nobody else has embeded Alexa INSIDE the Billy for a seamless solution. This project uses an ATTiny to perform all the logic, which includes a photoresistor for detecting when the light ring is illuminated, and audio input for detecting the audio, running a DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform), and…
Memcached Servers Abused for DDOS Attacks
Cloudflare announced recently that they are seeing an increase in amplification attacks using memcached servers, and that this exploit has the potential to be a big problem because memcached is capable of amplifying an attack significantly. This takes DDoS attacks to a new level, but the good news is that the problem is confined to a…
What Are Those Hieroglyphics on Your Laptop Charger?
Look on the back of your laptop charger and you’ll find a mess of symbols and numbers. We’d bet you’ve looked at them before and gleaned little or no understanding from what they’re telling you. These symbols are as complicated as the label on the tag of your shirt that have never taught you anything about doing…
Ben Heck Show – Alexa Workbench
In Jan 2018 I was invited on to the Ben Heck show to build an automated workbench using Alexa. The show happened in two parts. Part 1: Part 2:
Yellowing: The Plastic Equivalent of a Sunburn
Your fancy white electronic brick of consumer electronics started off white, but after some time it yellowed and became brittle. This shouldn’t have happened; plastic is supposed to last forever. It turns out that plastic enclosures are vulnerable to the same things as skin, and the effects are similar. When they are stared at by…
Fail of the Week – Accidental Demagnetization
There’s a trick in the world of plastic enclosures. The threaded insert is a small cylinder of metal with threads on the inside and a rough edge on the outside. To make a plastic part with a hole for securely connecting bolts that can be repeatedly screwed without destroying the plastic, you take the threaded…
Active Discussion about Passive Components
People talk about active and passive components like they are two distinct classes of electronic parts. When sourcing components on a BOM, you have the passives, which are the little things that are cheaper than a dime a dozen, and then the rest that make up the bulk of the cost. Diodes and transistors definitely…