Author Archives: robert

Energy consumption rant — again!

Posted on December 15, 2011 by robert

With Canada having recently CHICKENED OUT of the Kyoto treaty, I’ve had a look at my various little power supplies again. I’m talking about ‘wall warts’ / laptop power supplies and the likes. The ones I have are 100% switch-mode … Continue reading →

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Riding a bicycle at night — Most bikers are braindead…

Posted on December 7, 2011 by robert

… or will be ! It was at night, it was raining, ice rain at times, the roads were covered with slippery leaves. I met a lot of bikers – some of them had their lights on. I was still … Continue reading →

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Arduino 1.0 — a few things you can do to save FLASH space

Posted on December 7, 2011 by robert

Since the release of Arduino 1.0, some libraries have seen a huge increase in compiled file size. This is _not_ a fix for those. This will be taken care of the community sooner or later! Here are a few general … Continue reading →

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What does it take to call something ‘open’ ?

Posted on October 24, 2011 by robert

I recently stumbled across this blog post. The writer talks fervently (a small play of words if you translate his avatar from German to English) about the open-ness of KiCAD, especially about the open-ness of the design files. In this … Continue reading →

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Zombie Meerkat — The compulsory Halloween project

Posted on October 22, 2011 by robert

2x red LEDs, 1x RGB LED, 1x ATtiny24, 1x MBI5168, 1x 470R potentiometer, 2x 270R, 1x 10k, 1x 294R resistors, perfboard, wire, solder and a lot of time. The victim: a meerkat sculpture I wanted to ‘deal with’ last year … Continue reading →

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