Mac: Suddenly turns off
Me: Fuck my code..F***
Mac: No response at all
Me: reset SMC etc etc
Mac: I am dead (no battery detection, dies after 10 min on power adaptor)
Me: Skips a heart beat..(Git, oh yea git)

**Takes Mac to store, After diagnosis**

Apple Freaking Genius (AG): Your Mac has a mother board problem it needs to be replaced.
Me: Hmm what is the problem exactly??
AG: Issues in logic board and some other components.
Me: How much?
AG: Out of warranty so $$$ (60% of original amount)
Me: (wtf?) Really
AG: It's entire motherboard replacement .. bla bla

**Bring it home > open > everything seems ok on multimeter as per circuit diagram > finally finds a voltage drop that is not consistent > minute short circuit > remove > check further > nothing else > reassemble > hit power button > starts fine > freaking battery detected > works fine**

0 $ repair

Fixes two more devices @ 0 $ in friend circle

Builds a raspberry pi backup laptop with 3d printed body..Ubuntu.. you know can't live without a computer

#ThugLife #Engineer

Reality

I made a ridicously hilarious hack recently. My refrigerator it's broken, it has a huge leak of water, my hack was to let the water flow in a plastic box and make a circuit with two water level sensors, a relay and a PIC16F628A to activate a pump that sucks water away through a tube that I wedged intlside the gasket of the washbasin. This gave me the time to buy a newer and better one.

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!

I want to stop charging my e-scooter at around 85% because this will increase the battery life. To avoid always having to pull the plug at the right level, I made a stop circuit that goes between charging brick and e-scooter.

There's no processor involved, just a CMOS 555 used as inverting Schmitt Trigger which controls a power mosfet. Also two status LEDs and a start switch. The poti adjusts the cut-off level. Worked on first try, with only manual voltage and tolerance calculations beforehand!

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.

A quite normal Windows day:

Bios to Windows: "Go now! Get up!"

Windows to Bios: "Always slow with the young circuit boards."

"I've got something weird on screen."

Windows' answer: "Ignore it first."

Hardware assistant to Windows: "The user puts pressure. He wants me to identify this thing. Could be an ISDN card."

Windows: "Well, well."

Unknown ISDN card to all: "Will you please let me in?"

Network card to intruder: "You can't spread out here!"

Windows: "Quiet in the case! Or I'll cut both their support!"

Device Manager: "Offer compromise. The network card is allowed on Mondays, the ISDN card is on Tuesday."

Graphics card to Windows: "My driver retired yesterday. I'm crashing now."

Windows to graphics card: "When will you be back?"

Graphics card: "Well, not at first."

CD-Rom drive to Windows: "uh, I would have a new driver here..."

Windows: "What's ich´n supposed to do with it?!"

Installation software to Windows: "Leave it, I'll mach´ that already."

Windows: "That's nice to hear."

USB connection to interrupt management: "Alarm! Just been penetrated by a scanner cable. Request response."

Interrupt management: "Where are you coming from?"

USB connection: "I was in the computer right from the start. I'm joined by another colleague."

"You're not on my list." - "Say something."

Windows: "Hopefully there won't be another printer."

Graphics card: "The new driver twitches."

Windows: "We'll just have to get the old one out of retirement."

Uninstall program to new driver: "Go away."

Unwanted driver: "Fuck you."

Windows to Norton Utilities: "Kill him and his brood!"

Utilities to driver rests: "Sorry, we have to delete you."

Important system file: "Arrrrrrgghh!"

Windows on blue screen: "Gib´, the Norton Boys are over the top again."

Blue screen to user: "So, that's it for this week."

Excuse me for stealing your time

And I know it's way too long

*sees that the high voltage generator kit got delivered today*
Cool, let's build this thing and integrate it into my old bugzapper! Mosquitos beware 😈

*starts building the kit, all is going very well*
Oh wow, isn't it Monday? But it's taking only 15 minutes of soldering and everything goes super smooth.. what divine power is giving me such good luck?

Alright, last thing, the transformer and then this circuit is done!!!

*solders in the transformer without realizing that the wires are coated, and the solder isn't protruding through*
Fuck. Time to desolder this shit and blast the wires with my lighter to flash that coating right off!

*engages solder pump and solder goes off extremely easily, because it only adhered to the pad*
*takes off transformer*
Me: "Nnngh..!!! Get off you piece of junk!!!"
Transformer: "Hmph!! I will stay in here no matter what!"
Me: "Get the fuck off already!!! 😡"
Transformer: *leads break off* "Alright, but these leads stay here!!!"
Me: "MotherFUCKER!!!"

Yep, it's Monday after all.

I just fell in love with PCBs and all kinds of circuit boards for one sole reason.

Radio Shack store closed near my house. Had a huge fire sale. Electric circuit components were 90% off.
My wife thought I'd gone insane when I got home with two huge bags full of LEDs, resistors, switches, IR sensors, photocells, capacitors, bridge rectifiers, a spare breadboard, a pair of helping hands, etc.
My only regret is that I didn't catch the fire sale in time to grab all their Arduinos.

so my mom wanted to write some word document, but she didn't use her laptop for like ~5 years, it didn't boot up so she asked me to fix, now here is what I found :
>the laptop had a 240 gb hdd
>the hdd was literally broken
>bought her a new 500 gb hdd
>installed windows 7
>took 10 mins to install
>took 19 minutes to boot up
>removed windows 7
>installed win xp
>took 30 mins to install
>took 3 minutes to boot up
>opened windows
>checked pc specs
>see picture below
>[insert wtf gif here]
>installed drivers
>took 20 minutes to install drivers
>[insert epic music here]
>tried installing office 2016
>insta regret
>tried installing office 2010
>memory farted and I couldn't even move the cursor
>installed office 2007
>mom started writing document peacefully
>after 2 hours bsod
>mom asks me to fix
>opens laptop to check internal components
>the cpu had a black hole inside
>the fans weren't working due to the circuit being burnt for some reason
>kills laptop
>kills mom
>kills self
>live peacefully in hell

The most useful circuit evarr.......

Storytime
A story about an Android TVbox which decided to become an iPad

Several years ago we've bought an android tv-box. 

It served me and my family well for several years.

Specs are not that important in this story, but there they are:

Android 4.4 
1GB RAM
Amlogic quadcore 1.4HGz
8GB memory.

This device served us well - online TV, browsing, music, file sharing and so on. But recently cheap Chinese memory deciteed to take a break and damaged ROM. Because of that device won't boot. The only option was to take it apart and "short circuit" certain legs on memory chip and make it boot from SD card and install new firmware. After such operations tv-box worked well again. 

Hoverer, memory glitched again and again and this algorithm was repeated for several months.

But that is not what is this story about.

One day memory went completely crazy and there was no way to install new firmware on it. It just hanged on install. (BTW, it was official firmware for this device)

But after countless attempts it finally worked! It installed the firmware and booted into launcher and connected to WiFi! 

But now comes the most interesting part. 

It was not android anymore.

It decided to became an iPad.

My dad logged in to his Google account via tv-box and got mail that someboby connected from our IP via iPad (we don't have an iPad) and using safari browser! Stock browser is not safari browser.....

"Ok, nvm, crazy glitch." - we thought.

But preinstalled play marked wont launch. Because he told us, that we're trying to connect from iPad.

And Google chrome page suggested to download chrome for iPad

And everything was acting like it is an iPad.

OK, downloaded iTunes, why not??? ._.

Tried to install elixir for android via apk from flash, but then memory glitched one more time, everything went black and tv-box had damaged ROM again...

After that we decided to not torment it anymore...

That's it. Poor Android TVbox that all his life dreamed to become an iPad. Rest in peace.

When your classmates are such lobotomites, that they manage to fry 11 fucking IC's within a day! And I am the one who has to find and replace all the broken stuff. FFS it says 9V right there on the board NOT 12V! No, your board should not draw 1.7AMPS! This chip is getting kinda hot. What is wrong? ONE OF YOUR FUCKING PROBES IS BRIDGING ONE OF THE PINS!
Why isnt this working correctly? You adjusted the wrong fucking potentiometer!
I know I have far more experience than most of my classmates, but man, atleast try to not break things by just thinking: "I dont know dis. (Its actually written in the docs!) So imma assume it will be fine if I do dis. It wasnt fine!"
Also IF something doesnt work, DO NOT TURN UP THE VOLTAGE ON THE CIRCUIT BECAUSE IT APPEARS TO BE THE CLOSEST POSSIBLE ERROR. Which in most cases it is not!

Regulation of a heating circuit

Found my missing flash drive... at the bottom of my broken washing machine... *sigh*
So I've got a broken Windows installation, destroyed flash drive and a washing machine that decided to explode and trip all circuit breakers in the building... what's next?

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.

14 hours in. With no end in sight. Who the fuck does circuit upgrades in a damn data center without ensuring there was a functional redundant powder supply?! I want to slap all these fuckers.

Soil moisture measuring circuit using onion omega2 , finally completed.

To the left, a conventional circuit board design done by a human. To the right, a design done by TopoR, a software that designs circuits automatically.

It looks absolutely alien, yet beautiful. It doesn't care about how it looks, it doesn't care about angles and alignment. It only cares about efficiency and designs every connection to be as short as possible. It can even account for electric interference.

Humans just cannot compete.

South Africa Electricity:

This is after I lost my 7th 3000VA online UPS...

In South Africa we have 240V power most of the time which is great, but then there is scheduled power outages (because our electricity companies cannot "handle the load").

When we have a power outage we have automatic generators which brings everything back up although there is still the 1 minute drop which has weird spikes and odd voltages before switching to the generator (as the generators wait until they are stable)

This has being destroying our equipment, we had a $2000 repair bill 3 TIMES for 3 SEPERATE Xerox Machines that have surge protectors although their circuit board somehow fried.

We have lost 7 3000VA UPSes (3 different brands) and 5 voltage regulators we put to protect the UPSes.

The one UPS that fried just had 2 dead fuses, I decided to replace them (unplugged the batteries to avoid 240V) and when plugging the batteries back in there was a huge spark and flame and the metal and plastic melted onto the board and turned black (the metal pins to connect the battery are non existant now)

I am done with electricity...

P.S. 2 of our generators also got hit by lightning as we are high on a hill and ALL the plastic cable coverings inside the generator were melted

this short-circuit bug is not an option lols

Atother story about PC hardware and being... Not so careful.

A friend complained about his PSU fan being too loud. I said "well, maybe bearings are dying already".
The next day he messaged me and asked to suggest a new PSU. Ok, I threw him some links.
Leter, he told me what happened:
He decided to clean the PSU, because he thought the noise could be because of dust. So he turned off his PC and removed PSU cover with a screwdriver. While doing this, he accidentally hit the circuit board itself. Then "Puff", black smoke and smell of sth burning. Turned out he didn't switched the PSU off. Luckily, the screwdriver handle was rubberized. I'm glad he is alive ._.

!rant
Four hours of work.
You think you write spaghetti code? I write spaghetti wires.
H-Bridge dual motor tester for stepper motors.
Speed is controled by pot.
H-bride are L293D.
My third board, and the first that won't go to the trash.

Question. With the baterry off the motor continues spinning with the 5v from arduino.
My question is, is the L293D suposed to do that? Or do I have a short circuit somewhere that is giving power to the motor? Meaning it can burn the arduino.
Runs a 12v stepper from a CD-Rom driver perfectly at 5v from the arduino and actually starts to act strange when I turn the 12v on. (maby the circuit it's adding 12v + 5v?)

Two days ago...

I was happy, building out the network in a new lokation.

Suddenly my phone just doesn't want to stop ringing, from all the other lokation calling in that they can't connect to HQ.
Then HQ calls, we don't have internet, nothing works. The one guy on location who has access to the server room enters and finds all the servers offline and a couple of breakers blown.
Turn on breakers, servers won't boot properly.
Me in a taxi and hurry to HQ, to help boot the servers.

Afterwards I find out that one of the bosses spilled a cup of coffee on his desk, shorting the circuit.
Apparently he is on the same breaker group as the servers!?! What the actual fuck!

At least now the other bosses are like; yeah, we need to do something about that

Finally, the jeezless present is done.. fuck this shit, where's my booze and my bed?! 😒

Anyway, it's essentially a power bank with LED's attached to it. The LED matrix is at the back side and looks reasonably decent (but I don't wanna disclose the age it's displaying). It's powered through a 47ohm resistor and is directly attached to the 5V lines. Yellow LED's with 2V voltage drop that have each number completely parallelized, and then those numbers are put in series to increase the combined forward voltage of the LED's to 4V. That way the circuit is around 80% efficient (resistor drops 1V, LED's drop the remaining 4V). Other than that, nothing too special. It did take 2 nights to build though.. way too much for a mere formality 😑

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”)

Chinese powerbanks are so fucking dangerous. Cheap price = cheap quality. Alright, I get it, but that's not my point.
Today my dad gave me his powerbank and wanted me to upgrade it.
A 50k mAh powerbank, but it is far away from 50k mAh. He bought 12 6000mAh rechargeable batteries.
Before I started replacing it and resoldering the powerbank, I decided to open up the Chinese 50k mAh battery. A lot of aluminum foils covering the batteries. That's not great. A very high chance for a short circuit to happen.
Anyways, I carefully took the aluminum cover halfway out.
I took a (plier?) with plastic handles and grabbed the pack of batteries with it to not put myself into danger.
And BOOM! A short circuit.

Btw. It smelled very weird when I took the aluminum cover off of the pack.

3 hours making this beautiful circuit to test stepper motors.
Arduino nano + L293D + pot
Fucking bitch has a short circuit somewhere and can't find it out...
Made the same project in a breadboard in 15 minutes and it's working.
Fuck hardware bugs.
Cutted in the middle of all connections, took out excess solder... Nothing.
Fuck it, moving to the next ideia

Hey guys.
Arduino + Bluetooth + L293D + car Chacis and 4 DC motors.

Finaly finished my second bot/Drone.
Actually finished it yesterday but had lots of problems with hardware bugs (learned so fucking much in a day).
Tought I fucked two unos with bad soldering... No they are fine, just won't turn on in the circuit that was already working (was fine running the code).
Redone everything from scratch with a arduino uno, it's perfect now.

Funniest part is how I got my hands on a 50€ car kit for almost free... So some Chinese store sended this kit instead of some cheap stuff. Saved another arduino with the chip rack (that one that you can trade the atmega chip), I'll save it to program single chips. Plus a h bridge and lot lot more cool stuff.
Used only the Chacis.
Next: esp8266 and camera... And maby a gun? Would be cool

Recently I disassembled this Remington beard trimmer that I have, right. Thinking that I probably just depleted the battery or something like that, and that that's why the fucking thing would turn off after 10 seconds, with a miserable motor speed that could only be caused by what.. 2.5V or something like that? So I kept up with it for a while, and then a few days ago, I finally disassembled the fucking thing.

New 4.2V LiPo battery of my own attached, wicked! The thing has a 2Ah capacity and is fully charged, so fuck all in a big ship, I'ma shave my fucking hair without protection, who cares with 2Ah anyway, given that motors at 4.2V consume only 800-ish mA, right. So I shaved my head, and figured.. holy shit mate, I fucking beat this fucking cunt, fuck you Remington! Planned obsolescence my ass!!!

Just now @xewl sent me a request that made me reconsider this shaver. Some PS3 controller, should be easy enough to fix. But I referenced my shaver so I figured that I might actually check it beforehand.

The original fucking battery has 4V left on it. 4 fucking volts! That ain't gonna trip shit for an overdischarge protection circuit!!! WHY THE FUCK REMINGTON, WHY THE FUCK DID IT (IF ANYTHING) TRIP?! And more importantly, why did you make the motor turn for only 10-ish seconds after charging, 1 year after purchase, despite the fucking cell having 4 fucking volts in it, which is more than plenty to get the thing turning for at least a 60% charge?! Planned obsolescence perhaps, hmm?

But let's say that it was bad contacts or something like that. After all, my probing was a bit intermittent, showing 1.5V (if it's shorting, shouldn't it be in the mV range?) and then 4V at times, until I separated the nickel connectors from the 16500 cell. Why the fuck should that thing short, considering that it's unprotected?! The fucking cell is unprotected, and you Remington are going to let it short? What kind of fucking engineering is that, you fucking braindead morons?!!!

And why do you use a 16500 cell which isn't very standard over a 18650 cell, which is? Again, planned obsolescence? Fucking vile pieces of shit.

Now what's more.. I tried to power on the shaver for a picture for this fucking rant, using a LiPo cell of my own that I used to shave my hair with the other day, to get a nice picture of my little hack. But the fucking thing, despite having 3.89V left in it after that fucking shave, which is more than plenty for a lithium cell, the fucking unit doesn't power on. WHAT THE FUCK REMINGTON?!! That's planned obsolescence at its best, init?!! You vile fucking pieces of shit.

So I guess that this rant is no more one of "I beat these Remington cunts". It is one of "you can bet your fucking ass that planned obsolescence is a thing!!"

I’m working with a “senior” developer with a full decade more experience than me who didn’t know that short-circuit evaluation works differently for OR than it does for AND. He argued with me for a good hour and a half that in the expression (a || b), b would never be evaluated if a is false — and that this couldn’t possibly be the source of the bug he was trying to fix.

🙄

Just wasted a ton of time trying to figure out why my circuit wouldnt work properly and then noticed...

Using circuit simulator (can find it on itch.io) and recently built an 8bit adder as you can see below.

Pins on left are IN and pins on right are OUT.

Just wanted to run it by some of you because 1. circuit simulator is fucking cool, 2. I'm not sure if I got the basics correct.

I attached an imagine of the 8bit adder along with the subcircuits if that interests you.

TL;DR don't fiddle around with batteries if you aren't ABSOLUTELY sure what you are doing

For my arduino project I need to use 18650 Li-Ion batteries. They are pretty awesome but at the same time pretty dangerous if you don't use them the right way. You need protection boards etc. or they can/will go BOOM.

So I am looking around Amazon to find some good quality ones and reading some reviews made me wanna cry.

People were REMOVING protection circuits from the batteries and even removing the foil around the batteries. NEVER EVER FUCKING DO THAT!

I also found out that these are the batteries used in E-Cigarettes and now I really don't wonder anymore why they explode so often. People fuck around with the batteries just so they fit into their vapes, or reduce the resistance of the coil (the thing to heat up the liquid) to an absolute minimum so they can get more watts. A side effect of this is that a lot of current gets drawn from the batteries (>20A or something) which makes them go BOOM if no protection/fuses are used in the circuit.

Got a gift from my friend. It was from an Indiegogo project. It worked fantastically until it has broken recently.
Although 1 year warranty was promised according to the site, the fact that it's from Indiegogo means that's non existence (I'd say if you actually receive the thing, you're very lucky). So I disassembled it and had a look.
Now I'm thinking maybe I just need to hack my way in to find out what that blown chip is and if I can replace it.
I am also disgusted by the Chinese printed on the IC...

I feel so empty.

I can't keep up with what is being teached to us in the mathematical courses. Everything else is fine. "Algorithm and data structures" aka Info A (Programming in C++) and "Computer engineering" aka Info C (details of how a CPU, RAM etc. works) is understandable, but when it comes to math I, completely, am lost.

2-4 hours drive to university and 2-4 hours drive back to my home each day. Two oral examinations each week in Info A and Info C. Three assignments in Info A, Info C and math.

I was so naive to believe that I would be more free and have more free time as a student haha.

Maybe I should switch to a university of applied sciences. The classical university is too theoretical for me, but in the same time I know that I can't keep up with the time when I have to build a circuit in the university of applied sciences.

I am able to design and build a circuit, but I am slow. Probably because I am checking many times if I did it properly before testing it.

To my fellow German devRanters who have studied or tried to study: You all just read my situation and my thoughts. Am I wrong about what I am thinking about a university of applied sciences? How are the mathematical courses there in terms of difficulty?

If mathematics is at the same difficulty, I will try to do something else that has nothing to do with college. It just won't get into my brain.

was trying to present a project to an audience.

Apple VGA adapter got jammed.

my friend was a little too strong in pulling it out and the adapter wires got ripped out.

i see hot glue on the parts where the output wires connect to the circuit board.

yes! hot glue! now you know why it came out so easily!

i think you guys can imagine what happened to my presentation..

Thanks Apple!

My godmother asked me to repair her PC... so when opening the case i realized that her "shady"(improvised wires) case fan was not working... so i tried to connect its molex wire to the psu, and realized i neded an wire adaptor because the psu could not support that fan(only had one molex, female, not male and female), but I gave it a try... long story short... I SHORT-CIRCUITED THE PC...(but it restarted after 10 minutes of me dying of fear that i destroyed her pc...)

It grinds my gears to no end as to how insanely BAD most Electrical engineering software is. Lets start with Tina. A circuit simulator. A few versions ago it was rather good but now it feel like its built upon more legacy crap than fucking Windows! This causes it to have memory access violations and crashes even when you look at it from an odd angle.
On topic of circuit simulation. LT-Spice! It has less errors than Tina but is impossible to use without being lobotomized first. Who the FUCK decided it was a good idea to reinvent keyboard shortcuts by movin all of them to the F-row at the top of the keyboard. Also there is no option to delete a component. YOU NEED TO USE CUT IN ORDER TO REMOVE IT!
And at last Altium Designer for Layouting and Schematics. Whose license costs 9 grand. No one outside of some companies will buy this because of the price. Altium realized this and made two watered down versions of it. Which dont really get updates anymore. (last one was in 2018) So they essentially made a cash grab from people who cant afford their actual product. There also exist other (and a lot cheaper) products than what Altium offers. The problem is that they dont work well with interoperability. Schematics drawn in one program will look distorted in another or not import at all. And since Altium is the industry standard you got yourself this nice steaming soup of impossible collaboration. Its kinda like Adobe being absolute shit at progressing their software just because they got no competition. Or rather they do but the industry wont switch cause adobe is so engraved into it.

Between high school and college, working in a circuit board manufacturing storeroom.

Fun fact: when we are bagging small boards, we do not gently lay them in containers, they're usually thrown at least 6 feet into a bin of the same type of board after they're placed in the bag. We also don't remake a board when pins are bent, we just bend them back with tweezers. And you know that rule about not touching the gold connectors... Yeah... So much for that... Did I remember to mention that these boards are for medical equipment?

On the bright side, we at least have electrostatic discharge control going on all the time.

I don't know if this is a problem only in Belgium or also in other countries but while I love Bluetooth for audio playback (headsets, speakers and everything) despite being extremely convoluted as a protocol.. FUCK Bluetooth keyboards.

Several of them I've tried. Several of them, from various brands. Pairing, setting the Belgian keyboard layout (which on that shitty Android 7.0 tablet that I want to use the fucking things with apparently has to be done *every fucking time you connect*, because reasons) all well. Except half the keys don't fucking map properly. A keymap, it doesn't get easier than that! How hard is it to make buttons map to the right keys!? They're literally fucking push buttons on a matrix! Seeing which points in the circuit make contact and sending that off to wherever it needs to go!

And to put the icing on the cake? USB keyboards with the same fucking layout settings work without any problems. So it's extremely likely that it's something in those shitty keyboards' controllers or Bluetooth going full rart on all of them.

Of course, Bluetooth being as convoluted as it is, manufacturers just copy each others' implementations of it if they can.. so there's that.

Can really nobody make a product halfway decent anymore before putting it on the market!?

Another one bites the dust.. JUNK!!! Every single goddamn one of them!

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". 😬

Who has taken a tech-free vacation? I understand there are vacation area's that disconnect you from anything containing a circuit.

A few days after the vacation, daddy (me) finally finished copying all the photos from the digital camera to the big external hard drive. Left it lying in the living room, in the corner where all the tech stuff frequently lies. In come my boys, and I'm not sure why, they start plugging power supplies around. Unfortunately the one from the laptop fit into the hole on the external disk, but had a different (higher) voltage. Result: 1 fried hard drive, containing all the baby photos and videos of said boys up that time.
I still believe that it's only the circuit board that is fried, and the data is still all there. I still have the hope to find a used disk, replace the board and all will be back.

Hey, fellow dRs.
I may need some help regarding this circuit.

It is about an 8 Bit multifunctional shift register with a 2 Bit instruction set.

These work:
If "Sel" is 0x00, the circuit loads data into its 8 D flip flops.
If "Sel" is 0x03, the circuit replaces all data with 0s.

These don't work (they do, but they do it in a very strange way and end up filling 1s instead):
If "Sel" is 0x01, it is supposed to ringshift bitwise to the right.
If "Sel" is 0x02, it is supposed to ringshift to the left.

As mentioned above. They do it in a very strange way. If we have 10000000, it will shift to the left or right depending on the "Sel"'s binary value. Let us say we want to shift it right. The output will turn from 10000000 to 01000000 (which is what we want), BUT after that it adds another 1 to it: 01100000. It keeps doing it until every single Bit is a 1. Same thing happens with the left ringshift.

I will include the other circuits used in this circuit in the comment section.

Hey guys
I think I just burned 2 Nanos.
I'm using a 30W soldering Iron and had to resolder the pins of one and solder the pins of a new one.
Now they don't work. One allows for code upload but won't turn on, other seams to have a short circuit.
Could have I burned the circuits due to a 30W soldering iron?
Also used a little of flux on the pins, can flux pass energy and make bridges?
Thanks

after 21 years today was the day i let go of my personal homepage.

still don't know whether this is just a depressive short circuit action or at least reducing channels of unfulfilled socialisation.

TIL how time-delay relays are used in circuits with a hell lot of power. For example to power and control the motor of a machine that lifts 20 people up to the sky and back to ground again.
FYI this is a simple circuit. We will hopefully start experimenting with SPS/Speicherprogrammierbare Steuerung (Programmable Logic Controllers). I cannot wait to make use of our predesigned circuits with complex logic gates with the new unit we will get to know.
Unfortunately, we will do practical networking (testing cables for the signal strength and speed, building a network of telephones and call each other - guess this is going to be the funniest part lol, etc.) before the SPS and LOGO software phase.

Btw. I am doing an all-nighter rn and repeating everything we did in our recent signal calculation lesson. We have another exam tomorrow.

So there are consequences to being an experimenter. Currently trying to develop my own smarthome, and last night, I was fixing up some lights. Just soldered some wires together, and hung it up by the outlet on the wall. And it worked!

But I didn't want it to just hang, so I moved it around a bit. And obviously because of my shitty soldering job, not really insulating anything, I created a short circuit, sparks everywhere, and blew a fuse in the electrical box. No problem, I'll just replace the fuse.. Except I didn't have any lying around, and it was 1am...

So I had to get up at 8am when the stores opened, and buy some fuses. Couldn't fall asleep again, so I started cleaning my apartment (I've possibly gone crazy from the electrical shock), and now I'm in my 3:30pm till midnight shift...

Ohhhhhh shit, this is a good topic.

Well, I just expected more... Better.

Like maybe the programming lecture could have been Java 1.6 rather than 1.2, and taught rather than read from an archaic time of dusty powerpoints.

Maybe we could have used Spice or a reputable circuit modelling tool rather than CircuitMaker; a tool no longer being maintained that barely makes it past install because it was written in a time before circuits.

Maybe day fucking one of the first year, happy clappy, let's teach you HTML lecture the tutor could have just shown us a copy-pasted hello world. Rather than the ugly, mixed-case, no-end-tag-having, broke ass HTML 4 scribble she felt the need to go over every detail of.

I corrupted a raspberry pi, and while debugging the issue, plugged it in and placed it on my metal desk by mistake, which caused it to short circuit and stop working completely.

I built an expert system (what we used to think of as AI back then) that could read the circuit diagram of a complex electronic circuit, figure out what it was meant to do, and set up the test gear to test it and diagnose manufacturing errors.
In 1985, using Vax/VMS and OPS5.

More recently, I was on a project (can't claim to have done it all myself this time) that used a neural network to detect patients in a care home that fell over/fell out of bed and alert the nurses' station.

That feeling when you spend 2 hours debugging circuit + code, to find out that the arduino had gone loose in the breadboard...

For 2 hours I've been looking for the reason why my mouse and external hard drives suddenly stop working, just to find out that my external USB hub is junk and caused a short circuit that disabled all the USB ports on my laptop.

USB Hub (Logitech, $30) replaced with a cheap one from China ($1). Now everything works again.

For all the hate that Java gets, this *not rant* is to appreciate the Spring Boot/Cloud & Netty for without them I would not be half as productive as I am at my job.

Just to highlight a few of these life savers:
- Spring security: many features but I will just mention robust authorization out of the box
- Netflix Feign & Hystrix: easy circuit breaking & fallback pattern.
- Spring Data: consistent data access patterns & out of the box functionality regardless of the data source: eg relational & document dbs, redis etc with managed offerings integrations as well. The abstraction here is something to marvel at.
- Spring Boot Actuator: Out of the box health checks that check all integrations: Db, Redis, Mail,Disk, RabbitMQ etc which are crucial for Kubernetes readiness/liveness health checks.
- Spring Cloud Stream: Another abstraction for the messaging layer that decouples application logic from the binder ie could be kafka, rabbitmq etc
- SpringFox Swagger - Fantastic swagger documentation integration that allows always up to date API docs via annotations that can be converted to a swagger.yml if need be.
- Last but not least - Netty: Implementing secure non-blocking network applications is not trivial. This framework has made it easier for us to implement a protocol server on top of UDP using Java & all the support that comes with Spring.

For these & many more am grateful for Java & the big big community of devs that love & support it.

Been asked to give a lecture to the freshmen at ye olde alma mater.
They are gonna pay for the air ticket, the shuttle to and from campus and a couple nights at a fairly ok hotel.
Feeling like a fucking rockstar.
...
Gave the lecture. Only half those kids spent the whole time on their phones. My old drinking buddy and now a professor at the school said it was more direct attention than one could expect at a music concert.
...
Feeling kinda scared about how young women dress nowadays, but I do am an old indian dude, so what do I know?
Also, since when is lifting weights and running a half-marathon a requirement for a degree in computer sciences? Turing might have been an Olympian, but I'm pretty sure that since the invention of the integrated circuit my people have spent more time in labs than in gyms. That is not true for those kids.
Maybe it's a freshmen thing, and they will age out of that healthy living nonsense. Maybe the real world will crush it under bills and tuition loan repayments.
...
Tried to ask the university for a refund of the hotel and taxi bills that I've paid out of pocket. Two hours in four different queues and two opposite-sode-of-campus buildings. Suddenly remembered the true meaning of the word "Kafkaesque".
...
Remembering the old uni days with some still-in-grad-school / faculty old friends and getting drunk in the old watering holes? Priceless.

OH MY FUCKING GOD IT'S BOOTING! Yesterday I spilled liquid on my desktop computer stopping it immediately, and today after letting it dry and rubbing it with some isopropyl alcohol it starts up as if nothing ever happened! 😊

However, I didn't try the graphics card under heavy load yet, maybe it can get unstable as the spillage affected it's power circuit area.

That moment when you are working on a project that controls a electric circuit and realize, after the softwarepart is done, that the circuit doesn't work as it should :/

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.

The universe has taken a cactus.

It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.

After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.

Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.

Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...

There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.

Guess what happened..... Naaaa?

*drum roll*

For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.

:thumbsup:

That's not cactus level yet.

Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.

So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...

Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).

I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.

Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…

Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...

I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.

It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.

I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.

After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...

We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).

This day was a marvelous shit show.

I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.

The moment when you short circuit a new 1TB disk because the the external disk case has on one side conductive bumpers (I think for ESD purpose) ... Who designs this shit? D:

Still waiting...

so, any EE here?
I'm a self-taught EE (shots fired! I was told to call myself an "inventor" so I don't offend my dear EE friends!)

Anyways... I just made a huge insight that wanted to share!

in the circuit that has been breaking my head for the past couple of days (switching DC-DC [boost, buck] converter the inductor takes care of holding the current stable while the capacitor the voltage. (apart from an low-pass filter...) The higher the frequency the smaller the capacity of the inductor needed, the less amount of wire, less resistance, more watts!!!!!

Itd be cool if we could get something like Schenzen.Io going, but you build the chips from the gates up
Maybe package them into modular units, and connect those at a higher level or abstraction, ad infinitum.

Then add access to virtual LCD output, and other peripherals, or even map output to real hardware, essentially letting you build near bare-metal virtual machines.

Dont know about that last part, but the closest I've seen to the rest is circuit simulator and again, schenzen.

On the machine learning front I figured out I need about ten times as many training samples as validation samples, or vice versa. I'll have to check my notes. Explains why I could get training loss below 2.11

Also, I'm looking at grouping digits, and trying different representations. I'm looking at the hidden variables for primorials to see what that reveals. And I realized because of the amount of configurations and training that I want to do, even a personally built cloud isnt going to be sufficient. I'm gonna have to rent someone else's hardware and run it "in duh cloud."

Any good providers that are ridiculously upfront for beginners to get started with? Namely something cheapish.

Story, !rant.

So after previously telling the story of my laptop in the rain, I thought I should follow up with this one. (this is couple months later)

My laptop was bought second hand by my father (who doesn't know anything about computers) and the poor thing had a tendency to overheat. It worked fine, but under heavy load it would only last a couple minutes before it shut down.

So once I was cleaning out the fan (as dust accumulated in there) and I ran it under the tap, to get everything off. Sure, you might cringe at the idea but I thought some water wouldn't hurt it, especially after surviving en evening in the rain. So I cleaned it and let it dry.

A while later, when it finished drying I started to reassemble my laptop. After about 30 mins of fiddling with it, it was back together and ready for a fresh start! So I powered it on.

Sparks flew. Smoke started coming off the motherboard. More sparks.

😯

I pulled the cord. "Fuck, glad I caught it on time..."

I waited a while longer. Turn it back on. "Fan is not functioning properly or is missing". FML. After all it had survived, a bit of water in the circuit that made the fan spin is what took it down 😑

Fast forward two years (without a fan, shitty days), and I bought a second hand Lenovo laptop that I adore. So I thought I'd sell the laptop on Ebay, but first I should fix the fan so that I wouldn't have to sell it for next to nothing. Part number was hard to find, and bought it from somewhere in Europe. Four weeks later, the fan arrived at my doorstep.

Took the laptop apart (have I mentioned how hard that was?) and replaced the fan. Felt good to fix what I had ruined two years back. Put it back together (after applying thermal paste, I'm not a monster) and powered it on.

"Fan is not functioning properly or is missing"

😑

After checking the connection a couple times, I realized that what had given out was the motherboard connector for the fan, after the water incident. Wasted 40 dollars and several hours of my time for nothing.

The laptop that survived hours in the rain was taken down by a wee bit of water. So sad.

Sex worker, perfumer, scientist, circuit engineer, musician (regular or session), makeup artist, soap maker, graphic or ui designer, voice actor, track bike racer, runner, swimming coach (or running coach or bike coach), dietitian, paramedic, repairman, cook, veterinarian, animal shelter worker, teacher, electrician

Can anyone help me with this theory about microprocessor, cpu and computers in general?

( I used to love programming when during school days when it was just basic searching/sorting and oop. Even in college , when it advanced to language details , compilers and data structures, i was fine. But subjects like coa and microprocessors, which kind of explains the working of hardware behind the brain that is a computer is so difficult to understand for me 😭😭😭)

How a computer works? All i knew was that when a bulb gets connected to a battery via wires, some metal inside it starts glowing and we see light. No magics involved till now.

Then came the von Neumann architecture which says a computer consists of 4 things : i/o devices, system bus ,memory and cpu. I/0 and memory interact with system bus, which is controlled by cpu . Thus cpu controls everything and that's how computer works.

Wait, what?
Let's take an easy example of calc. i pressed 1+2= on keyboard, it showed me '1+2=' and then '3'. How the hell that hapenned ?

Then some video told me this : every key in your keyboard is connected to a multiplexer which gives a special "code" to the processer regarding the key press.
The "control unit" of cpu commands the ram to store every character until '=' is pressed (which is a kind of interrupt telling the cpu to start processing) . RAM is simply a bunch of storage circuits (which can store some 1s) along with another bunch of circuits which can retrieve these data.

Up till now, the control unit knows that memory has (for eg):
Value 1 stored as 0001 at some address 34A
Value + stored as 11001101 at some address 34B
Value 2 stored as 0010 at some Address 23B

On recieving code for '=' press, the "control unit" commands the "alu" unit of cpu to fectch data from memory , understand it and calculate the result(i e the "fetch, decode and execute" cycle)

Alu fetches the "codes" from the memory, which translates to ADD 34A,23B i.e add the data stored at addresses 34a , 23b. The alu retrieves values present at given addresses, passes them through its adder circuit and puts the result at some new address 21H.

The control unit then fetches this result from new address and via, system busses, sends this new value to display's memory loaded at some memory port 4044.
The display picks it up and instantly shows it.

My problems:
1. Is this all correct? Does this only happens?

2. Please expand this more.
How is this system bus, alu, cpu , working?
What are the registers, accumulators , flip flops in the memory?
What are the machine cycles?
What are instructions cycles , opcodes, instruction codes ?
Where does assembly language comes in?
How does cpu manipulates memory?
This data bus , control bus, what are they?
I have come across so many weird words i dont understand dma, interrupts , memory mapped i/o devices, etc. Somebody please explain.

Ps : am learning about the fucking 8085 microprocessor in class and i can't even relate to basic computer architecture. I had flunked the coa paper which i now realise why, coz its so confusing. :'''(

Was raging that my new earphones already got a short circuit only to realize that I didn’t put the other ear in....

Any recommendations for introductory books on electrical engineering? I'm looking for something that goes into detail on the basics: tension, current, resistance, inductance, capacitance, etc. I have very little knowledge on the subject (I know what the basic components do and that's it) and I found myself struggling a bit with the most basic concept: voltage.

I grabbed my multimeter, a few resistors and a battery and played around a bit. For some reason it doesn't really "click" why on a 5v circuit with 3 2.2k ohm resistors (I think) the voltage around each resistor was like ~1.3 volts or something, while on a circuit with 2 resistors the voltage accross each one was ~2.3 something volts (I don't remember exact values). Like, I know that voltage is a difference in potential, but I still don't get it and idk what I'm missing. Why is the difference in potential accross a resistor different if the circuit has 2 resistors in series instead of 3. It kinda makes sense in my head but at the same time it doesn't.

In short, I want to know the "why" stuff works the way it does, not just the "how".

Also, if the book covers common practices, components, and circuits that'd be very helpful. I want to learn how to build well-designed, reliable and safe circuits.

Me and a couple of friends have this group on WhatsApp where we can share stuff that we do and maybe come up with new stuff to work on as well.

For giggles (honestly irritating to me) I'm gonna summarize some conversations on the group.

26/11
Me: Finally completed my first FPGA program, these devices are amazjng!
NO REPLY

28/11
Me: gonna make the Jacobs ladder thing today! Hope I don't get zapped
Anyone interested ?
NO REPLY

29/11
Me: hey here's a nice electronic circuit, try to analyze how this circuit oscillates (we're all ec 'engineers' well... soon at least)
NO REPLY

2/12
Friend: Guys creed 2 was amazing I don't mind watching it twice
F2 : Really? Why don't we go soon?
F3 : I'm in!!! What's the plan
F4 : how about tomorrow ?
....

3/12
F1 : Guys anyone have notes for X exam
F2 : here. {Link}
F3 : here. {Link}
F4 : how many of you are done ?
F5 : what are the important questions
(just a stupid aptitude test)

{Me} changes group title from X to Notes group

Let's give this another shot
6/12
Me: There's a conference on X technology by Y industry leader ..
Should we check it out ?
There's even a workshop on X
NO REPLY

Alright time to acknowledge my stupidity and my lack of brains for even belonging to this kind of social circle/COUNTRY

7/12
ME: New fortnite season is out
F1: woah it's crazy let's play
F2: already on it, client is updating
F3: are you shitting me? gonna get BROS laptop (i'm going to suck my brothers cock and take his computer)
F4: Hang on bro wait for me also call me on discord.

I hope you guys could stick through that. Well there's no crazy moral to this but if you're one of these guys just appreciate your friend for his efforts once in a while even at the cost of acknowledging your stupidity.

Also, words like BRO are instant triggers and I'll make sure I find you can kill you if you use it more than once every couple of sentences ( I have relatively high tolerance )

For my final project of first year at middle school (that's before university), I had to make a experiment and measured it using a circuit connected to the computer. At the end I couldn't finish but I made a program for explain what the circuit (expected) did using one of the Microsoft Office's assistant (Merlin the wizard), Merlin moved around the screen talking about the experiment and what the circuit measured it over and over, almost forgotten to tell I had to show it in a science festival to anybody who came at school, none asked about the experiment or the circuit, all the questions was about how I made the program, how the program could speech in spanish and explain the experiment.
At the begining of that day I was so nervous, but at the end I could say fuck yeah.
And the program was a macro in Basic with text to speech of a Loquendo like voice, I only record the movements and put the text.
That's one of the reason of I like programming, it save it my ass.
That was more than ten years ago, I didn't have a computer only at the school, internet not was so common.

Programming embedded systems from scratch. All hardware, memory, timers, peripherals, etc, must be set up correctly at startup, and if you set even one single bit incorrect in any of the sometimes hundreds of 32- or 64-bit configuration registers, you are screwed. There is often no terminal that prints error messages to help you, but if you are lucky you have an (often very expensive) hardware in-circuit debugger to step through the start up code.

I'm sitting here in the dark and can't program because no electricians are available... Right before a deadline...

I worked on refactoring my code for our University lab's project (I am the programmer assigned to it) for almost a week and managed to refactor most of my old and unorganized code. Today I finally had the chance to finish the job.
While everything was open I decided to charge my laptop (I work on a desktop) and the moment I plugged it in the room turned dark. I realized I just have to turn the fuse back on but of course all the fuses are on already. Appearantly that short-circuit fried my home's electrical framework somehow and because it's a weekend I can't get in touch with any electricians.

All my code was committed but not pushed so now I am stuck here before a deadline with no way to work...

tl;dr Because of a short-circuit I don't have any electricity and all my work is unpushed.

[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?

!rant, I have a couple of sky hd+ boxes knocking around, we've cancelled our sky subscription as we're big on netflix and amazon prime instead and sky don't want the boxes back. I was going to take the hard drives out (1 TB each) as i could use some more external storage for my work and pics, but before I do so is there anything I can do with the boxes instead?

Afterall they have a circuit board, memory and a chipset, can I replace the sky OS with something else?

Not job but during internship, the guy I didn’t like gave me the electrical circuit task, with acid bath and shit. I had to create 2 from the original tEmplate. I realized one copy had one of its connecting plate removed by mistake. I duplicated my mistake on the second copy as well.

Framework for easy implementation of circuit-breaker

haha I just thought of the perfect training device.

so many guns can have hair triggers. why not create a wifi enabled composite replica of guns someone is training with and get them all excited and psyched out and add a tracker to the trigger that opens a simple circuit and reports 'weapon fire' and gun orientation to the computer to help with training and reinforcing the training of proper weapons handling during apprehension or holding of a person so you can take control without shooting them accidentally in war or law enforcement actions, you could add a system that plays a very alarming bad noise when someone in the scenario is accidentally shot or you accidentally shoot the person being apprehended :P you know like you hold a pair of scissors with the point away, train them to hold their finger somewhere when handling a certain way to prevent misfire.

yes i'm thinking about shooting certain people or holding pedo money bags hostage atm.

Sometimes the world does not make sense to me.. It's like my matrix got restarted and while restarting due to some short circuit all the human beings around my clusters has turned into absolute fuckwits...

What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...

I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.

- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)

Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)

But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.

As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...

You know what I think they should extend chatgpt to do ? Output some of it's results in math latex or circuit diagrams in jpg or some popular xml format

how useful does a program that makes a new tor circuit to the website your on every 10 seconds sound devrant!

I have a mini laptop ( i-ball CompBook Excelance). I want to add an extra monitor to it for coding purpose. Can I do it? Someone suggested me not to do so as monitor would require more power which this laptop will not be able to provide and would result in a short circuit. Is it so that I can't add a monitor to this kind of mini laptop? If it's possible then tell me the kind of monitor to add and it's procedure.

Also it has a 2gb sdRAM. Can I run Android Studio in that? Or can I add more RAM to it?

I know I have asked too many questions here! But please help me guys coz I think that this is the platform where I'll get answers to all my queries. The people I am surrounded with are not worthy to ask such questions. Please help!

Thanks in advance!