Category Archives: Electronics

I’ve been looking for a 3-axis gyroscope recently, and I came across the Wii Motion Plus. Fortunately, other people have done the hard work of reverse engineering the protocol and written this up elsewhere. In short, it’s a nice simple … Continue reading →

My slug died. No, not the sort that shrivels up when it comes across salt, but my Linksys NSLU2. As it turns out, the power supply is known to be a bit flaky. Again, dodgy electrolytic capacitors. Who’d have thought … Continue reading →

A while back, you may remember that I had to put together an RS-232 level shifter for my NSLU2’s serial console. It’s been working reliably so far, despite hanging loose as a bare piece of stripboard dangling from the other … Continue reading →

I thought it was about time to write here about my DVD player and my CD player.

I have a Netgear GS108 8-port gigabit ethernet switch, which died the other day. I found it working normally for a few seconds, and slowly flashing all of its lights for a few seconds, over and over again. During the … Continue reading →

My bank recently sent me a new debit card, which included the non-optional feature of contactless payment. This is based on NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, which utilises a loop antenna to allow a reader to communicate with the chip … Continue reading →

Some time ago I bought a Digilent Nexys 2 FPGA development board and a Digilent PmodCLS LCD module. I spent some time implementing a more or less trivial CPU in the FPGA, and various bits and pieces to aid with … Continue reading →

Some months back, I picked up a 1GB DIMM at a computer fair. It was cheap, which was about the only thing going for it, but I thought I’d take a chance on it. When I got home I plugged … Continue reading →

I decided to have a play around with digital hardware. Having been exposed to some verilog at work, and seen that FPGA development boards have become quite affordable, I thought I’d have a go.