Collaborate Disseminate
Call us old fashioned, but we feel like when you buy a piece of hardware, the thing should actually function. Now don’t get us wrong, like most of you, we’re …read more Continue reading Investigating a Defective USB Power Bank Module
Join us on Wednesday, April 21 at noon Pacific for the AVR Reverse Engineering Hack Chat with Uri Shaked! We’ve all become familiar with the Arduino ecosystem by now, to …read more Continue reading AVR Reverse Engineering Hack Chat
I know it is a common stereotype for an old guy to complain about how good the kids have it today. I, however, will take a little different approach: We have it so much better today when it comes to …read more
Continue reading Before Google, There was the Reference Librarian
You have to be of a certain vintage to remember doing research on microfilm and microfiche. Before the age of mass digitization of public records, periodicals, and other obscure bits of history, dead-tree records were optically condensed onto fine-grain film, either in roll form or as flat sheets, which were …read more
Continue reading This Expedient Microfiche Reader Illuminates Retro Datasheets
Mechanical keyboards use switches of a few different types. But even those types include myriad variations. How’s a hacker to know just exactly what equipment is out there?
For example, if you grab a fellow cube-farmer’s mechanical keyboard (possibly because they clacked on their Cherry Blue’s just one too many times) and angrily rip off a few keycaps to show you’re serious, what do you see? In most cases you expect to see the familiar color and stem shape of a Cherry MX switch or one of its various clones. But you may find a square box around it like …read more
Continue reading Bonanza of Keyswitch Datasheets Fills Our Decks with Clack
[Charles Ouweland] purchased some parts off Aliexpress and noticed that the Texas Instruments logo on some of his parts wasn’t the Texas Instruments logo at all, it was just some kind of abstract shape that vaguely resembled the logo. Suspicious and a little curious, he decided to take a closer look at the MCP1702 3.3v LDO regulators he ordered as well. Testing revealed that they were counterfeits with poor performance.
Looking at the packages, there were some superficial differences in the markings of the counterfeit MCP1702 versus genuine parts from Microchip, but nothing obviously out of place. To conclusively test …read more
Continue reading What Good Are Counterfeit Parts? Believe It Or Not, Maybe A Refund
I’m in the planning stages of a side project for Hackaday right now. It’s nothing too impressive, but this is a project that will involve a lot of electromechanical parts. This project is going to need a lot of panel mount 1/8″ jacks and sockets, vertical mount DIN 5 connectors, pots, switches, and other carefully crafted bits of metal. Mouser and Digikey are great for nearly every other type of electrical component, but when it comes to these sorts of electromechanical components, your best move is usually to look at AliExpress or DealExtreme, finding something close to what you need, …read more
It’s a fair assumption that the majority of Hackaday readers will be used to working with electronic components, they are the life blood of so many of the projects featured here. In a lot of cases those projects will feature very common components, those which have become commoditized through appearing across an enormous breadth of applications. We become familiar with those components through repeated use, and we build on that familiarity when we create our own circuits using them.
All manufacturers of electronic components will publish a datasheet for those components. A document containing all the pertinent information for a …read more
Continue reading Pillaging the Wealth of Information in a Datasheet
