Month: December 2017

1 min 1

Atari Portfolio retro computers

Around 12 years ago I had four Atari Portfolio palmtop computers complete with boxes, manuals and a ton of memory cards plus many accessories. For some really stupid reason I decided that they were a pieces of crap and chucked them (I faintly remember trying to sell them on ebay without success) but not before […]
Read More
2 min 0

Arduino NIMH battery tester update

Back in October I posted about a basic NIMH battery tester based on an Arduino nano I made some time back which was a successful project and works quite well however it could only test one battery at a time and didn’t apply a constant current load. It was good but not very accurate and […]
Read More
1 min 0

Fake DS18B20 sensors from China sold on Ebay / Amazon?

A while ago I read an article on fake electronic components that are flooding the market with high end audio and hobbyist parts being the biggest targets of the fakers. The article in particular spoke about high end transistors used in power amplifiers blowing or producing nowhere near the gain and / or frequency response […]
Read More
1 min 0

Is it even worth repairing consumer goods nowadays?

30 years ago… Yes. Now not so much. Take for example a repair of a Panasonic DMR-BWT720 blu-ray recorder which I was handed for free as it had failed and had been replaced with a newer model. The fault – freezes / runs slow and fails to record sometimes. If it does record the image […]
Read More