General – Page 2 – Adrian’s electronics blog

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General

Teardown of a high end outdoor mast head Wi-Fi access point

Adrian Smith
22/04/2023

Here I have a couple of defective enterprise grade access points that were decommissioned as they were suspected as faulty and were out of warranty. They are manufactured by Xirrus and are meant for outdoor high capacity Wi-Fi for public locations e.g. Stadiums, festivals etc. I thought I’d pull one apart and see what was […]

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General

Is it worth buying faulty tablets off eBay to repair & resell for profit?

Adrian Smith
23/02/2023

I bought two lots of faulty laptops and tablets from eBay with the intention of repairing and reselling them as mentioned in my previous blog posts. Without repeating myself this was largely a success more so with the laptops and not so much with the tablets. The problem with the tablets not being profitable is […]

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General

More headaches – an Asus X205T that won’t boot from USB

admin
22/03/2022

I bought several laptops and netbooks off eBay with a view to refurbish and sell them; I got around 7 laptops and 9 tablets and netbooks for just £100. One of the netbooks was an Asus X205T that had it’s eMMC drive encrypted with bitlocker amongst other issues such as a dead battery and faulty […]

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NTP clock only version of my ESP8266 based display

admin
27/04/2021

As there was interest I have released firmware for my YouTube statistics and clock internet connected display featured in my previous post for users who just want an NTP clock and don’t require the YouTube counter functions. This clock automatically gets the time from the NTP server and synchronises it with the software based RTC […]

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The DM134B 16 bit shift register with constant current LED drivers

admin
06/02/2021

I have quite a few DM134B IC’s which are 16 bit shift registers complete with constant current LED drivers built in so I decided to make something useful from them. The chips require minimal components; LED current is simply set via an external resistor which is far better than having to use 16 individual resistors. […]

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Racal Avionics data entry device / CDU teardown and test

admin
06/02/2021

This will be the last teardown video for a while and this time I have a Racal Avionics CDU allegedly from an RAF Nimrod which I obtained some time ago and discovered that it communicates with a host system over standard RS422. Now, thinking I might be able to connect it to my PC or […]

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General

Using large / high current 7 segment LED displays with the MAX7219

admin
23/01/2021

I have some largish 7 segment displays which are 0.8″ in height but I found that they were dim when driven from a MAX7219 even at full brightness. I found that this was because the LED displays I were using need around 15 mA for a decent amount of brightness, 25mA ideal. However the MAX7219 […]

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P&G aircraft cockpit voice recorder (black box) teardown

admin
16/01/2021

In this teardown video I’ve got something pretty cool; a black box from an RAF Nimrod MRA4 which was a failed project and numerous aircraft were built but were never delivered to the RAF and were later scrapped. This one does show some signs of wear and tear although it may well be damage due […]

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General

Clone Wemos D1 mini boards intermittent resetting and other problems

admin
09/01/2021

I’ve recently been experimenting with the ESP8266 modules and made a YouTube statistics counter as the first and experimental project. I used a NodeMCU for that which gave me no problems at all. However there is a smaller board, the Wemos D1 mini which on first impressions looks like a more ideal board for final […]

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General

A YouTube statistics counter for subscribers and views (2020)

Adrian Smith
22/12/2020

This month’s project; a YouTube statistics counter I made from spare parts I had laying around and also a good opportunity to play around with the ESP8266 module which is a WiFi chip that contains an 80Mhz 32bit CPU with some flash space free to run some additional code on. It has a USB bootloader […]

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Oddball military hardware – GRF Control Panel

admin
27/11/2020

I bought some more crap; this time another eBay find which appears to be a control panel for a video processing unit that takes the recorded video from a Tornado jet’s onboard VHS video recorder (yes, really!) and exports it to another media format along with some video processing. It has several analog switches and […]

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Merlin Helicopter CDU update – serial port probing

admin
24/11/2020

I have been trying to see if the Merlin Helicopter CDU I wrote about in my previous article could be repurposed. I found that it has a number of serial ports which are a mix of RS485 and RS232 and was hoping that key presses would present something on the serial port(s) or the display […]