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I don't understand why every non-technical person who comes to do work in my apartment messes up my fucking router.
The cleaning lady - multiple times knocked the antennas partially off. Like fucking clock work. I don't get it, why is the cleaning lady attracted to my router antennas and why does she need to be so hard on them? Whatever.
The most ridiculous episode was today. And it wasn't the cleaning lady. I had a few people here doing some work today and the woman in charge who was here informed me before that they might have to move the furniture "a little."
I come home, and like a bad omen, the plastic parts on BOTH my router antennas are missing. Completely gone. It's just the the wires. Now, the router still works fine in my tiny apartment, but it is a fancy Asus router (I learned the hard way not to buy cheap routers) and I'd like it to not have fucking wires as antennas.
I email the woman (paraphrased):
Me: hey, it seems the antennas got knocked off my router, do you have any idea where they might have went?
Her: Apologies if we didn't put everything back (no shit you didn't, that's why I've had to email you). If we knocked the antennas off the router (fucking "if"???? I literally just told you in my email that they were knocked off) , they are probably somewhere by the window on the floor (they weren't).
And I still haven't found them. Why the fuck do these people seemingly attack my router? I can't figure out what it is about it. You would think people would be more careful around electronics but naaah. Anyway, going to go keep looking for my router antennas.
44 -
My mom never touched a PC or smartphone. Well, most people didn't back then, because it was the early 90s.
But I brought a borrowed SNES to the hospital and taught her to blow on the Zelda cartridge if it didn't work. She died after we finished the game.
After that my dad bought me a commodore 64, the machine that taught me about electronics and programming, and molded me into who I am today.
On the first date with my girlfriend (now 12y together) we just sat talking for hours in her room, playing Zelda on her SNES taking turns, and I told her my mom would have liked her.14 -
Six months ago my girlfriend broke up with me...
BUT since then I've...
•Found the wonderful world of devRant
•Gotten back into electronics
•Taught myself PCB design
•Gotten back into programming
•Made a discord bot
•Started teaching myself calculus
•Began building an ai for said discord bot
•Designed a wireless mesh networking NIC for the TI84+CE
Sure I feel like shit most of the time but before I did anyway but I've been super productive and it feels kind of nice45 -
My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.
I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.
I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.
So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.
I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.
That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.
After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.
In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.
A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.
But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.23 -
At the airport.
Security: Please put all your electronics in the bin, including your watch.
Me: No problem
<goes through scanner>
Me: there was an Apple Watch in here and now it is gone.
Security: Oh, you lost your Apple Watch?
Me: No! I put my Apple Watch in the bin like you instructed and YOU lost my Apple Watch.
Security: It must be in the spinners.
Me: So my $500 Watch is in the spinners being run over by bins?
Security: you have to put the small things on the bottom.
Me: It was on the bottom and I did as you asked, this is entirely on you. Do not try to shift the blame to me again please.
Security: As I said...
Me: As I said, Do not try to shift the blame to me again. This is entirely your responsibility once you separate me from my electronics so you can perform security theatre. Have a nice day.
—————
Fuck this god damn security theatre. Fuck the dumbasses they hire. Fuck your country. Fuck your god damn feeling of insecurity. Fuck Your ineffective security theatre.
Sick my fucking dick until you choke and gag you worthless pieces of shit. Homeless people the street provide more security than you incompetent, under-educated assholes. Fuck you
And yes, I have 2 fucking laptops. I have a real fucking job where I provide actual value and for that I need a work laptop. I don’t come to work in a stupid looking outfit with a chip on my shoulder looking to inconvenience people. I come to work to provide real value to someone.
Fuck you and your worthless bullshit39 -
The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.
I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.
Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.
I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.
I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.
I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).
One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.
The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.
Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).
Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...
But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.16 -
I have decided to build a computer right from the logic gates. Not physical, though. Everything will be basically built on top of a NAND gate.
Prayers needed! 😁😂
43 -
Today at school I borrowed an oscilloscope and a few capacitors and used a circuit I made at home to just demonstrate the discharge of a capacitor, since my physics teacher asked me to teach the class about this on Friday
So it's one of those old analogue scopes, so to get a nice line I turned the speed right down and did a long exposure shot with my phone and it turned out brilliantly!
31 -
Since past two-three years, Indian Government has been organizing a Hackathon called Smart India Hackathon for college students. And Luckily our team was selected this year.
This team had 5 Electronics Student and 1 Computer Student. Guess who the Computer Student was? Yea, Me.
They Knew nothing about Android Development. And the idea was about an Android Development. I was the only person who could code.
The centre for our hackathon was Varanasi and we live in Hyderabad. So we had to go there. I have not really travelled a lot in the trains (especially not this far from Hyderabad to Varanasi ). During the whole 37 hours journey, I was not able to sleep cause I am not accustomed to sleeping on a train.
The moment we reached Varanasi the hackathon had started which was 36 hours long. Normally team members switch places so that they can sleep but not ours. Cause I was the only one coding and it had to be done in this 36 hours. So add this up 36+36 hours of no sleep, I must have rarely slept for 3-4 hours in that 72 hours.
After the hackathon, I slept like a Snorlax whereas the other went for a trip around Varanasi ('_')
18 -
Electronics store clerk: "Can I help you?"
Me: "Good afternoon sir. I'm a developer and lifelong PC gamer. I received a second hand PS4, and might buy a next gen console at the end of the year. People tell me that in front of this soft wide desk chair people call a "couch", you need some sort of large computer monitor to enjoy console gaming"
Clerk: "Yeah, we sell TVs. What TV do you have now?"
Me: "I don't own a TV. I just want a huge 4K computer display with a good response time, excellent refresh rate, and great contrast"
Clerk: "OK so this is an entry level 55" smart TV. It's 120hz, QLED, has full array local dimming. It's great for gaming. It's €1000. We also have this LG OLED smart TV for €1200, which is a step up in terms of contrast and response time..."
Me: "Wait... Smart TV? No, I don't want a TV with an operating system. I want a computer display."
Clerk: "There aren't a lot of big computer displays. We have this ASUS ROG 55" computer monitor. It's also 120hz. Very similar response time, but the brightness and contrast aren't as great, it's edge-lit"
Me, trying really hard to make out the contrast differences under ugly fluorescent lights of the store: "So it's a worse big couch display, without smart OS. How much is it?"
Clerk: "€3500"
Me: "So what you're saying is that while the displays are similar or even better, the operating system on all these TVs is so incredibly bad, you have to give €2500 discount for people to even buy it?"30 -
So, I'm programming a control system for a prototype aerospace vehicle. You know, the stuff that needs to work to prevent falling out of the sky.
Anyway, test day was today (was -- not anymore). Wiring all the electronics, everything is actuating and works well. Except for one part, a little thruster for stability.
I spent hours - literally, fucking hours - trying to fix the problem. Wrong address? Wrong syntax? I had absolutely no clue what was wrong. Queue the hardware guy, $stupid:
$stupid: "How have you not got it working yet?!"
$me: "I don't know, everything I'm trying isn't working. I've spent hours digging through this code and nothing is fucking working."
$stupid: "Well have you set it up for the new thruster?"
$me: "What...What new thruster?"
$stupid: "Oh, the one we installed this morning, did noone tell you?"
WHY WOULDN'T YOU TELL ME THIS?! COMMUNICATION 101!6 -
For those who were wondering, since my last post had some people who seemed interested, here's my progress on my 8-bit computer. I've got the clock on the left hand side, and the 2 8-bit registers on the right hand sign. (The power strips in the middle are going to be used as a bus)
9 -
Everyone's posting their PC's for wk119, but I thought I could do better.. think different, so to say :P
My electronics workbench.. cleaned up, I promise! Just that there's so much stuff that I have no idea where else to place it :')
And I wish I could post this BEFORE WanBLowS decided to shit itself again with one of those goddamn fucking Blue Screens of Dicksucking Shaftsystem! At least devRant UWP from @JS96 has the dignity to save the post just in case its host craps itself all over.. FUCK!!!
.. Anyway, high resolution counterpart of the image here: https://i.imgur.com/ZrJmMe0.jpg
25 -
Although I love developing I always thought that there was something missing.
I learned Java but didn't really like it. I had spent quite some time with web development and enjoyed it but I felt like developing with JavaScript was too high level and I felt the same for Python.
So I started learning the most awesome programming language: C
I just love that I have so much control over everything and that the language is so compact and gives you just the right amount of tools you need.
I also love physics and electronics a lot and it feels awesome to first build something and then program it.
I am looking forward to design a PCB (printed circuit board) and write code for an AVR microcontroller like the Atmega328 (most arduinos use this one).
Picture of the project I am working on.
10 -
After 2 hours of wiring/debugging/rewiring, I have my EEPROM programmer halfway done. Currently is only able to read locations in memory. Next step: make it programmable.
(For those of you who dont know, EEPROM stands for Electrically Erasable, Programmable Read-Only Memory
29 -
Mainly a story with some ranting sprinkled on top :)
My grandma used to refuse to turn her PC off because ONE SINGLE WINDOWS 8.1 UPDATE like 2 years ago made it so that Windows would turn the PC on by itself, nevermind it was fixed in the next update, she would simply refuse to try to turn the PC off from that point on... I never looked at the uptime but the PC was sitting on a carpet and all the fans were struggling to keep spinning, so much dust! When I asked her why it's so dusty all around the PC (the table that the PC was under was covered in a really thick layer of dust) she replied that the chambermaid comes every Wednesday to clean up the whole flat so she has no idea. I set up a camera that was recording the whole room so I could see what was going on... sure enough the chambermaid avoided anything that looked like it could have some ICs in it with a distance of at least 2 meters... When I showed the video to my grandma she was like: Yes, she is scared of electronics...
Seriously fuck me... Allright, I cleaned the whole table, carpet and the inside of PC, everything ran so quietly that I wasn't sure if I plugged the fans in.
Anyway after this I had to record the PC one whole night so I could prove to my grandma that it would not turn on by itself and she can in fact turn it off.
Fuck me... what a bad week that was...
PS: Yes, my stories do not have a point :)5 -
Being a sysadmin, it's pretty difficult to get around the whole development of front-end stuff.. positioning, scaling, and everything... I hate it. So many ideas but only the ability to make the back-end and if it involves electronics that as well as networking. But building a pretty UI is beyond me... I love hating on all the frameworks and Node, but in all honesty.. front-end people, I kind of envy you 😅6
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Mountain climbing. Increases social skills, teamwork and trust.
Building a house. Increases spatial visualization and planning skills.
Electronics. Increases mathematical and problem solving skills.
Chemistry. Increases precision and analytical reasoning skills.
Psychedelic drugs. Increases imagination, inspiration and abstraction skills.24 -
What is the most ridiculous over-the-top "startup" thing you've been the victim of as a developer?
Alternatively, what kind of weird startup luxury would you absolutely love to have at your company?
For me, at various companies I've worked at/visited:
1. Hammocks & fatboy beanbags. Current employer has a "Netflix & Chill" corner with nice couches, and a small gym. I have encountered isolation/flotation tanks at the office of one of our partners... which is cool, but over the top in my opinion.
2. A fully automated aquaponics garden in the lunchroom. Was awesome, until some fish died and started to rot.
3. One hoverboard per employee, at previous employer. I splashed hot chocolate milk in an arc over three desks. A coworker broke his ankle while watching me spill chocolate milk.
4. Daily scrum standup meetings, on socks, in a big bouncy castle. Not kidding. Fucking ridiculous... (but secretly fun). That employer also had spiral slides between all floors, a tiny half-pipe with tiny skateboards, and someone who rode a unicycle way too much. It was a fucking circus. Stuck in the office of a Fintech company.
5. Soldering bench (at my current company), with drawers full of breadboards, servos and electronics components. Completely unrelated to my work, but it was my idea. It's just great to build a simple kits together with another random coworker while brainstorming platform features & refining specs... much better than meetings with bullshit slides.
6. Unlimited energy drink. Developed a serious caffeine habit (15-20 cans a day), and almost got a stomach ulcer. Not beneficial to employee health.
7. I really do love working from home + unlimited holidays. Just being able to honestly say "fuck you guys, I'm gonna get drunk and play games today", and at other times working until 4am and sleeping in the next day, or taking a week to work in a park in Rome... It makes work truly feel like my favorite hobby. Combined with a good sprints and curious/ambitious people, you can easily track productivity anyway.19 -
Made myself a little sparker :3 judging from the spark gap, the output is about 6-7kV I guess. Can't measure it though, it's way too high for my multimeters to handle. Taser, beefed up bugzapper module, electronic cigarette lighter, so many possible uses for this thing 😋
49 -
Fuck all those shitdesigns that interface with their LCD using flat graphite cables!
USE FUCKING COPPER WIRES ALREADY!!! At least those things can take a small fucking tug of gravity during disassembly, unlike that micron-thick graphite junk which fractures even more easily than my goddamn toe did!!!
And as mentioned on Hackaday (https://hackaday.com/2012/09/...), repairing it is hell. How much does it cost to make a decent copper wire.. I can buy those things for like 20 cents from AliExpress, so don't tell me motherfuckturer that you can't. And these copper ribbon wires last on ya, AND can be repaired with a simple soldering job. Unlike this FUCKING GARBAGE!!!7 -
Anyone who remembers my last rant about getting fake chips might enjoy this.
After realizing that the EEPROMs I got last time were counterfeit, I bought a new set (and different model) from Atmel. They were super easy to hook up, and the best part is they actually work! Behold, my bit-by-bit EEPROM programmer:
10 -
Just found a 1000kV arc generator on AliExpress.. huehue :v
1 megavolt? That's the usual voltage level on lightning bolts. And with air's breakdown voltage of ~15kV/cm (could differ depending on humidity), you'd need nearly a meter of distance between the prongs *and* be able to achieve an arc between that distance without having shit arc internally, before you could ever reach 1MV. Yet arc generators' prongs are usually within 1cm of each other. I'd give it 10kV at best.
Also, they're generating the voltage of a lightning bolt for €3.65 apparently.. way too good to be true. Even components able to handle 10kV are quite costly, and components having a breakdown voltage of over 1MV is completely unheard of. I'm gonna buy one of those puppies to see how the circuit is designed and to zap the shit out of those bloody mosquitos in here - the only women that love me :'( - but I wouldn't be surprised if it just boosts the output voltage up to whatever until it can arc and short out. Completely unregulated of course.. which is fine but eh, I doubt that any of those components are rated for 1MV so probably the regulation is in smoking components acting like fuses when the prongs are too wide apart :v
As for the purpose of this rant.. nothing in particular really. Perhaps it'll educate some, I don't know. Just wanted to put it out there :)
Also if you'd like to watch some video material about this, you may find ElectroBOOM's coverage interesting: https://youtube.com/watch/...29 -
Once I had been sick for a couple of weeks. Then came back to this abomination
Didn't make me feel any better 😨
8 -
My company decided to hire a new director at the electronics shop. There are certain hours when we have a lot of clients. So the guy had to man a cash register.
Client: I need 2 kilo resistors
The client obviously needed resistors of two kiloohms.
The director rushed out to the warehouse and came back with 2 kilograms of resistors to the gram
How can someone be so retarded! ¿4 -
Well, it all started off with hardware-level programming involving jumpers and stuff like that... Then came Assembly, which was good.. B, C compilers. Finally came the interpreted languages, and that's where in my opinion the abstraction should've ended. But no, we needed more frameworks, more libraries, even more abstraction! Where does it end? As it seems to be going, I guess that users will have kid toys - no iToys! - for electronics and we'll be programming on with bloated Scratch GUI's. Nothing against Scratch, but that shit ain't proper programming anymore. God I can't wait for the future.
ABSTRACT ALL THE THINGS!!!
Oh and not to mention that all software will be governed in political correctness by some Alex SJW AI shit that became sentient. Not a single programming term will be non-offensive anymore, no matter how hard you try to not offend anyone, or God forbid - don't care about it because you just want to make something that's readable, usable and working!! Terms, UI names for buttons, heck even icons! REMOVE IT BECAUSE IT OFFENDS SOMEONE THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT!!!18 -
People, please understand
1GB != 1024MB
1GB == 1000MB
1GiB != 1024MB
1GiB == 1024MiB
The MebiByte, GibiByte, KibiByte and others "biByte"s were defined at the end of XX century. How can be possible that people (I mean people which study/teach informatics, electronics or something similar) still don't know what is it?16 -
My devGoals for 2018:
- Build a RESTful API with NodeJS just for learning.
- Finish my first product (electronics sideproject).
- Convert more people to use CraftCMS or at least not use Joomla or WP.
- Get a raise.
- Add Continuous Integration to more projects.
- Add more unit testing where appropriate.
- Create and release a mobile app.
To be continued...
*playing to be continued meme sound*9 -
New to this but here's my rant I suppose. It bothers me how "non-tech" people kind of devalue what tech people do. Like they have zero understanding of it, so you make something in 30 minutes or an hour that took years of building said skills and involved complex logic and understanding of relational data and because it only took you 30 minutes or an hour it must have been "easy". Or the way you are everybody's free tech advisor with family and friends... And things are said like "I'm not good with this stuff, but you're so good with it". For the record nobody is just "great" at technology or coding from birth its been a 2+ decade craft that I've experimented with and learned and put effort into. So taking into consideration all this effort I have put in to understand all this you say you'll never remember to push that button so you'll just ask me again when the problem arises. Yes because its so fun for me to constantly maintain your electronics because you can't bother to remember to push a button.5
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In electronics there's 3 options.
1. You pay a small fortune to get something decent.
2. You pay a smaller fortune to get crap.
3. You build it yourself and it'll be nicely priced AND decent.
Why is that? I have no idea. Profiteering gluttons perhaps.
Case in point: my watch. A waterproof one, so you'd expect to be able to take it in the shower, which I often did.
But then, le wild drop from 50cm height occurred and the whole thing just popped open, with soapy water rushing in. Luckily it didn't short out, and I quickly evacuated it out of the shower and dipped it with my towel.
Then already I thought.. what the fuck is wrong with the designers of this thing?! I'm all for keeping the inner parts of electronics accessible for self-servicing. But in a waterproof watch you wouldn't expect the backside to pop right off and expose the bloody internals, would you? So that's one thing. While evacuating it I quickly figured that I'd want to remove the battery immediately.. except that fucking thing was screwed in place?! WHAT THE FUCK?!! Use those screws to keep the fucking backside of the watch in place you certified pieces of shit that designed this craptacular piece of garbage!!!
Finished showering, went ahead and troubleshooted the thing. Miraculously it still worked. Except that now the UI of the fucking thing is biting me in the ass. A single button on the watch is used to operate the whole thing, and get it to set itself to the correct time, get radio signal, go in sleep mode (where the watch stops ticking, for storage purposes) and activate itself again. So I dived into the manual.. and still couldn't get it to work properly. So it's got one button just like an iPhone, it craps itself when it's dropped just like an iPhone, its design is shit just like an iPhone, and it's completely unusable when it craps itself just like an iPhone.
And the manual... Oh fucking shit. It specifies that the watch is 3 bar water resistant, yet apparently you can't take it into the shower. 3 FUCKING BAR!!! That's supposed to enable you to take a fucking dive with it! And apparently you can't drop it either.. who would've thought, when they lock it with no more than outwards pressure from the back plate into the main body! How difficult can it be to use fucking screws, and to make it watertight put some rubber bands or whatever?!
CERTIFIED MOTHERFUCKERS!!!
And the watch, it's in the garbage can right now. Right where it belongs!!21 -
All this "political correctness" cancer spreading through the Python community at the moment over "master/slave" terminology has me wondering where will it end. When the pendulum swings will be have a pro-life movement opposed to pre-emptively killing processes? Will a branch of PETA form to oppose the taxonomic appropriation of reptilian names for the language as a whole? Are we going to need to find gender-neutral names for motherboards to avoid offending those who are offended by the oppressive digital binary? Will removing "mother" from the name motherboard invite 6th wave feminists to decry the influence of toxic masculinity in electronics? Do snake lives matter? Seriously, some people need to take a month off to go fuck themselves somewhere far far away and stop confusing "diversity" with "rampant idiocy".
14 -
I absolutely hate the way we are taught programming in Indian colleges.
FML #1: I'm pursuing a UG CS course, and this semester, I only had one subject of Computers, that too only 1 credit. The rest with all electronics.
FML #2: In that 1 credit course, we had to make a C++ project which had "data handling". No one cares if you build something cool or not, just that a project should have "extensive use" of data handling.
FML #3: Source code had to be >= 1000 lines. This is the only place where ADDING MORE LINES OF CODES THAN REDUCING IT is appreciated. Had to stuff my code with all kinds of comments and violating the basic principle of DRY.
So, yeah, we're fucked big time. 😥14 -
I felt very inspired when I first controlled a LED using QBasic and the LPT1 (printer) port, back in 1996. It just felt like "so much power"!
(Was more or less similar to the photo)
1 -
I've just disassembled this LED floodlight that I bought a while ago. It's some stupid little cheapie from a dollar store, so I figured that there'd be shit inside. But I wanted that LED cob.. a power LED :3
Well, shit wasn't too far off from the truth. The component choice is reasonable, but the design of the bloody thing.. batshit insane. The LED floodlight is powered by 4 AAA batteries, connected in series. So 6VDC. That then goes into this little tactile pushbutton, into the LED cob and then a 4.7 ohm resistor.
Well that's a pretty easy circuit.. let's remove the batteries and the casement, and put it on the lab bench power supply. Probes connected to the circuit with only the resistor and the LED cob in between (I didn't want to deal with the switch). Power supply set to 6V, current limiting to 500mA, contact!! And it works, amazing! So I let it run for a while to see that nothing gets too hot.. hah. After a minute or so, smoke would come out.. LED cob was a bit warm to the touch but nothing too bad. But the resistor.. I could cook water on it if I wanted to! 100 fucking °C, and rising. What the F yo?!
So I figured that I didn't want to put the resistor in between there. Just the LED cob now, which apparently has a forward voltage somewhere between 3.2V and 3.3V depending on how I set the current (500mA and 600mA respectively). Needed a bigger heatsink though, so I jammed one of my aluminium heatsinks on there. And it worked great! Very bright too, as it takes between 1.6 and 2W of power. Just for a comparison, the lighting in my living room is 4x5W and the ones on top of my dining table are 2x3W (along with some TL bar that my landlord put there.. fluorescent I think). So yeah, 2W is quite a lot for an LED, especially when it's all concentrated into one tiny spot.
That said, back to the original design with the resistor. 2 questions I have for that moron that designed this crap. First, why use a resistor for a power LED?! They needlessly waste power, and aren't good choices for anything that consumes more than 100mA. You should use PWM for these purposes, or tune your voltage on the supply side. Second, why go with 6V when your forward voltage is 3.3 at most? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 3 batteries with 4.5V? Ah, but I know the answer to the second one. AAA cells aren't rated for high loads like this. So that's likely why the alkaline cells that I had in there before have started leaking. Thanks, certified piece of shit!
Honestly, consumer electronics are such a joke... At least there's some components that I can salvage from this crap. Mainly the LED cob, but also the resistor and the tactile pushbutton perhaps.
One last remark that I'd like to make. This floodlight was cheap garbage. But considering that you can't do it well at that price, you just shouldn't do it. You know why? Because consumers always go for the cheapest. Makes a lot of money to build at rock bottom prices and make shit, but it damages the whole industry, since now the good designs will go out of business. That's why consumer electronics is so full of crap nowadays. Some unethical profiteering gluttons saw money, and they replaced the whole assortment with nothing but garbage. I'm sure that there's a special place in hell for that kind of people.17 -
This is my desk right now, anyone else who really enjoys fiddling with arduino / rpi electronics stuff?
Like making a remote for the projectors in school or using an Ethernet switch and a raspberry pi to create a WiFi network :P
34 -
I smell burnt electronics.... Somewhere. Can't find it. Look, unplug, smell, plug in, look smell, unplug, smell, dance, can't find it.
I need a young priest and an old priest.5 -
I finally had the patience to finish the Electronics class :D
https://instructables.com/class/...
13 -
Damn, credit cards are so fucking secure these days that you hardly can BUY shit with them!
I need some special electronics that I only can get from a vendor in the US, which is overseas. Click click, buy, done. Well no, credit card refused. WTF? Click retry link. No, still refused. FUCK.
Called up the 24/7 hotline of my CC company. Oh yeah, that got blocked by the security system, somehow. We disable that for 20 minutes, just retry. Clicked retry link at the vendor. No failure mail. Hmmm, too good to be true?! Called up the electronics vendor. Yeah should work, stuff is in the warehouse stage. 40 minutes later: credit card declined. FUCK.
Called up the CC company again. Ok, disable blocker for one hour. Nice advice from them, tell the vendor it's only 45 minutes so that there's some buffer. Clicked retry link at the vendor and called them up to make sure that they retry before the time runs out.
LO AND BEHOLD, I could finally pay the shit!!8 -
Me: *starts to get into electronics*
Me: *unplugs a few wires while building a project*
Me: Shit, actually, didn't want to unplug those. No worries.
Me: *instinctively reaches for the nonexistent Ctrl-Z*
Me: Oh, that's right. My actions have consequences in the real world.5 -
Procrastinating while waiting for my robot parts to arrive
(The lights make a nice pattern, but I can't upload videos here :()
8 -
RANT TIME!
Sorry guys, I know this is devRant and probably not a place to post this but am fucking burning with fury and fatigue! I should probably develop elecRant and post it there instead.
I FUCKING HATE POWER ELECTRONICS!!
I am in my final year of electrical engineering and I can fucking say with confidence that power electronics is the most fucked up unit I have seen in my life. A whole load of useless math from simple RLC circuits just to make students' lives miserable. For those who might not know, power electronics is some unit that involves use of solid state electronics(transistors, diodes etc) for power applications(switching mostly). Basically things like inverters and converters. UPS systems are an example of their applications.
Now don't be fooled by how that sounds cool and so smart, this shit is fucked up. These circuits in the attached picture might just seem like simple RLC networks with some BJTs, but they are devils in their own right. They fucking need some advanced unnecessary calculus and Fourier analysis to even calculate the simplest output current!! Worst still, some of these motherfuckers have more than 1 mode of operation,needing one to analyze some fucking 100+ waveforms. I fucking hate this shiit! I hate it!
You might say that i am just being lazy and don't want to study. Let me tell you something, FUCK YOU TOO!!
19 -
Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.
No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.
It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)
Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.
The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.
Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.
It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.
There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.
The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.
As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).
46 -
Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding
That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.
I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.
Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.
Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase
but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol
Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.39 -
I found something even more effective than coffee on hard Mondays mornings. A fresh cup of technology, just the right quantity of silicium, transistors and sensors with a pinch of cloud connectivity.
9 -
Just disassembled 2 €5 desk fans because they were shit.. and so is their design apparently.
What I found inside was actually surprisingly simple.. a toddler could build it. It's just a DC motor, a 3PDT switch, DC barrel connector, some wires and screws to hold stuff in place. Oh and the plastic thingie with the fan blades, as well as the USB cable of course.
5 fucking euros. The combined cost of the components would be less than 3, certified motherfuckturers. Time to build it, injection moulding, transportation, sure.. but still.
And if you think that being salty about €5 is cheap shittalk, expand that to every fucking piece of electronics that doesn't cost a small fortune.. at all price ranges. Could be radios, alarm clocks, heck even phones. Shit's way too expensive for what it's worth. Perhaps because so many people in the industry are just here for a quick buck.. motherfuckers 😒
Anyway, back to the design.. the hole in the fan blade thingie is supposed to get the motor's shaft shafted in, to turn the blades. I'd use glue there.. but not these designers. They just shove it in and hope that friction takes care of everything. And one of the fan blade modules' hole was so wide that inserting the motor is like throwing a sausage down the hallway. No contact at all! Make it tight already like the Chinese designer's glory-...
Nah let's not get into Chinese tightness just yet.
Oh and also a resistor for slow mode. Consumes just as much power except the fan turns slower. Because fuck efficiency, right?
Goddammit, next time I'm just gonna build my own again.. at least that wouldn't be a certified piece of shit 😑
7 -
*receives an old business laptop as payment for refurbishing another one*
Hmm, this thing doesn't have a charger with it.. looks like it's taking 18.5V.. my HP laptop's charger supplies that but its barrel connector doesn't fit 🤔
Regular users: oh dear now I have to buy a charger with a fitting connector for this.. where do I even start?!
Me: Well I guess I could just remove the charging port and solder some wires straight into the board instead 🤔
But that voltage.. my HP laptop's charger is still in use and I don't really want to fuck around with that one.
Regular users: oh dear oh dear, shouldn't I just throw this laptop away?
Me: well I guess that I could just use one of the rails of my upgraded lab bench power supply for it?
Lab electronics saving the day, every day, time and time again.. fuck yeah 😎6 -
My first try at greentext.
>Be me
>18y.o recently recruted to a university
>1 month before moving to the university
>Be alone with his computer && electronics hobbys
>My town sucks
>Go on first year student integration camp
>Yay im going to meet a lot of people like me!
>Camp near the lake, 100km from home
>Day 1/7
>Moved my stuff to a house
>I dont know anybody
>Meet 3 friends who are going to live with me
>One of them is great, i like him, he likes to code, uses mac and iphone (it suffices for his needs, he understand everybody else who thinks otherwise)
>Two of them are pro party guys / alcohol vaccums
>Fucking pricks with their boombox
>99% of students are just there to drink a FUCKING LOT
>WTF.jpg
>Day 5/7
>I had been drunk only once at the camp and i havent drunk since because of AlcoholAfterEffects®
>Have a sad moment due to me wasting my time and money here.
>Totaly wasted my time... and found nobody like me
>After that day i meet 2 programers
>I have taught them OOP
>Had a great time
>Night game!
>Bizarre student party rituals
>Use my torch i made literary 8h before the camp had started
>Torch is made from pvc pipe, 9v battery, chinesium buck converter, old led module, switch
>Find the guy with the HUGE TORCH
>Wow. Is it the 100W homemade floodlight?
>Conversation about our constructions
>Both sides were looking for a friend with similar hobbies
>Exchange the contacts
>Hopefuly meet thogether and make few projects in the future
>Present time
>Got 3 friends in one day
>But still dosent understand the huge amount of alcohol nearly everyone is drinking13 -
So I just received this second DSP5005 DC-DC programmable power supply. Time to make an enclosure for the thing!! 3 power supplies totaling at around 1kW, and 2 variables connected to the 50V 10A one, through external banana wires (I want all of this to be modular). No biggie, take measurements for the AC-DC supplies, add in the variables on the front, and cut it out.
So, I went and did just that. Now my 500W (50V 10A) supply is a bit larger than the others, and it's got a fan. So I figured, well then probably my 24V 8.3A (200W) and 12V 15A (180W) supplies could use some cooling as well. But how am I going to achieve passive cooling without a spacing between the supplies?! So I thought of some spacer design. It had to be out of wood, and I had some 4mm MDF and some IKEA parts around. So, 4mm MDF for the plate and 8mm wood spacers from IKEA for the spacing. And some super glue to hold it all together.
Weighing my power supplies against a 1l bottle of milk, it seems like my power supplies are ~500g. Great, so the top spacer would take 500g and the bottom one 1kg + the weight of the top spacer.
I ended up building one plate with 6 spacers in it yesterday, until I got too tired. Then I placed my entire weight against it, 20kg at least. It didn't budge. Pretty good for something that's only designed to withstand a 1kg load!!
So, I made something good with only a 10x18cm piece of MDF, some garbage from IKEA, and most importantly a bit of a brain. Something that can handle 20x its designed load no problem. Manufacturers, is it really right to produce shit when I can beat your manufacturing processes big time without an assembly line?!5 -
Someone here into 3d printing? Got into the hobby end of last year and built my own new printer this year. I love this hobby! So great to print custom housings for your build electronics.
13 -
I’m pretty terrible at soldiering and small electronics in general, but I’m kind of okay with how this turned out.
Back story:
That helmet is my sister-in-law’s, she drives a polaris slingshot. (It’s technically a motorcycle here in the US because it has three wheels.) and she hooked up some EL wire to her helmet and the larger black rectangle in the picture is what the battery pack looked like before. (It takes two AA batteries.) and doesn’t have anyway to recharge them natively.
I did some research and found a neat little charging board (TP4056) and got her a small single cell li-ion battery for it. Now it’s not only less than half the length of the original, but it has a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit built in. The battery is 500mAh and lasts about 65-70mins on a charge. Personally, I feel like that’s not a good enough battery life on a charge, but my sis-in-law says that her and her slingshot friends usually only run with the EL lights on for 30 minute stretches at time so they should be able to get two to three uses before needing a recharge. Which btw, only takes about 35-40 minutes from completely dead.
The box looks like shit cause I literally hacked away at the original casing with a pocket knife and then crammed all the pieces back in and hot-glued the casing together. But I took measurements of the final-ish design and will try to find a small electronics box that will be able to house everything internally. (L: 1-3/4” W: 1-1/4” H: 1-1/4”)
6 -
I've noticed something odd lately.. every time I mention mains electricity in certain EE forums, people tend to go "you are a madman for wanting to use that 🤨".
To which I think in my head, sure it's a dangerous thing, after all the angry pixies that dance back and forth are kind of angry (120V) or actually insane (230V) depending on where you live.. but to mindlessly tell people to not use it at all, as an electronics engineer.. what's up with that?
I mean, it's a matter of respecting its power, right. So whenever I work with it, thick gloves, keeping my exposed lines as tiny as possible, keeping them around for as short as possible, properly insulating anything permanent, and even asking my landlord to install a defibrillator for when things still go horribly wrong (to which she agreed because it'd be useful to the other residents as well, yay 😁) are kinda mandatory.
And that's for the same reason essentially that precautions are taken when climbing a mountain by having climbing shoes, connecting yourself to pikes jammed into the mountain over a strong metal wire in case things go wrong, etc etc. And for the same reason that you don't climb a ladder in high heels and so on. Obvious, right.
Point is, inexperienced people indeed shouldn't be working with mains AC at all and that's the reason that I've avoided it in the first year or 2 of learning about electronics. But mindlessly telling people in EE forums that they're a redneck for working with the imminently lethal AC.. what's up with that?
Maybe I should just go find another electronics forum like the EEVblog forums over some random (kinda dead) electronics chat on Telegram though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯12 -
I'm working on the scariest looking electronic thing that I've ever built.
It started to terrify me more today...
17 -
I love it.
I'm a geek, and a nerd,
I love everything that computers,
I love electronics, physics, even mathematics,
I love thinking, solving problems, learning new things.
And programming is all of those combined, I love it with a passion.5 -
Why do managers always want to fucking "discuss"? If you had literally a first-grader's education in basic electronics, you could define tasks and tickets by yourself and not have to fumble around all day and fuck it up,13
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TL;TR
My mum just came to me asking me why the mouse is not working ...like I'm GOD of electronics :( (I'm just a simple dev) I simply though that the battery is dead because it's old. Soooooo.....
I showed her how to open it and how to change the battery. After 5 min she came back with a new battery and the same mouse asking me to fix it for her....
In my mind I literally snapped my brain was bleeding and exploding at the same time.
I just cringed a fake smile and changed the battery in front of her very slowly. I sure she won't remember how to do it next time.
At the end of the story I can't talk back or be angry to my parents I have to much respect for them. They though me everything from how to poop, speak, dress, eat and so on.
Be kind to your parents.5 -
The down sides of living in a third world country, the prices of things { especially electronics } are so damn expensive. I love my country and all but hey this is really unaffordable.
To give you an idea, I work for 40 hours a week, four weeks a month and earn around 25,000 rupees.
Sometimes I just watch videos on YouTube of people building things and feel happy for them.
14 -
Is the software at your company so bad that it's a miracle that anything works?
Does it feel like this colossal pile of broken electronics from the past 30 years duct taped together and patched with multiple tiers of adapters, wires spliced together with scotch tape, and someone on stand by with a fire extinguisher?
Do you feel like getting your product to work is like how we used to get things to work back in the eighties? Not just turning things off and on again, but things like hitting the tv to make it work again, blowing into cartridges, and the feeling of pulling on the starting cord on a gas powered mower over and over again to no avail?
That is exactly what my company's codebase is. A huge amorphous, heterogenous pile of shit that somehow works and occasionally has to be massaged to make it work again. Fuck my life.3 -
Coders get yourself a electronics friend and electronic heads get yourself a coder.
I got a friend who studies engineering and really loves it and i do software development with a passion.
And we both love to chill with some drinks every now and then.
The result: We're currently creating a thing which fills you drinks via a button press on your phone.😁
Optional paypal payment for every drink for use at parties of course.(;4 -
Just stumbled upon this channel of a woman called Jeri Ellsworth.. turns out that she's interested in HAM radio. This is something that I'm personally interested in as well, and seeing how the community here seems to have a keen interest in electronics, I figured that I might want to put it out there. After all, knowledge is to be shared :)
Also she's apparently self-taught as well which I think is really impressive. That's what - to me at least - separates the "I do it just for the money" people from the genuinely interested ones, and the spoonfed bunch from the curious few.
https://youtube.com/channel/...8 -
Hololens development forced me into Visual Studio after spending years doing Unity development with MonoDevelop in MacOS.
Why haven't anyone told me to switch sooner! Thanks to Visual Studio + ReSharper, my brain farts turn into a coherent code almost automatically.
I hate that I need MacOS for the iOS development and Win 10 for Hololens. Running Win 10 on Parallels kinda works, but it is a compromise. Developing without headphones/earplugs is out of the question if you don't want to go deaf.
I wan't all the tools for a single OS so I don't have to maintain multiple computers and even more importantly travel with multiple laptops. Just love the security check question "Do you have any electronics with you? Please put it into the container." - "Could I get a couple more containers, please..."9 -
Bloody shit, I hate all the hypes right now.
Seemingly everyone is going from 0 to zealous hype at the moment...
Be it Musk's fanboys (that arsehole must have a prolapse), the mfucking GPT chatbot or anything else.
Everything's hyped up and noone talks about normal stuff...
... and when you point that out, everyone gets angry for reasons I cannot understand.
We had so many good inventions and progress in science this year (despite the world being pretty apocalyptic....), but seemingly everyone can only talk about either Twitter or their Twitter timeline. -.-
The Christmas bullshitting was hard enough each year, as it has nothing to do with being a festive event and love etc, but being just an commercial bullshit bingo...
But adding all the hypes makes the bullshit parade unbearable.
Dear Santa, please fry all the mobile electronics at Christmas, so we can talk about normal stuff and have a nice evening.
... Would be probably even better to just fry all electronics, even stone age was probably more interesting than the earbleeding conversations at the moment.19 -
Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃
Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.
But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970
So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.
So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.
So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.
So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.
Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.
And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.
And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!
Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!
P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".11 -
First year at university, prepared to set up multiple electronics.
rPi, arduino Ethernet shield, laptop, and desktop.
Brand new netgear switch to satisfy my internet surfing needs....
After setting up my devices, I realized none of them have internet. Hm. The feed port on my switch wasn't blinking either. So I tell the front desk, and a short 7 days later the port is back on. Yay, problem solved.
One morning I arise to see the port dark and inactive. Furious I use my laptop to share an internet connection while my actual port is "broken".
Support ticket is reopened and this time I get an email saying the port was disabled due to a security issue.
Me: what's the issue?
IT: there was more than two devices connected to the port
(OnLy TwO dEvIcEs PeR port???)
Me: oh okay I will only connect two.
The next day the port is disabled, again.
Me: can you tell me why it was disabled?
IT: a switch was detected being used, security error.
Me: how do I connect more than one device to the port without a switch???
IT: ...
IT: Please only connect one device.
🤔10 -
I've just found out that the Chinese can even fuck up the most basic of manufacturing processes. A goddamn fucking perfboard, why on Earth would that need good adhesive with decent mechanical strength, right?!!
Initially I was told by other electronics chaps that the adhesive under the pads melts because I'm soldering at such a high temperature (470°C). Well I thought at the time that these boards are really shitty and their adhesive is garbage, and now that I've even seen a cold pad just rip off cleanly, I guess it's confirmed. That adhesive IS fucking garbage and that temperature on the iron is really just fine.
Well, I guess that I'll just design my own PCB's then, and hope that JLCPCB isn't even more Chinesium shit. Because honestly I'm pretty fucking sick of it.4 -
Most hobbies need funding to get started and to continue. Wood to carve, cables and electronics to solder. Programmers need only their time (as long as they have a computer). It is the most cheap thing to pick up and learn.9
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We had robotics, or rather an electronics workshop today. Just imagine throwing a bunch of nerds into a room with 3d printers, lots of electronic parts and other tools.
Anyway one of my friends said that his computer wasn't working.
Me: It's running windows so it's broken by default.
Him: common, windows isn't that bad
Me: it is
Our teacher walking by: I'd never want to use windows, it's basically malware
I just sat there smiling 😊2 -
I always get yelled at when I make a big deal of having tons of open drinks near expensive hardware, and it gets on my fucking nerves because it is almost always followed by a spill and irreversible damage.
Is it really that difficult to place beverages away from the electronics or maybe close the water bottle after taking a drink?9 -
Hello World! First post here. I'm literally done with frontend stuff. I want to design code, not to code design. Unless it's Processing. I find it cute. So.. I have a somewhat handy grasp on C++ because of a class in electronics course, Python seems quite easy to catch. I'm totally new to programming. I'd like to get into software, game development and android development (but I would like to do things cross-platform).
Which paths, resources, languages, useful books, videos, or just anything would you recommend?
To be fair, I have no coding friends so mentorship or simply finding code buddies would be great. 💜7 -
Making electronics more difficult to repair with security fasteners and ultrasonically welded plastic nightmares and what have you.. what's the point? The argument from manufacturers is that "users don't want to get in there anyway". But, it's not like even if they could, they'd want to, right? Which type of person that doesn't know electronics very well and has an interest in repairing it would go and look at a board, and say "this is how it works, this and that is broken and this is how it should be repaired"? Not many users can repair their own devices regardless. So why? To preserve IP? Not like the Chinese bootleggers care about that. To preserve sales? Users can't repair their stuff anyway. To keep those who want to peek inside out, just for the hell of it? Anyone determined enough will be willing to break it in the process anyway.6
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4 Weeks ago i went to a Electronics store here in germany. My Intention was to look at some smaller laptios (12-14 zoll) to use while im traveling to my work. While i was looking at some Laptops i hear a conversation next to me between a customer and a guy working at the Electronic store.
He says to the customer That the Laptop has a 8 zoll Monitor pointing at the Laptops bottom. My First thought was wtf because i dont knwo any Laptop with an 8 Zoll screen but its still possible. After they done talking i walk to the Laptop and look at the Spot the guy was pointing at. There was a battery sign saying 8h battery duration. says no more :)16 -
This community is amazing. I started developing an app from scratch, with no knowledge of how to do it but this community has helped me so much. I have just started it, been a few days but devRant is what got me into coding in the first place. I was more of a hands-on electronics/mechanical engineering kinda guy but this has been amazing and I might just switch to computer science branch for my engineering. Thanks devRant and the community :)8
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that feeling when your new toys from aliexpress get delivered earlier than expected... i feel so happy unpacking those sensors, capacitors, heat sinks, microchips, breadboards and all. i feel like i have a geeky shopping addiction, i probably won't have the time to play with them from all the work and other personal projects, but still i hoarded enough electronics to invade the world with a drone army in case i have a few weeks me-time.5
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FFUUUuucccckkk me sideways. So I decided to look into USB type-c's power delivery and alt modes. Cause I kinda want to make an adapter card to run my displays over a single cable. TLDR of the rest: USB-C has some huge capabilities which noone is interested in using since its way to complex to handle for what its worth in the end.
Now PD alone is kinda ok to deal with since a lot of powerbanks use it and some hobby guys documented how to work with it. I find it really odd thou that you NEED to use a dedicated IC for using the configuration chanel to negotiate how much power you can draw. Why the USB standard didnt use some simple 5V low speed signalling? Also the standard says that you only have to implement 5v 0.6A with every other power level being optional. (This is also true for cables. Most manufacturers use only the USB 2.0 standard for them and brag about how fast type-C is. ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) )
Now to the alt modes. These motherfuckers are a real shitshow to deal with. First you need a Mux to deal with USB-C's two way insertion, so your signals wont get flipped. Next thing is that you have four lanes at your disposal in alt mode. Which you can either use for four Display Port Lanes or two DP lanes and two USB 3.0 lanes. (You always get USB 2.0) Now you may think that there would be one simple chip to do it all? Nope you need atleast two at the price of 6$ each. One for PD and one for Alt modes. Both are very hard to solder (QFN, 0.5 mm pitch 40+ pins) TI ended up being the only one with a decent offering of IC's that do what I need. As for working with them, you would think that you just slap a simple MCU on there that communicates over I2C or SPI to configure the chips? Nope! You program the chips memory from which it configures itsself. And the programming is done with some TI tool which gives me no idea as to how you can handle everything whith no control logic behind it.
Looking into alternative IC's leaves me with cypress semi. And their documentation is basically a total mess. I wanna know what that chip is good for and what I need to do to make it work. I dont care about technical details mixed with marketing jargon nobody understands. And I really despise that I have to register just to download a datasheet. Especially since there is no info about it on the main page.
And this whole rant hasnt even touched the topic that USB-C only uses DP and nothing else. So you better hope that you have DP++ so you can use a passive conversion.
This was my Ted Talk about USB-C. Some info in it may be subject to my stupidity and errors as it currently is 02:15 in the morning and I need some sleep.14 -
What really helps me is knowing electronics, having a solid understanding of maths and experimenting around with computers and hardware in my spare time.
At some point you start to see programming as being more than just "kreating" (as Karlie Kloss would say) an "app".
I see programming as pushing your machine to go beyond its seemingly narrow boundaries. -
Ordered $12 worth of electronic bits and bobs. They came a day ago and tonight I hooked them up to my raspberry pi. Made some lights blink, pressed some buttons. A solid re-introduction to electronics. This time on my own time and not in school, so I don't automatically hate it. I only got a cheap kit so I don't have many toys to play with but I'm excited to get more. Maybe even buy an Arduino. Maybe even make them talk to each other idk. I'm happy.8
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Happy birthday, Dr. Nabil Ali!
Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Egyptian pioneer of Arabic language computing, Dr. Nabil Ali, on his 82nd birthday. Dr. Nabil Ali’s innovations in the field of computational linguistics propelled the Arab world into the Information Age by creating programs that enabled computers to understand Arabic in digital form.
Dr. Nabil Ali was born in Cairo on this day in 1938. Expressing an interest in art at a young age, Mohamed was inspired to apply his creative passion for visual aesthetics to the world of engineering. After obtaining his PhD in Aeronautical Engineering at Cairo University, he spent over 20 years working as an engineer with the Egyptian Air Force, as well as with various computer and electronics companies throughout the world.
For Dr. Nabil Ali, digitization of Arabic, with its complex linguistic rules and morphology, was a way to connect Arabic speakers with the world.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Nabil Ali published a number of papers, books, and technical reports in support of the developments he was making in the field of computational linguistics. His work won him several awards, including the prestigious Saudi Arabian award, the King Faisal Prize, in 2012—recognizing his pioneering contributions to the Arabic Language and Literature.
5 -
Tuning cars doesnt sound too geeky but if you consider all the electronics that go into making vroom vroom, it is.
-
When you're broke, don't have access to a 3d printer but still wanted to make a raspberry pi portable. Cardboard + power bank is the easiest way
2 -
I thought I'd opened every shitty type of Chinese-grade electronics by now. Glued in shit, ultrasonically welded shit, potted shit. And occasionally the now very rare piece of electronics that has actual screws.
Until now. Remington, apparently yet another company filled with certified enganeers. My razor is from them, and I wanted to open it up to see why the lithium cell inside was failing, and to replace it with a bigger one. 2 screws in the back of the unit, Phillips head. But holy fuck, those things sat in there more tightly than the glory hole of the Asian girl that probably assembled this thing. Externalizing our own features in our craft? Check!
Pretty hard to remove them but that's fine. But the unit didn't open up, and there seems to be no screws left. I guess that they leveled up their level of certified enganeering and actually used both screws and ultrasonic welding. Because why wouldn't you, right?!
Motherfuckers.5 -
Probably the MOST complete software book on a very broad subject.
This is book to read for those of you are near college grad, first job in the industry. But to the level of detail and broad coverage this book has I think it’s actually a great book for everyone in the industry almost as a “baseline”
From requirements, project planning, workflow paradigms. Software Architecture design, variable naming, refactoring, testing, releasing the book covers everything, not only high level but also in reference to C.
Why C ...because in the consumer electronics, automotive industry, medical electronics and other industries creating physical products c is the language of choice, no changing that. BUT it’s not a C book... it contains C and goes into dept into C but it’s not a C book, C is more like a vehicle for the book, because there are long established, successful industry’s built around it. Plenty of examples.
When I say it’s the most complete on a broad subject seriously like example the chapter about the C language is not a brief over like many other books, for example 10 pages alone are dedicated to just pointer! Many C books have only a few paragraphs on the subject. This goes on depth.
Other topics, recursion, how to write documentation for your code.
Lots of detail and philosophy of the construction of software.
Even if you are a veteran software engineer you could probably learn a thing or two from the book.
It’s not book that you can finish in weekend, unless you can read and comprehend over 1000 pages.
Very few books cover such a broad topic ALL while still going into great detail on those subtopics. the second part is what lacks in most “broad topic books” ..
Code Complete.. is definitely “Complete”
So the image doesn’t match the rest of my book images because I tried to make an amage to cover of the book, inception style kinda haha 😂
19 -
This scene is an 8-year-old.
My friend(F) got his first mobile. First featured mobile.
Maximum smartness in that mobile was a snake game and Bluetooth.
So I decided to prank him.
M: Bro do you know this particular model need a network to use Bluetooth?
F: I am not stupid to believe you.
M: I can prove that.
F: K prove me, I will give you treat.
M: ok, turn on your Bluetooth paired it with my Bluetooth.
F: Ok
*start sending him the movie. We were on the train, a train was about to enter the tunnel*
M: When the train will enter a tunnel, We will lose network and sending will fail.
F: ok let's see.
*when a train enters in a tunnel, we shift light to black in meantime for 3-4 sec our eyes feel blindness. so I closed eyes before entering a tunnel and once train enter in the tunnel immediately restart Bluetooth *
M: look sending failed
F: Seriously man, I didn't know that.
M: It's ok bro next time inform me before buying any electronics.
F: sure
M: my treat?
F: Yup
*for next few days, he was thinking that Bluetooth need a network to send files until whole group laugh on him*4 -
Yesterday I did some experiments with my lab bench power supply to see if everything was working as it should, and whether my newly acquired laptop (old business laptop from 2004) would still power up. Noticed that it did, and left the thing charging for a while - its battery was completely drained. But after letting it sit for a few hours, one of my switches wouldn't turn off anymore.
The lab bench power supply has a 250V 2.5A (625W) rated switch on the AC side, connected to a 50V 10A (500W) AC-DC power supply. The DC side of that is then connected to 2 DPS5005 units, of which one was driving 50W of power into the laptop.
The experiment went reasonably well, the AC-DC power supply was loud but stayed cool like a cucumber. The switch however wouldn't turn off anymore after a few hours. Today I've desoldered that and put on a new one, and did a failure analysis. Turns out that it was a rocker switch (so there's a little nub in there that moves a piece of metal back and forth) and that the contacts of the switch (the piece of metal and the inside of the connector piece) were welded together.
However, the only thing that I know of that causes this welding is when loads are switched off, and an arc is generated. This wasn't the case here - it was just kept on for a couple of hours, with (accounting for power losses across the circuits) 80W going through it at most. I never expected that to cause a weld. Any clue as to why this happened? It really boggles my mind, and I don't want the switch that's currently in there to face the same fate.12 -
Every single time a cool electronic device comes out, that connects to an API. The nerd in me can’t resist getting on a 3 month waiting list to get said gadget. I impatiently wait. I get gadget. It’s usually cool but never as cool as the marketing made it seem….thats not the rant yet.
Within 2 year the company is gone and i’m left with a $500-$1,000 paperweight that doesn’t work anymore.
This has happened to every single device I have bought that wasn’t from a billion $ company.
These companies would rather screw everyone over instead of simply making the backend of product open-source so people that use the product can at least try to get it working again.
My 1st rant. Sorry in much better in real life at bitching about things 😎7 -
!rant
I didn't see a post for it but a decent book bundle for Raspberry Pi and Arduino is on Humble Bundle at the moment.
HUMBLE BOOK BUNDLE:
DIY ELECTRONICS BY WILEY
Get Learning Python with Raspberry Pi, Electronics For Dummies, and more!
https://humblebundle.com/books/...
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Dad: “Cool! Now you can sit around like you always do!” 😑
Mom: “So you are programming the computer? Can you show me how to do x on my computer/iPhone?” Except it’s the same questions every single time... She never learns...
Brother: Talks to me about jailbreak stuff
And of course, they all ask me how to fix things on different electronics.3 -
Since learning electronics I have a new found love for fixing peoples printers:
Now I actually look at it before saying "yep it's fucked! Better get a new one, do you want me to toss the old one for you?"
I'm now only one rail away from having a cnc machine.1 -
What you are expected to learn in 3 years:
power electronics,
analogue signal,
digital signal processing,
VDHL development,
VLSI debelopment,
antenna design,
optical communication,
networking,
digital storage,
electromagnetic,
ARM ISA,
x86 ISA,
signal and control system,
robotics,
computer vision,
NLP, data algorithm,
Java, C++, Python,
javascript frameworks,
ASP.NET web development,
cloud computing,
computer security ,
Information coding,
ethical hacking,
statistics,
machine learning,
data mining,
data analysis,
cloud computing,
Matlab,
Android app development,
IOS app development,
Computer architecture,
Computer network,
discrete structure,
3D game development,
operating system,
introduction to DevOps,
how-to -fix- computer,
system administration,
Project of being entrepreneur,
and 24 random unrelated subjects of your choices
This is a major called "computer engineering"4 -
I decided to fix my car after car mechanic gave up... The backlight was blinking even the car was locked and turned off in the parking. Took me 4 days to figure it out. What I realised is that we are pushing tech to places where tech and electronics shouldn't be... My next car will be 1972 ford c, it doesn't have any of these modern problems.
14 -
Got my first soldering project working. Looks trash and horribly done but it does power the RPI from my 3d printers power supply using a buck converter to drop the voltage
Thankfully I got 2 pack of the usb c breakout boards. The first attempt is horribly mangled 😅😅😅 did i mention i suck. Lol
9 -
Applied to a company as an electronics technician for work starting in the summer of 2019. This application was back in October 2018. Got a quick reply that they already have a candidate and are willing to look into mine if he isnt the right guy. Two months later I hear back from them. They will look into my application now and I will receive their feedback after the christmas break. K. Finally a response. Ended up taking them a month longer with following reply. It appears we have forgotten about you we will have some more info by next week. This was on a monday. Thursday I receive a call. Errr. I accidentally sent you the wrong message. It should have been an interview invitation. Are you able to come by tomorrow morning?
Meanwhile I was in military service during this time till april 2019. This was written in the application with a statement, that anytime I have to ask for a day off, I need to apply for it atleast three weeks in advance. Ended up saying I have no more interest in their offer as I had signed my current work contract the week before they called me.
BTW: During the call some girls were constantly giggling childishly in the background. Which gives them even less credibility for being a serious company!1 -
My papa was financing my first university education. After 4 years in electrics&electronics engineering, I had 2.1 GPA and was not ready for life.
I reapplied for university exams and earned right to computer engineering dept. Papa supported my decision for whole new education after a brief talk and financed me for the second time.
Thanks father.4 -
So we were organizing an IoT hackathon and wanted to build something cool to show off to the participants, so we had this thing where if people would tweet about our hackathon, they would automatically be sent a code via a DM for a vending machine that we built from scratch (carpentry, electronics, everything) and they would get goodies upon entering their code! :D
We unveiled this machine at midnight when the participants were beginning to get sleepy so that they would have something to keep them awake. Instant success! We got tired of refilling the machine ran out of goodies stock even though we had plenty!
(The goodies ended up being only chocolates due to budget reasons :P)2 -
It's actually safer to use a flat head screwdriver bit to screw and unscrew Phillips head screws than the screwdriver bit that's actually designed for it.. because reasons.
Fuck Phillips heads, they're fucking junk. They're quite a decent match for the shit that consumer electronics often is though... But for anything halfway fucking worth it, why don't we use something like Torx or tri-wing already?! Or rather, anything that isn't Phillips or Pozidriv. Anything that doesn't fuck right off when you slightly overtorque it (without stripping the threads) or want to unscrew it.16 -
Aaaaand my home setup, featuring a bunch of electronics, an orange pi on the wall (the little orange led is a bitcoin ticker), a nintendo 2ds and a nico robin figurine
6 -
The "Hot Network Questions" in the right side of every StackOverflow page.
Physics, Electronics, World building, Programming puzzles and code golf, Aviation, Skeptics... -
Made a custom RGB macro keypad for development. Combined it with my scripts for controlling my Android dev device
3 -
Oh for crying out loud. Master/Slave has been the defacto way to describe dependent interactions between electronics since the birth of the silicon chip. Even IDE used to implement it as a standard for running multiple devices over a single cable. Just because a handful of fresh faced 18 year old kids think the world owes them a soap box and a rock to hang themselves over, it does not mean the world has to bend to this oversaturated retribution complex that seems to be affecting every college student lately. Grow the fuck up.5
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Any idea how to make a fan in an HP laptop spin at lower temperatures? The fan in my Pavilion dm-1 only starts spinning when CPU reaches 75°C and enters full speed when the GPU also becomes 75°C. Which is strange because this CPU and GPU are one and the same thing.. an APU. And overheating freezes often happen at around 75-80°C.. which isn't too much of a headroom really. I'd rather have it kick in at 50-60°C already, but would like to avoid using the power of the soldering iron for it.. I've already lost a fan to that previously (current one is a spare part from AliExpress). Granted, my soldering experience was much less back then.. nowadays I can probably even solder 1206 SMD packages comfortably. But I don't want to risk it, and I've got experience with custom kernels anyway.. are there any fan speed governors in the kernel that you know of?
FWIW, fancontrol doesn't seem to be supported on this laptop, and neither is pwmconfig. Perhaps I'll have to stick to the electronics method after all? Given that it's just a 5V fan, I guess that I could feed it power by tapping some power from a USB rail and controlling its speed from an ATtiny85.. but inside the laptop there isn't enough space for that and I don't feel like freeing this hardware out of its laptop chassis yet (though that is on the list). Either way running at 60°C under no load is terrible.. some HP certified enganeering "feature" I guess...4 -
i honestly hate the ap computer science principles curriculum. we're taking an ap test soon, so for the past few weeks, we've been constantly taking practice tests.
it pisses me off so much. the questions, the criteria, it's all bs.
we have questions like "what will reduce the digital divide?" with choices like "education for low income families on computers." like, I DONT FUCKING KNOW.
frankly, I DONT FUCKING CARE. giving electronics to people who cant afford it is great and all, BUT IT DOESNT INVOLVE ANYTHING ABOUT COMPUTING.
HEY, COLLEGE BOARD, KNOWING IF AN ALGORITHM IS TECHNICALLY AN "ABSTRACTION" DOESNT FUCKING MATTER. WHAT MATTERS IS THAT I CAN IDENTIFY WHATS MORE EFFICIENT, WHERE A BUG IS, CONCEPTS INVOLVED IN PROGRAMS, THINGS LIKE THAT.
NOT IF DNS IS SIMILAR IN STRUCTURE TO THE US POSTAL SYSTEM.
god i hope whoever wrote this gets hit in the head by a github server that was dropped from the 2^8th floor.2 -
Got tipsy last night, hungry, saw that some of the pots I needed still needed to be washed, yada yada. Noticed that the lid of the fucking pot got broken. ... PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE AGAIN?!!! 😠
Noticed some schmoo in there (wtf is that doing in there?!), cut that out and decided to try again.. still no good, the damn handle just falls right off. Super glue to the rescue, because YOU FUCKING POT AREN'T ALLOWED TO DIE JUST YET, MOTHERFUCKER!!! 😤
So after a while of cursing, shouting in rage and repairing something for once instead of sending it in a low earth orbit, I got it back together. With the white schmoo that must've been super glue earlier as well. To fix the shit that those Swedish IKEA fuckers couldn't possibly get right!!! I don't give a shit about getting inside of a fucking lid for a cooking pot (other than for having to build the goddamn thing, wtf yo) so feel fucking free to close the damn thing down to make it last! That's where it should be closed down, unlike in fucking consumer electronics where it shouldn't!!! HOW FUCKING DIFFICULT CAN IT BE, CORPORATE AIRHEADS???!!!! 😡
... As such I vocally ranted last night in my home. Some neighbor passed by as I was raging, and he probably thinks that I've got anger issues (guess why... 😑). But I have no idea how to explain it to my neighbors, or whether I even should. Any suggestions?12 -
Today I bought some parts at Conrad Electronics (they have a blue logo) and wore a blue shirt.
I got asked for technical support a total of five times.😅6 -
I started with C#at the age of 12, it was way too complicated and I learned Lua for Computer craft instead. Next I learned Ruby for RPG Maker and finally Javascript for web Dev stuff.
Now comfortable enought with Javascript but put off by its quirks I learned Java for compiling faulty minecraft mods, but I only fully learned it in school.
At the same time I learned python and quite liked it for scripting, but ultimately it was not a good match for my projects.
Disapointed with Java I returned to C# and liked it quite a lot, but started learning C++. After touching my first Microcontroller I learned C and I've stuck with it as my favorite language.
Along the way I picked up Kotlin, in case I need to do some Java shit. Much better.
But how did I come to an understanding of programming. Well I got better after each time I got a layer deeper until I hit silicon.
I had tinkered with electronics since I was 15 so I just had to study some boolean mathematics in school and some vintage computers architecture and instruction sets and...
Then I finally understood how that shit I wrote in Lua way back when was actually executed by my hardware.
Allways dig deeper and you'll find enlightenment eventually. -
I like model railways. I also like embedded electronics.
I therefore enjoy combining the two in my free time quite a bit - putting arm processors on trains and getting them to do cool stuff. I'm also happy to dish out electronics advice to other model railway guys, a lot of whom are older and have literally no clue (but will create stunningly realistic scenes that are a million miles away from my lowly efforts.)
But bloody hell - is it hard to do so without being drowned out by incompetent sods who think they know it all because... reasons. I think I may just stop attempting to help beyond this point. This is the latest nugget I've had to contend against - I guess he's heard about skin effect, but since DCC works at around 8Khz and using anything more than 1.5mm core cable is ridiculous for a model railway, even that is complete baloney.
Other electrical nuggets I've heard from this group include "only washing machines run on AC, everything else is DC", "the colour of the wire matters otherwise it could short circuit", and "driving your old trains with a DCC signal will make them run better, because it's more modern". 😬
26 -
I love the mix of people’s setups. There are those with actual monitors set up in a nice curved way, and then there are people with like 10 random laptops set up on their desks like they hoard electronics3
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Hey guys.
Well I've been down last months due to a burn out and medication.
Last ween I finally got my first arduino, then second and two kits...
Now I'm addicted...
Stopped Proscriating with games.
Started learning electronics and shit, specially , started cleaning... And just did my first project :p13 -
>uni project
>6 people in group
>3 devs (including me)
I am in charge of electronics and software to control it as well as the application that will use them.
2 other "devs" in charge of a simple website.
Literally, static pages, a login/registration, and a dump of data when users are logged in.
Took on writing the api for the data as well, since I didn't fully trust the other 2.
Finished api, soldered all electronics, 3d printed models.
Check on the website.
Ugly af, badly written html and css.
No function working yet.
Project is due next week Thursday.
Guess who's not having a weekend and gonna be pulling 2 all nighters2 -
I started to get interested in programming at the age of 13. I was started spending a lot time in our school library and read mostly technical books (beginner/hobbyist stuff) about electronics.
Some book was about Quick Basic (hence my username).
On Windoze 95 in a DOS mode IDE I started trying stuff out and soon I had my first tiny console game.
A bit later I started with HTML and CSS stuff, made a website about ongoing jokes in our class and some rants, later I got into VB6 (I hate VB nowadays!) and wrote for a personal school project a learning software (relatively simple one) to learn vocabulary for foreign languages.
At about 15 I started with C++ and later C# .NET, which I liked the most, and started on some new Windows.Forms stuff, created some small websites.
Now I'm working parttime as a professional developer (mostly web, but VR & .NET too) and studying EE at a university.
My parents had no experience with computers at all, so I learned everything myself an with the help of the allmighty internet (the black box with the red dot on top).
That's my story. ;)
Insert your rant about this below this line:
----------------------------------------- -
rant = Rant.STORY_TIME
<<<Story
This is still something funny me and my friends often remember.
There was once upon a time we were young and stupid, playing on the internet with fake credit card numbers, sometimes we had luck and the orders passed.
We were on the living room, checking who could put an order for a coffee machine, while another friend of mine was talking about the deep web and what he found there.
Suddenly, someone knocks really hard on the door... We went silent...
Me: "Who's there?"
Voice: Federal Police, open up!
Me: *shiiiit*
I went blank, close my laptop as fast as possible, I thought of throwing it away through the window. My friends panicked, I had my laptop upside down, opening the lid to remove the HDD.
One of my friends stood up and went to the door, looked through the eyehole.
Friend: *whispering* The eyehole's covered!
We quickly stood up and looked at each other, like we were acknowledging our wrong doing and getting ready to face the consequences.
I took a deep breath and put the key in the door to open it. Sudden heavy knock again. I jumped and yelled "I'm on it, wait a minute!".
Slowly I opened the door... And there they were, another two of my friends.
F1: hey...what, what happened? Why are you so scared.
They stepped in while we told them what we were doing and they laughed their asses off.
We were shit scared, and those two were laughing.
Story;
So, nowadays, I don't even think about doing that kind of stuff again and I'm hoping to make a Master's degree in security...or electronics, whatever happens first. -
I have a 16 year old son who is off-and-on showing interest in learning electronics. He wants to work for NASA someday. I’ve looked at dozens of Arduino and Raspberry Pi kits but I feel like he would benefit not so much from “mostly done for him” types of kits that are more like toys, but the kind that teach more fundamentals like resistors, capacitors, transistors, relays, etc. In other words, knowing first what the principles are behind the fancier kits. Do any of you have a recommendation of kits that start with the fundamentals, but that can still be inspiring and engaging?11
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:3 I'm soooo happy right now! My friend asked me to help her get started in designing circuits and making her own PCBs. Great motivation for me to write a few articles on it 😊... Honestly I would have just asked her to marry me right on the spot if she wasn't a lesbian and didn't have a girlfriend already.
...maan, it bugs me a lot: super cute, same interests, really really intelligent and knowledgeable, great character... Why must everyone care about gender? :( (I don't - just for the context...)4 -
At first my dad was against it, I'm studying electronics engineering and he didn't want me to code because he is a software developer and he know that in my country it's really hard to make a living out of it. But since he realized that there is not much he can do about it he became really supportive and always review my code to help me improve it.2
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I started writing code at a young age, nodding games, building websites, modifying hex files, hacking etc... I started my career off tho in highschool writing embedded code for a local medical robotics company, and also got tasked with building the mobile app to control these robots and use them for diagnostics, etc.... this was before the App bubble, before there was app degree and that bullshit.. anyway graduated highschool, went to college to get a comp sci degree.
Wanted to teach for the university and research AI...
well I dropped out of college after 3 years, cuz I spent more time at work than in class. (I was a software consultant) in the auto industry in Detroit. I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know or could learn from books or a quick google search.
I also didn’t like the approach professors and the department taught software... way none of the kids had a good foundation of what the fuck they were doing... and everyone relied on the god damn IDEs... so I said fuck it and dropped out after getting in plenty of arguments with the professors and department leads.
I probably should have choose CE .. but whatever CS imo still needs a solid CE/EE foundation without it, 30 years from now I fear what will become of the industry of electronics... when all current gen folks are retired and nobody to write the embedded code, that literally ALLLLL consumer electronics runs on. Newer generations don’t understand pointers, proper memory management etc.
So I combined both passion AI and knowledge of software in general and embedded software, and been working on my career in the auto industry without a degree, never looked back.2 -
I did a project once and it came back to haunt me - this is how I got the job I have now:
I was already working for the company, in the second year of my vocational training as an electronics technician when I got a assigned The Project.
In brief, The Project was a kind of measurement automation implemented with some arduinos. I was tinkering with them at the time in my free time so they must've thought 'Hey, great, she can do that, so she can also do The Project!'
Just that I couldn't - after investing nearly a year, getting frustrated because of the lack of time, support, knowledge etc. The Project died quite unceremoniously and I resumed my training normally.
I just wish devRant already existed back then, it'd have made up for some spectacular rants - The Project was fucking nerve-wrecking due to incoherent behaviour by some hardware and I had to battle the whole big, ugly thing more or less alone as an apprentice.
If it hadn't died at the time it did I feel like I would've brutally murdered it with a shovel - that is, if someone actually would've cared enough to buy me a shovel.
But it ended and I let it go.
In the last year of completing this vocational training, my feeling of "This is not enough" and growing boredom with the routines of my future job had manifested. I wanted to go back to university but also continue working at the same time.
I wasn't ready to do freelancing nor did I want to quit at that time - most people there are amazing and I'm still learning much from them - so I asked early for a student position and got one.
And to get some continuity in my work, it wasn't just any student project I was assigned to but The Project. It came back alive, laughing at me, leaving bodies of dead electronics in its wake, after all these years.*
And that's how I got my current job.
*(They asked me if I was OK with it and they dropped the Arduinos and other hardware in exchange for a bit more software. Also I have a team of great engineers which I can ask for help anytime should I get stuck, so I got that going for me which is nice.) -
1.Pass my final tests (A levels -> i think thats the name of them in usa)
2.Get to university
3.Finish my private projects (at least few of them)
4.Learn more programming, electronics, ect. -
So, I'm still not certain if it's actually a bug or merely my lack of experience, but I've been working on a 2D platformer game (using only C++ and SDL2) for roughly 2 years now (on and off; sometimes off for months) and I'm extremely embarrassed about this, but for the life of me, I cannot seem to get the player character's movement and collision physics working properly. It's driving me absolutely insane.
I've read articles and tutorials, referenced books, and posted about it in game development communities (e.g., gamedev.com, Discord servers, etc.), but even though the fundamental structure and explanations made sense, getting the code to work has been unsuccessful, albeit not completely so, but if I get one thing working, another thing breaks. It feels like I'm trying to repair a vase that fell off of a skyscraper and turned to dust on the street below.
I've always been a very tech savvy person with a fiery passion for programming, electronics and game/software/embedded/web development, but to be honest, having such a difficult time with things like this that — in theory, at least — seem like trivial bumps in the road have made me feel like I'm never going to be successful in this field. But regardless of the depressing thoughts of worthlessness, my passion doesn't let me stop trying. Who knows, maybe it'll have to remain just a hobby. 😕4 -
Most successful project at work: NodeJS utility for storing loads of measurements from an application running on various other systems and providing fast ways of getting at that data. No DB, just CSV files broken into time periods. Also has a search function written in C that can very quickly find all user sessions matching the criteria. It's not perfect, but it does the job pretty well and I can tweak the storage engine as much as needed for our use case since its all custom written.
Outside of work: Incomplete right now but I soldered some wires onto an old sound card and managed to get an Arduino to configure it and play some notes on its FM synthesis chip. Still quite a newbie to electronics so this was quite an achievement for me personally. -
#arduino #led matrix
Hey guys.
So, this is my first led matrix using a 74hc595n, I did all the connections right, isolated the cathodes (-), and when I tested, I only connected one cathode (to test one row, when almost all the lights turned on, in all rows doing a chacing... So I disconnected the negative wire and it still works.
One led in the arduino blinks (L).
GND is only connected to the shift register
All the rows light up doing a colum chase when there is no negative.
I'm astowned.....
3 -
My bed IS WAYYYYYY better than yours....Music reactive lights on bed...gotta make friends now to party :(
https://youtu.be/dEVrOnxW004
14 -
The hand of IT guy in family
My family sees me as guy who works on IT stuff. The best part is that I will have to help them whenever they encounter problem regarding electronics in daily activities.
Son! The internet is not working
Son! The printer is not working
Son! The TV is not working
Son! My phone didnt get any signals
Son! The microwave is not working
Son! The TV remote is not working
Son! Why is this whatsapp popup always appear whenever I opened it
Son! The dvd player is not working
Son! My phone wont charged
Son! I want to buy online stuff
Son! The email that ur uncle sent me cannot be opened
Son! The email that ur aunt sent me is not there
Son! Can u help me download this travelling app
Son! I opened a website and it told me that I have 163718362 virus!
Son! I forget my password of my facebook account!
Son! Some guy idk on facebook added me as his/her friends, what should i do?
....
Son! The internet is not working (again)
The fact is that, most if these problem, I helped them by just.. restarting the router, reboot the router for 1 min interval, find specific toggler in disfunctional hardware that they accidentally hit during sweeping the floor, take out the power and put it back again, show them how to's in many account/payment mechanism in apps, etc
The very best part that whenever they satisfied, whenever things back to work again, whenever they can reset the password:
"I've tried what you told me, but it just didnt work, but idk when u did it, it works! you are really an IT guy"
And i was like
🙃4 -
Create a unified OS that runs across all electronics in existence (and can be loaded onto most older electronics running different OSes.)2
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I've never been to a job interview yet (most of the cunts here in Belgium work with Windows Server 🤮, and I'm still studying electronics), but given most of the submissions on this group rant, I think that I might very well have seriously overestimated interviewers! 😄2
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Question from curiosity:
Does anyone know of interesting things to try on unused electronics, like phones or game consoles? Does Anyone have any stories of such or something? Software and hardware wise?6 -
So I am a marvel fan and have an Espruino Pico, after scavenging left over parts from a home renovation project I realised I had all the bits to built a replica iron man arc reactor chest piece.
I figured it'd be a fun little electronics project, so I have thick copper wire that needs shaping.
I have my pliers, gloves and a gas stove. My lodgers walk into the kitchen...
Them: "What the hell are you doing?!"
Me: "We don't have a forge." -
In the beginning, computers used relays on a macro scale instead of micro electronics
In the 40's admiral grace hopper found a moth in one of the relays and the term "debugging" was born
1 -
The traits that compile to form a programmer
-Not good at naming things
-People started asking for you to fix electronics regardless of what you tell them You’re actually studying/good at
-Procrastination through the roof
-Lives off of Coffee, POP, Energy drinks, or what ever source of caffeine.13 -
Thinking about going full bum and just hike national parks until I die. No job, no possessions, no electronics, no hell, no heaven, no nothing - just living totally in nature - and if I die? So what 🤷♂️4
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Today I Fucked Up. I tried to do something involving hardware.
I tried to fix my mechanical keyboard by myself with no thought towards how electronics work. My first time using a soldering iron and trying to fix something myself.
I went from needing to replace one key to burning some plastic, failing to get new solder onto the parts to attach the new key to the PCB and getting solder where I didn't want it to needing a new keyboard because I think I've fried some stuff so badly half the bottom row of keys no longer works.
Fucking wonderful.
Guess it's time to buy a new keyboard.
Sigh.
4 -
When people use the word, "technology" in place of electronics. Technology encompasses everything: shoes, compasses, etc. Yet people still feel the need to use the word only for their iPhone.
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I have so much shit I want/need to learn. I've started learning C while picking JavaScript back up, I'm learning basic electronics but I have a lot planned for that. Not even related but I want to fucking Cook, yeah i said it i wanna cook but why does that make me feel like i should just stop and go back to programming. Idk I just spill shit in these rants. Also wanna learn to speak another langauge but can't find the time, and I have college and dude I'm trying and trying and I need someone to appreciate something I do before I flip or before C destroys my entire being from being the weirdest yet interesting yet fucking brain melting. And fuck JS I Love it but sometimes it's a twat let's be honest4
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- assignment is to display a paragraph fit within a rectangle
- takes maybe 10 minutes to write
- 1 error preventing Xamarin Forms solution from building
- googles error and seems to be a version issue with a single package
- upgrade that single package
- 43 errors preventing solution from building
- reverts back to previous package version
- 76 errors preventing solution from building
- angrily turns off laptop and packs away things into laptop case
- talks shit about xamarin and all the annoying nuisances ive dealt with for this stupid mobile app class
- takes laptop back out because deadline is tomorrow and i have to make the solution build even though i want nothing to do with it
- laptop takes 2 hours and 14 minutes to load up Windows (no update or anything. Just me signing in like every other normal day)
- code builds first try without errors
- wait what the fuck
- concludes that i need only verbally intimidate electronics into submission from now on7 -
Imma jus start callin uhlee niggas who touch me electronics wo/ discharging their static electricity fat fucken retards 🤙5
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Hey guys, my gf and I want to do something with the Arduino we got. We are getting a CS degree, so programming is not a problem, but we have quite basic knowledge of electronics.
What could be a cool simple (but not too introductory) project we could do?
The arduino came with a bunch of sensors (ultrasonic distance sensor, humidity, ...) some input (joystick, RFID reader/writer, buttons) and some outputs (LCD display, 8x8 LED matrix, bunch of color and RGB leds).16 -
So... My parent's house is 40 years old.
I'm cleaning the corners... and my father as a DIY guy and a man that was never afraid to learn and update, there is so must useful junk, but also soooo many card boxes. He never throws them away, in case he needs to return the item.
So... I've been cleaning a 3 shelf open closet.
- have around 8 bags of cardboard, paper and newspappers for recycling.
- plus 2 bags of plastic.
- 4 bags filled with books for the local community center.
- a bag full of electronics to salvage.
And this only in 2 rows...
Man how could he store so much stuff in there I don't know, but this ends up being fun.
Also, one printer to salvage. :D
When it's over I get to own the shelf to store my stuff :D4 -
Somebody, anybody, tell me what I'm missing here that makes this get mass-produced.
I've always been a bit if a pyro, and ive certainly made random, pointless texh for no valid reason beyond "why not?'. I also have dealt in international OEM sourcing and manufacturing. I even missed the selfie stick boom back before anyone knew they existed... muktille faxriries I've done signing business with were selling them(dead stock) below cost due to lack... silly me thought they were too ridiculous; one of my hudiness cards literally says ".Really cool stuff you almost alwats want... but never need". Most nonsense novelty is the majority of one if my businesses
...but seriously... who thinks a rechargeable battery, compact soeakers, and lit gas canister is a good idea??
I think I may need to re-rank my mental list of most asinine things I've encountered this week... wsl GUI capability built-in with default images and the reminder of pointoess features like passwords for groups, seem less worthy now.
27 -
A while ago at the electronics store...
That touchscreen should give customers the opportunity to review their products, but instead you were able to mess with their network and system 😁
Of course i did not harm them.
Btw. it says Linux in the lower left corner :o
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This is an anti-rant...
I had a problematic arch-dwm setup which i've been struggling with for a looong time, and when i thought i still needed quite some time to solve all issues, yesterday i somehow managed to hit the right solutions for each problem in a single evening. My setup is now in its most stable and usable state ever, and rsynced to a flash drive. I am no longer forced to use windows for my daily needs.
Praise be to holy gnu and holy tux! Do you think maybe i should sacrifice some electronics for the souls of st. ritchie, st. thompson, st. stallman and st. torvalds?2 -
This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.
Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.
It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.
And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that
Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!11 -
Chemists recently "compiled" a programming language into chemicals! I'll admit that I have no clue how it works, but they were able to get a mathematical function working without any electronics. The article I read doesn't describe the speed of the reaction, so I'm not sure if it's really useful as a replacement for computer operations.4
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I was working with my embedded systems friend a few days ago on a website, and since we work with electronics, it was something new.
I then went home and started learning web development.
Holy shit I love it
I will continue to until it’s time to know about JavaScript1 -
I cancelled prime a few months ago so when I was doing BF shopping on Amazon yesterday, delivery is now 1wk instead of 2-days.
And shipping apparently is $9 if you don't meet the $25 minimum and manually select free shipping; I remember it was $6 before...
So a few thoughts I had:
1. Amazon really must need the Prime memberships to cover all the shipping costs since it is now a pain in the ass to get free shipping on the checkout page.
2. Americans really want instant gratification? Waiting a week is that painful?
In contrast, stuff from China take about a month but are much cheaper
3. The only thing that's worth buying via Amazon now is electronics and stuff that are fragile... And food that's on sale because they have to uphold quality
4. Lucky for me, I get 1 week shipping, I have more time to cancel orders... Which is what I actually did8 -
So I'm studying at a university where everyone who studies electronics has to do the same "internship" where we have to program some microcontroller.
For most of us it is the first time programming with pointers and working with the register (C++). But the institute who does this shitty internship manages to FUCK up the class description and even the classes and methods they give you.
In the class description there are methods missing so you have no idea what they want you to do with that method and then they write stuff in the class description that aren't in the class and you don't need. For fucks sake how can you fuck up such a simple task.
And then their shitty template is wrong. If you expect your students to do well please for fucks sake make sure you give your students the correct classes and descriptions. Many students won't fucking know what is wrong because the never programmed in C++. The best part is that they are doing this "internship" for more than 5 years.5 -
Just set up my own IoT device for free thanks to the guys at Losant.
I met them at codestock a couple years ago. They were running a workshop with some Adafruit boards and at the time I had never seen anything like Arduinos before. I was fascinated. So I walked up and asked about it. They said they sold the chips just to demo their IoT stuff. I said I'd buy one. I then waited like 40 minutes for them to get their card reader working. They gave up and handed it to me, gratis. That started my dive into electronics from programming.
Few years later, I needed a remote temperature sensor to make sure a certain unattended appliance never got below freezing. I suddenly remembered that kit (now buried under my heaping stash of electronics), followed the tutorials, and had the exact thing I needed up and running in like a few hours, with all the bells and whistles I could want. And for free.
The icing on the cake here? I went on their website to look at a kit to replace it. I found one with even more goodies in it, and the entire kit cost less than the cost to go to adafruit and buy just the board alone.
Thanks Losant for being awesome. If you wanna do IoT anything, look em up. -
I've got quite excited that they changed a program at my university and they decided to put python instead electronics at first year. My younger friend came to me with notes from the lectures and asked for help. It seems that my university thinks that starting learning programming with overloading operators at first class is a good idea and they say that python 3.x isn't used widely yet, so they will stick to 2.7 during course.4
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"Most electronics work better while turned *on*. The rest are made by HP"
Fucking printer will not only *not* print my stuff but will also make hellish noises, print the same "hello world!" page six times in a row, jam paper in the seventh and spit expensive ink on its own mechanism while there is not even paper in it.
Fucking outdated cellulose-based bureaucracy. Govt' websites are far from perfect but yet are closer to it than presenting fucking tree-meat slabs unecessary covered in colourful liquid gold.2 -
Damn, I'm fucking tired of this country...
"Want affordable electronics?
Well you can go uck your self"
Imagine paying 200 for a pi zero... And from a world wide reseller they don't ship here...
Want a notebook? How about getting 2 months worth of your full salary to pay for a medium one? Pretty good huh?
Globalization my ass.6 -
Best co-worker is my elder brother, he is electronics & communication engineer. Working on robotics project is too much fun. He handle the haredware i.e electronic circuits design in PCB where as programming work is left for me.1
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Happend to me when I was looking through the deals section, of a electronics retailer...
I guess, these know what's needed
-
Anyone watch this guy? Very much addicted to his videos, informative for a newbie at electronics, and always waiting for the next moment he shorts a circuit, shocks himself or creates a light bulb.
There are compilations, but the videos are way better and give you the suspense.
https://youtu.be/sI5Ftm1-jik5 -
I realized I wouldn’t be great electronics engineer so I switched to computer enginering. Best decision of my life. I have so much comfortable work experience because I am natural in this job
-
X : What do you do?
Me : I am an embedded software developer
X: So you develop software?
Me: Yes, but my software works on BareMetal.
X: So you work in a metal workshop.
Me: -_-3 -
That I've never been able to attend a hackathon since they are ALL always on the weekend. I'm Jewish and can't use electronics on the Sabbath FFS6
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I’m 15 and I love programming and electronics and I need a way to earn some money in some way even if a small amount, so if anyone knows or advises some kind of way to use my skills to earn money I’d like to know. Thank you.10
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Some times I like to think what would I do with my life if suddenly all electronics stopped working...
It's scary as shit, but I think I would survive. I have some other skills (wood working and construction).
Would you?4 -
Helped my electronics teacher with a basic MATLAB code in beginning of the semester, she awarded extra 2 marks at the end to acknowledge it.
All I did was google the error and apply fix according to first link.😂😂1 -
Goin on vacation tomorrow night... As expected to have two more days.
Started packing everything for my new addiction...
I usually take two cases, with everything I want, even a laptop. So space is already filled except my stuff and clothes.
Already have 3 cases... only with electronics stuff :D1 -
Current boss is best boss.
Seriously though, he's a great guy. He has a lot of knowledge technology-wise, especially in electronics and will explain things to you without tiring if you don't understand them.
He lets me run my thing which is cool and letting me run too freely/not taking enough time is probably the only thing I'd criticize.
He seems to have a similar mindset to mine which makes it (most times) enjoyable to work with him. I like him personally - though I'm sometimes not sure whether he gets my somewhat weird humour. -
Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"
"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"
"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"
"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."
"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."
"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."
"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."
"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."
"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"2 -
Hardware Developing.
My current school project where I build a gps thief lock for my moped had me realized one thing. I don't want to go into Hardware Developing. The first problem took me about 4 months until I finally gave up and solved it differently. And this goes on and on and on. You fixed something and the next day it doesn't work anymore for some reason. I never had this problem when coding. It's fun to do stuff with electronics but coding is just way more rewarding. Anyone else had the same experience?1 -
I've been wanting to get into circuit design and general electronics for a while now. PCBs seem interesting.
What can you people recommend me to start learning it? I've only found some random courses by people with thick accent I cant understand.5 -
What's the most efficient motor driver for a small DC motor that I want to run off a 5V source for aurdino?
I previously had a L293D and it was inefficient as fuck, it got so hot that almost burnt my finger, (ran it from a 12V supply) and it dropped a good 2 volts from power supply to motor.
Is there a good enough off the shelf driver or do I have to make a H-bridge myself using MOFSETs?6 -
Yesterday a met a self learned dev. He started electronics at 11 years old. He was homeschooled with no obligations at home. So he ended up doing about 10 hours of electronics a day. Until he got bored of it and realized he could integrate his own programes.
So he started coding 10 hours a day. He is really smart. I figured someone like that surely plays video games. So i mentionned path of exile. I love rpgs the new league is starting on friday， im trying to make exiled friends you know...
The guy tellls me he has no clue about the game so i ask him what games he play and thats when i heard: “factorysialimsntnaio” something. I was like “whaaat?”.
Its the type of game where you create your factory. You smelt， combine， make parts like screws and so on and build your factory.
Thats when i realized how some people will always be smarter than me ;)3 -
I just wanted to develop a cool webapp-controlled lighting for my bar.
Next things I know, there is electronics scattered everywhere, 2 multimeters to find what the fck is wrong with a PSU not outputting 1/100 of the current it's supposed to, said PSU opened on my desk, and I'm trying to find a capacitor online because there isn't any fcking electronics store selling spare parts anymore in my city.
Context:
- PSU means Power Supply Unit, in this case a computer one.
- PSU was given by a friend and is out of warranty
- the total consumption for all LEDs is 24A @ 5V consumption. A refurbished PSU is ideal for that
- that PSU is rated 2A @ 5V on the stand-by, which is perfect to power a Raspberry Pi. The issue is that there is a sharp voltage drop as soon as you try to use more than 20mA.9 -
OH MAN it feels so fucking good achieving something with electronics, especially because I have a really hard time learning it by myself
-
Hello everyone !
I am a self taught programmer. Currently in last semester in electronics engineering. I want to become a software developer but can't decide the right career path for me to take. I like back end, Android, Data structures and algorithm, Parallel programming, Machine learning and computer vision, and even security. I am afraid I will remain the jack off all trades and won't be the master of any. This way I won't be doing any good in my career. Any advice as what to do ?7 -
Thinking about quitting college more and more.
Not because it's hard, but because I can't bear with it anymore. I had a 3 day break and I noticed I didn't want to just disappear anymore.
What will I if I quit? Work. Try to find work in something electronics or programming related. I know my chances are slimmer than someone who did finish, but I can't...
I dunno3 -
Everytime i buy any electronics , my brother would suggest me to buy latest ones with the newest configuration . His logic was " If you buy a not-so new tech now.. It will outdate fast and you will end up with an outdated one soon.. So the extra 10K is worth considering that " .
Considering the development trend i personally think it is useless to invest in electronics unless necessary . Everytime i buy an electronic product , within 2 or 3 months i find the same good at almost 75% of the price.. So with tech prices falling like this.. i think it is worth saving that money instead of the cutting edge tech which i wont need for another 2 years .
Thoughts ?
(The cousin brother i mentioned does this everytime he buys a phone and ends up changing the phone 4 times faster than me.. and the use case is similar to mine if not worse..)1 -
Googling how to electromagnetically shield a espruino project from neodymium magnets over lunch, and that leads on a trail of manipulating and directing em fields...
"What are you doing? That doesn't look anything like a binary tree structure in Java... What the hell is all that?"
"Uhm... Personal research?" -
DigiKey seems like a great resource for purchasing electronics but oh my god as a beginner I totally do not understand their website!3
-
The near future is in IOT and device programming...
In ten years most of us will have some kind of central control and more and more stuff connected to IOT, security will be even a bigger problem with all the Firmware bugs and 0-day exploits, and In 10 years IOT programmers will be like today's plumbers... You need one to make a custom build and you must pay an excessive hour salary.
My country is already getting Ready, I'm starting next month a 1-year course on automation and electronics programming paid by the government.
On the other hand, most users will use fewer computers and more tablets and phones, meaning jobs in the backend and device apps programming and less in general computer programs for the general public.
Programmers jobs will increase as general jobs decrease, as many jobs will be replaced by machines, but such machines still need to be programmed, meaning trading 10 low-level jobs for 1 or 2 programming jobs.
Unlike most job areas, self-tough and Bootcamp programmers will have a chance for a job, as experience and knowledge will be more important than a "canudo" (Portuguese expression for the paper you get at the end of a university course). And we will see an increase of Programmer jobs class, with lower paid jobs for less experienced and more well-paid jobs for engineers.
In 10 years the market will be flooded with programmers and computer engineers, as many countries are investing in computer classes in the first years of the kids, So most kids will know at least one programming language at the end of their school and more about computers than most people these days. -
Alot of hacks around here!
An extract of some of those:
-Couldn't time the shutter right when photographing lightning. Used my oscilloscope to measure its electrical influence and anytime a peak is detected, it actuates the shutter.
-Using a lock as a heatsink for a overheating display driver ic.
-Hacking two USB ports together to get more power.
-Display module was too tall with header pins. Moved its back components to the main board and soldered the module flat onto it by flowing solder down its connecting holes.
-Not me but still interesting: Back on ye olde times when paid tv contained a disruptive H or VSYNC signal only their paid tv box could filter, my electronics prof. analyzed it and built the required comb filter on his own. Even sold some on the black market. -
My lovely, fellow devRanters.
I hope you're all doing well.
How do I learn electronics? Any recommendations? I know computer architecture but I want to build vibrators for my mom and shit. You smell me?9 -
Hey guys
Just finished my first tutorial ever!!!
"Cheap poly pocket/plastic sleeve hack for storing small electronics/stuff... "
I wanted to make tutorials for a long time, but due to a burnout, I've been unable to finish any project.
Yesterday I was trying to find a solution to place all my resistors in one place, and I found it... Then I tought.. I never saw this hack on the internet... It's simple, easily explaining, this could be my first Tutorial.
So here it goes:
https://rodrigojpf.000webhostapp.com/...
1st - It's an Alpha product, just finished with the grammar
2rd - Pictures may be changed later when I get my workbench and good light
3rd - No styles yet, so don't complain about the lack of CSS, but it's already readable.
When I get a few more made, enough to desert a page on itself I'll CSS everything (So I can create a common theme) and release it to the public... maybe I'll get a few bucks with a few Ads
This alpha release is only for DevRant use. I would appreciate comments, improvements, ideias and tips
Thanks to @forE , @oudalally , @ewpratten , @Stuxnet , @j4cobgarby , @BashouT , @Plastic pocket and other in: https://devrant.com/rants/1539595/...8 -
Really start with the band I planned with some friends.
Learn some useful electronics
Move to a bigger apartment with a retro and a hobby room.
There are lots of more ideas 😅1 -
The ammount of frustration my parents give me sometimes is odd. Today (friday) evening I went online at six and did some random stuff. At eight my father orders me to go offline for the reason that I shouldn't stay upstairs all night playing games.
So what am I supposed to do otherwise? All my electronics projects are on hold because Im waiting for parts. There is nothing on TV and I dont have netflix. If Im on my phone watching youtube videos, he'll come with some sentences like: Your on the phone again? Get off it!
If I ask him what I can do, he answers me with something like; Thats up to you. Yeah when 99% of the options i have require a pc. And there is NO way Im going to do something for school! And the rest of the evening ends probably in my parents watching a moovie I've seen several times. Which should be the same as wacthing the stuff I actually want to see on youtube or being on the computer.4 -
Is connecting your aurdino and motors that it'll drive (through a motor driver of course) to the same battery bad for the aurdino?
I mean those are small DC brushed motors, will the noise/fluctuatuons they generate harm the aurdino in the long run?11 -
Most of the faculty on my college's IT engineering department aren't exactly adept with Linux, despite the fact that 10/12 labs in our building run on Ubuntu.
Last week, a really great professor (who doesn't take any classes I can attend) from the Electronics and Communications department and I wrote some bash scripts to automate updates and so on, staying back after college until late evening to try to get the PCs updated.
We'll be trying to use SSH to update as many computers as we can remotely, and trying to learn to use Cron to automate the whole updating deal.
I'm learning this stuff on the side, since it's not on my syllabus at all, and the professor isn't even related to the departments that run the labs usually.
We're not getting anything for doing this, the head of my department (who has it in for me) has no idea about this, and nobody else is bothered enough to learn either. -
Recently .. (28. Jan) .. Bluetooth 5.1 spec was released containing among other things, the abillity to detect the angle of recieved or sent signal using phased array antenas. I am exited as ... as ... i dont know what but this is amazing for indoor location uses ... cant wait to get hands on dev kit.
Anybody else fidling with BL tech ?4 -
I have too many geeky non-dev activities. I don't know which is the geekiest...
Built a server rack out of bits of spare wood (going to rebuild and improve it in future). Wired up the entire house with network cabling. Didn't need to, just prefer not to use WiFi for things where possible. Also ceiling mounted a PoE WiFi AP for things that have to use WiFi (e.g. smartphones).
DIY built a rack mountable Pi shelf with faceplate.
Configured a dedicated TV tuner/PVR PC used by Kodi running on Raspberry Pi for a couple of TVs (all diskless/network boot).
Got a colocated server running in a data centre for running various VMs on for different things. Run my own email, webserver, DNS, VPN, voice chat server, various other stuff.
Gradually getting into electronics, which overlaps with dev a bit.
Sometimes I play games. I built a dedicated VR PC which occupies the smallest room of the house.
Unsure which is the geekiest thing!3 -
Ok so I have never really used motors before so I have no idea what I am doing, but I was wondering how to calculate how much weight a motor could move.
Say I have a trolley that weights ~300kg, and I attached a motor to each of its 4 wheels how would I calculate if it would move/what would be needed to move it, and how would I know the RPM of the motors. (Friction can be ignored and it would be on a flat surface)
Also, if I added 4 more motors to turn the wheels, since its just moving a small wheel and it wont be supporting the weight, could it be weaker than the other motors, or would the force that the wheel is experiencing from the trolleys weight effect the turning of the motor.1 -
I have already started the process of a side project by desiging the software, the architecture, the 3d model, ordered all the electronics of a pet 'smart' stable for my guinea pigs.
Which would automatically feed them and refill their water tanks silently but for me the point on playing around with dozens of sensors for like different water levels, water quality, hay, temperature, water quality (you get the point) ... Building a nice looking web interface or an App to control everything and get a live feed from different angles ( sounds a bit crazy altogether but it looked like a cool project )
I even started a instructable and had a github repo for sharing the source of the app/web interface and the whole micro service based server
I'm still at it and hopefully will start to build the ***ing wood and acrylic parts in the next month's but currently and for the last month's free time ist my archenemy
Keep you posted if you are interested 😀 -
Friend knows that you are good at electronics so they say can you fix my computer and you just turn it off and it works😆1
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Looking for recommendations on electronics learning kits. My 16 year-old son has recently been tearing into old electronics and trying to make new stuff with the components. I want to give him a more formal and engaging intro to what it is he’s playing with and how many other cool things he could do. He does struggle a bit with math and gets discouraged easily if he doesn’t understand new concepts or why they’re relevant. So, if you know of a good learning kit that balances lots of cool possibilities with good documentation and tutorials, I’d appreciate a little help.
I’m currently looking at Elegoo. https://amazon.com/EL-KIT-008-Proje...4 -
Someone knows about delta printers? I build one with a 8 bit mcu and I'm planning to upgrade to 32 bit. What do you think about it?
6 -
Android force-updated itself without my permission and it appears they've removed the "open applications" menu altogether. If not, it's well and completely hidden.
Getting fucking sick of my phone and other devices being at the mercy of Mommy Microsoft, Daddy Google and Auntie Apple. Fuck them. I have zero control over my electronics anymore.
EDIT: It's there, but it only works if you're already in an app - not from the home screen. Because that makes fucking sense.3 -
Hey, first time poster :-)
Working alone on a C++ app that has to control a GUI, camera and electronics on the side... but between the test cases, switching between classes and helping colleagues on unrelated issues, I find it hard to keep track of what connects with what, what needs to be done, what IS done...
So, how do you guys and girls keep track of your projects ? Stuck with To-do lists for now ^^6 -
So on Thursday I left my first job as a Trainee Electronics Technician which i got given when i finished my last year of College, to become a .NET Web Developer this Monday. Trying to put the sadness aside from missing co-workers and be excited instead!1
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Hi I just joined this great Community and here is my thoughts about programming tap "++" if you agree if not then change your mind.
For me programming is like becoming wizard of next generation. Like wizard you can control or create anything because in future you will find electronics containing programs written by a wizard (programmer). We are not people who can repair computer but greater then that because a pc is just a box without programs (software)
You are reading this article because you loves challenges and you are hard working too.1 -
About getting Help.
Hey guys
I've been needing lots of Help and explanations about small electronics and Arduino stuff.
What is the best to place such questions, where we do really get answers and replies to noobs?
Or anyone here, one of the Arduino / Electronic Pros who doesn't mind handling my questions :p
Thanks47 -
Theregister.com is wrestling with gpus that need 700 Watts of juice and how to cool them. 50 years ago I was reading an excellent magazine called "Electronics". And I remember that IBM came up with a scheme to absorb enormous amounts of heat from chips. You simply score the underside of the chip in a grid pattern and pump water through it. Hundreds of watts per degree Celsius can be removed. Problem solved.4
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!rant
Electronics
Just got a pack of 50 ULN2003A (for 4€).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Any Ideas?
I want to do a led matrix with them... But can't find tutorials online, help?2 -
Any one here have a degree in Electrical Engineering or Electronics Engineering? I'm thinking about going back to school, but I'm not sure it's worth the money since I live in the US. (cries in over-expensive education costs)
I do a lot infrastructure work and some super basic programming/scripting but I think I really want to get into hardware maybe zone in on either RF or take a stab at amps/effects pedals for guitar and bass.
as an aside, I'm not trying to go back to school for job or career related reasons, I just want to noodle with stuff and maybe create my own circuitry for stuff.15 -
My office uses decade old refurbished optiplexs. One of them even runs win7 32bit (ALL the rest or 64 bit) last night I stayed late to finalize some setup for moving the shared folder from a network shared external drive plugged into one person's computer. Over to a system that'll act as a NAS as well as run some simple automation (nightly backups mostly)
While doing that I remembered one person complaining their computer not always booting right. So I turned it on. Made sure it worked didn't notice any obvious issues. Turned it off. Unplugged it. Opened it up. didn't see any obvious issues so I closed it back up. Tried to turn it back on and it refused. Then I smelled burning electronics. Quickly turned it off unplugged and opened.
I think something shorted and the hard drive finally failed or something. I don't know what exactly it could've been but I threw a fit and left for the day
I'm currently in my way in early to swap that computer out and do some more investigating. Wish me luck talking to my boss less than a month in and something breaks while I'm in the office alone8 -
Dad was (and is) a technic freak, I played as kid with electronics instead of toys.
I'm always interested to modify things to feel more individual (Own Skins in game, modding, ...)
This and the love to games (-> "I wannaa make my own videogame daddy") developed into a curious computer science student working at IBM that loves to learn anything related to it and I'm so freaking happy about it! ☺️ -
Today on forgotten creators – Papa Srapa.
It all started with some kind of enlightenment. He writes that he suddenly realized that some genius musician somewhere died right now and his energy transferred to him. He had sex dozen times that day and it was like he has infinite libido and is unable to feel fatigue anymore. Was it really an enlightenment from above or he just lost his mind doesn’t matter anymore.
He created some music before but now he was wandering around scrapyards and flea markets to find some electronics to make his crazy synthesizers. He claims that he can instantly feel a “soul” hidden inside a microchip and he indeed have some innovative, unusual and straight up weird approaches when it comes to schematics. It’s basically A Place to Bury Strangers’ brand DEATH BY AUDIO but taken to the absolute limit.
He experimented with plants, living humans and even his own semen to use it and some of its “fluctuations” as a source for the sonic synthesis.
If you’re into weird experimental electronic music, give it a try:
https://discogs.com/artist/...
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More AI/ML at undergraduate level. Drop all those physics and electronics shit or at least make them optional.2
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It is with great sorrow I am announcing that an Apple Watch can catch fire while on your wrist. I bashed Fitbit very hard for this when they were giving people burn scars for life. Collecting and selling data is one thing, but mutilating bodies because of negligence and wanting to save a buck on manufacturing is a whole another thing. It seems like Apple is not much different.
I am struggling with body dysmorphia, and I told you out loud that if a Fitbit device gave me a burn scar for life, I would've probably committed suicide. I still stand by these words. My body integrity is a big deal to me. Having a scar due to my own negligence, like mishandling a knife, is one thing, but the concept itself that some fucking hustle culture startup can mutilate my body is another thing. It scares me.
I am considering to abandon any kind of wearable electronics altogether. The cost of failure is just too high. I'm probably going to get a mechanical Timex or a Seiko.
19 -
From an early age as far as I can remember I always used to break/open stuff - that my parents bought for me - such as.. small electronics or it could be even a stressball 😂 to find out what was inside or how it worked. This habit of extreme curiosity, somehow ended me up in programming.4
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A previous rant made me start doubting my choices.
I just graduated from college (but college here is probably not what you call college. You choose whether you do one more year and gain the 'x technician' certificate or you do two years and get the 'practical engineer' degree)
Hope you understand it.
Anyway, so I continued 1 year (I skipped 1 year so it's like I did the whole two years) and I have a practical engineer degree in electronics.
I love programming and really want to work in the field but (since I know nothing about the market) I don't even know if I'll get a job without going to university and getting a degree (which I want to get, I want to learn Software Engineering though, not CS)
So now to my question, do you guys truly think getting a degree will be a waste of my time?
tl;dr I want to get a Software Engineer degree, but a lot of posts say it's a waste of time. Who agrees and who doesn't?8 -
Here at the end of high school they make you create a sort of mini-thesis and/or a conceptual map. I found mine in midst of full blown bedroom chaos, dated one year ago (it's in italian because I am italian but you can definitely ask for translation). I got that fucking diploma despite all the issues I had and still have. Fuck 'em.
4 -
I got in contact with a teacher I had at school many years ago and went to meet him, just generally chatting. He had a job offer to teach some children coding for a week at local library but he didn't have the time to do it alone. A few weeks later and I was the primary tutioner for the course with a bit help from said teacher.
I also had some experience with electronics which I incorporated, blowing some components up, show them Arduino's etc. And I can say most of the children seemed really interested and hopefully a few continued after the course.
Either way, I got a really good reference from the library and got a couple more job offers from both them and some other libraries. Finally got a use for the company I registered in 2014. -
2018 on an electronics fair
I complain about seeing pixels when my eye is directly in front of the screen... Everybody laughs...
2024 and the people type mid-air on an invisible keyboard while wearing oversized ski goggles.
While I still see pixels on 4K on 27 inch...4 -
Half of the courses in my Bachelor of Engineering in IT course was about electronics. They even had chemistry and drafting.
What did they think I'll get a job in? Making silicon chips or writing CAD software?
And they didn't put in Algorithms. And combined Java and web development into one course.
WTF2 -
Satisfying my own curiosity #3:
Who here dabbles in electronics?
As professional or amateur/hobbyist, doesn't matter.
I'd appreciate straining from discussions, ideally 1 comment per person starting with "I do" or "I don't" (it'd make counting easier).9 -
I hate electronics but I picked the only CS degree in my country with a strong focus on it.
Any tips on how to stop hating hardware engineering? I have an exam tomorrow and every line I study makes me throw up in my mouth a little4 -
!Dev
If I was rich I think I'd donate to schools and children educational funds a lot
There's so much more that I've been able to learn about and do now that I have my own income stream and it's not just my dad supporting me and my 2 brothers himself. so I have the means to buy a server off eBay, or get books every few months on topics I find interesting, or upgrade my ram to an obscene 48GB to toy with ML and AI from my desktop when the whim arises, as well as all the stuff I'm learning to do with raspberry pi boards and my 3D printers, and the laptops I collect from people about to toss good fixable electronics
So I think I'd want to open the same doors for other children if I ever could who knows how much farther I could be if I had this same access when I was younger and didn't get access to my first 'personal' laptop when I was already 14 or 15 years old
I still consider my childhood 'lucky' and I had many opportunities other children couldn't get, but if I ever could I think I'd like to make future children have more opportunities in general1 -
Off to meet one of our customers next week. Requires my first long haul flight ever! 22hrs on a plane (with a wee stop in the middle!) Planning to buy a new set of noise cancelling headphones in the airport before I go! Duty Free Electronics FTW!!
See you down under!!1 -
I hate that I love electronics. You can be an absolute god in the technical world but on the other hand its like whose fault is it? The hardwares or the softwares???
Been debugging a DRA818v for 3 days now and havent found any answers towards why there is no transmission just noise and stuff.
FFS JUST GIVE ME AN ANSWER!
Also if you just happen to get one thing wrong, you just fried 5$ worth of components. (Which cant really happen to a software dev)1 -
Electronic companies nowadays are no different than ranchers that force their slaves to earn money to buy new stuff cause people can’t repair old electronics or fix software bugs cause it’s not theirs or it’s not maintained and source code is not existent.
Damn you software and hardware corporations.
You tell everyone that you care about environment, yet you don’t fucking support your software and hardware as long as people use it. When you stop support you don’t make everything open source but keep it on your private repositories as intellectual property and fuck your clients.
Literally all electronics and software should be mandatory made open source to the people who purchased product so they can use it as long as they want not as long as corporate assholes want. This is insane law that is splitting our world and making it burn. If I could fix my laptop in nearby shop I wouldn’t have to purchase new one.
If it won’t change we will end up with <10 corporations that would rule world economy, everyone who will work for those corporations will be rich and happy and everyone else will be poor and unhappy . Mind me if this is not already happening and this planet slowly becomes Elysium movie nightmare.
Stop buying new stuff you stupid people cause this make things worse.
If it won’t change in 10 or so years there will be connected to cloud robots all over the world guarding us and some dick shit rich John Conor kid will hack them to exterminate humans by executing order 66. After that there will be big power outage that will put us into the role of battery and we would be closed in the barrel full of pink shit connected to matrix.
Get me out of here you asshole.1 -
Half of the courses we had in our college were about electronics. Except Microprocessors and Transistors, it's not relevant.
We even had chemistry and engineering drawing. So we essentially wasted more than half of our time.
Besides languages, weren't taught anything about real world software development.
Nothing about how to work with an existing code base, version control, design patterns, system design, creating a website, debugging, functional programming, scalability, reliability.
The industry should be involved in setting the syllabus and also contributing part time teachers.3 -
Maybe someone can help me with this...
I have been doing design for three years and coding for two years now, and recently, two months back I have developed an interest in electronics.
I have a real hard time trying to figure out which dev field to pursue! It seems like I just fall into anything that intrigues me!!9 -
So i was just reading about some electronics..and just realised computers were possible only because one crooked mind thought what would happen if i give the output of a gate to itself ?
I know there may be some explanations.. But flip flops are memory right ?4 -
[Question]
What type of amplifier circuit would I need to power a 60w 8ohm speaker or can you recommend any prebuilt amplifier boards ?
[TLDR;]
I spotted the below stuff while cleaning out my junk cupboard and thought it might be a fun side project to convert them into a portable bluetooth speaker since the earphones are shit anyway and I've always wanted to learn more about amplifiers.
The only question remaining is how to amplify the headphone output signal enough to power the speaker. I plan on either using cells from old laptop batteries or a motorbike battery as a power supply so input voltage would be roughly 10-12v.
The speaker is from a set I salvaged from an old 80's hifi and has excellent sound quality, would mounting the components inside it have a large negative effect on it's sound?
Also although I would prefer to make my own amplifier board as a learning experience the goal is to have a portable speaker with good sound quality... is this something I'm likely to get from my first attempt at an amplifier or should I rather get a ready made board?
9 -
Got this from an online crane game (there's another pic, retracted)... anyone else see this and think of @SidTheITGuy ?
Side note: typing his handle is kinda shaking... i mean if hes considered IT... if the small amount of us old school and/or real tech people even got -40% from a meteor or something...the world is doomed... i highly doubt the sids of the world could start a fire, know basic irl skills... or simple electronics even. o.O
...wait, is this what kids are referring to as "woke"... im still fuzzy on that...so are they, ive asked several-- conflicting definitions.
44 -
Not an interview question but their logic:
On my first and only interview so far, i've apllied for a job in digitization department in our city library. They saw in my CV that i had some knowledge of digital electronics, so they've connected the dots and realized that that makes me perfect for the digitization work
There is absolutely nothing similar between those fields.
Moral of the story: take all the classes kids, you never know...1 -
I love to tinker with electronics and different embedded boards. For some guys its like I'm hacking government or something. Why everything is always about hacking with people?2
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I see a lot of people saying they are programmers and they can't fix other shit. But I mean, using that brain to do other things won't surely kill you. I know you don't have time, but it may be worth taking a while to focus on fixing something else. Just to know how to do it. I do a lot of electronics, but occasionally I've been a plumber, an electrician, a painter and a mechanic.
That said, I know, I'm 17 and I surely hadn't the full programmer experience yet, but I'll try to keep this attitude when I grow up.3 -
Electronics question:
Potentiometers
Hey guys. I'm searching for potentiometer calculators but I have a problem...
Where do I get the R1 and R2 for a given pot?
I wanted to know what pot should I use to regulate 0-12V and 0-5V.
Also, can this potentiometer handle a 400w power supply current?:
https://build-electronic-circuits.com/...
I'm designing the box for my power supply and I want to regulate the voltage on one of the exits.9 -
Hey I’m majoring computer engineering in one of the best universities in Turkey. But we take a lot of electrical and electronical courses. Topics are like introduction to electronics ( pn junctions , bjts, mosfets etc), electrical circuits ( mesh analysis, inductors, small signal analysis etc) . And were solving real hard problems. How is these stuff gonna relate to my software developer side? I can’t see the connection and benefits of learning the page long formulas about drain currents. What do you think about them?10
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All I want to do is build a robot. ROS is slow as crap on a raspi when you're trying to do SLAM. The chassis isn't big enough for a second raspi, and I can't print a bigger electronics tray until the end of my week off.
Also, Ubuntu just doesn't want to work right on my Surface. Emulation too slow.
So much for building cool things on vacation. -
I'll remove some courses - make some optional and some courses mandatory.
I'll explain- I did my B.E. degree in I.T. I'll remove some courses like the ECE subjects (Digital electronics , Communication Theory) - something I'll never use. If I will - I can learn it at that time. Some mandatory courses like DBMS, OS etc. And some optional ones you can take according to your passion like - security courses or scalability courses etc. -
So I just came across this and its really cool. I dropping the link for anyone curious, but its basically a digital FREE "magazine" that revolves around (and I'll quote from the site) "programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics." the issues come out in PDF's and its really fucking awesome. I thought some of you would enjoy this so if youre interested check it out.
https://pagedout.institute//...10 -
So today at the electronics shop I saw an 500Gb on sale. For some reason it also came with a code for Battlefield 2042. The price label was written in a very confusing way, so I thought it was actually ~22EUR instead of ~118EUR off. It sounded too good to be true, but my train of thought was that it's entirely possible that they are really desperate to get people to play their shitty game.
Unfortunately it was too good to be true and it was actually actually 96EUR. What a scam.
In case you wanna look it up yourself, you can also find it online (For a lot cheaper than in that store). "WD_BLACK 500GB SN750 SE NVMe"
For some reason it's cheaper with the game, I wonder why (But it's still a tad overpriced)1 -
TL;DR : How would you 'smart home' with privacy?
How would you go about a privacy focused home automation/smart home setup?
What I feel is not necessarily important
> some assistant that you can have conversations with.
> Not being in home network to automate.
What I feel is essential. (in decreasing order of importance)
> Being a able to control appliances/electronics with voice/app (optional gesture)
> Have features to automate stuff, like turn on something if something happens (IFTTTish)
> Easily play music from Spotify or something similar, e.g. " * Play some Tchaikovsky."
> Simple alarm and reminder features.
So far I have seen relays and other devices that you add in the wiring and they connect to wifi. They work surprisingly well, but whatever I came across also collects personal user data.
Also not aware of any google home and alexa alternative that can so seamlessly pick up commands through ambient noise.
What are your thoughts and views?
P. S. I would have picked up something like this as my side project, but I don't see my self having that much free time atleast for the next 4-5 months.4 -
I'm an Electrical Engineer currently doing my HNC in electronics (top up). I dont have a job as a programmer, but I'm tempted to bring in my laptop and sit in my car and code away. I'm employed as a trainee technician but I count stock in most of the time... (all the time practically)5
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First computer I saw was an Apple II running Oregon Trail in grade school. Then I played computer games on my uncles Apple IIe. The first home video game I ever saw was Pong. It was a device you hooked to the RF input on the TV. It had 2 paddles to control the input (single axis controllers). The first game console I played on was the Atari. The first computer I programmed was on a black and white Macintosh. Then the other programmers in my high school told me the PC was better. Well, it was better for learning IMO. That was with Windows 3.0. But the programming was Turbo Pascal in DOS. DOS gave you complete control of the machine. Better at the time for me learning to do graphics and sounds programming. The first computer I bought was a 386 and I played with VR programming. Made my own joysticks using the limited joystick port. Fun times learning electronics and software together.
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I discovered programming around the age of 12, when my parents bought their first computer:
A Pentium II, 233 MHz monster with Windoozle 95 and even 2 USB ports. Additionally we had an internet connection on crazy fast 56k. The machine was as slow as a snail on heroin, but I soon started to dig around in the file explorer and system control panel.
Searching the interwebs by what the obscure file endings meant, I found some mailing lists about quickbasic and one about C.
QuickBasic was pretty easy and it didnt take long to get some beep abuse script running and a basic text "game". Later on I got into HTML and PHP.
Being still somewhat of a child at that time, QuickBasic really opened my mind to imagine what else could be possible by using just a computer, your brain and lots of willpower.
It was the moment I realized, I wanted to really get into programming or electronics after school.
Hey baby, wanna go to my place and do some QuickBasic and chill? 😏💦 -
If you guys are interested in IoT or electronics you should definitely check out Particle. I've been using them for years. This September they'll be releasing their third generation IoT boards. You can preorder the boards here: https://particle.io/mesh/...
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Any tips for doing well on the technical interview?
It's my first time doing a technical interview so any tips are welcome. It is for a (paid) field application engineering internship. They said it would mostly be regarding electronics10 -
I'm a physics student who have problem with the "theory without every application (even theoretical)" approach of my university. I'm at the second year. The year is near to end i will pass at the first year of Informatic Engineering, one of my real True love who took from me a lot of time. I don't know what will happen... But Electronics and Informatics are my True love. I hope it's not too late...2
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I just bought an arduino out of curiosity to actually learn IOT.
I am a business student with 0 knowledge on electronics. What am I suppose to learn first before playing with this device, i don't care about learning curve (i have the time and resources assuming i don't get fired from my current job)3 -
I'm starting DIY electronic projects soon and in really excited. Although I'm gonna have to try to balance learning Web dev and C now. But other than that it should be fun!
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So next year, I'm going to high school. I consider two studies: electronics aka robotics and stuff
and computer science aka programming and stuff, the thing is: I just can not decide what to choose? Any ideas?12 -
New to the the electronics stuff and I'm building a word clock. Recommendations for a microcontroller that has at least 22 outputs (22 words to light up). Something from Arduino? Also need to plug in for power and use an RTC.5
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Any ideas as to what I can do with a 24 port network switch that I salvaged out of an electronics dump?
It's only 100 Mbit though4 -
Do you randomly feel intense hatred towards people in your friend circle ?
Well I am
I have tons of friends to hang out and randomly talk about well... random things.
When it comes to more engineering related dev discussions I only have a couple friends.
One I don't speak to since he isn't very passionate about the field other than the money aspect. It's hard discussing with a person who can only see the monetary aspect of things.
Well this other guy was my only companion on this journey.. but he gave up and took on an acting career. Tbh I feel cheated. I don't have a companion / rival / anybody who I can really talk heart to heart when I get a random fun idea.
I understand how acting is on its own a pretty difficult skill but I definitely am feeling intense hatred for this fucker.
No knowledgeable guy puts himself in a situation where he has to decide between acting and electronics/programming .. and I considered this bloody motherfuck my intellectual companion.
This is what it feels like to be lonely despite having so many people around.
I'm going to work on creating a split personality. It's my only option to surviving in an engineering deprived country as mine (India).
The same country where 70% people end up engineers and most of them don't know what an oscilloscope is.1 -
Finally got 3/5 offers from my choices for uni in and it's just so difficult to decide which ones to put down as my firm and insurance (((Computer Science MSc, Physics MSc, Software and Electronics Engineering BEng)-At Queens University Belfast)((Computer Science and Electronic Engineering MEng, Computer Science and Physics BSc)- University of Edinburgh))
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Previously: https://devrant.com/rants/1418829/...
So, I've successfully finished my final project, but at some point I was having massive troubles.
For some fucking reason, the chip select line was not going high after turning low...
Apparently the led was pulling it down permanently...
Another weekend wasted... -
My area of focus is getting paid doing shitty PHP, JS, CSS tweaking freelance gigs and save enough money so I can finally focus on learning electronics and make stuff with arduino, stm32 etc. Hardware interfacing is so interesting.
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