Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Finding the Shorted Component on a Printed Circuit Board

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Once in a while, you find yourself staring at a printed circuit board with a shorted power rail.  It could be any of the components, capacit...
Sunday, August 20, 2023

A Ni-MH Battery Charger by Panasonic

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 Here we'll look at Panasonic Ni-MH battery charger, rated as 0.3A for AA and 0.15A for AAA.  It can accommodate 1-4 AA or AAA cells. Th...
Monday, May 1, 2023

Failure of a 5V AC Adapter

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The adapter is for an Android TV box, input 100-240VAC 50/60Hz 0.3A, output 5V 2A.  The item was in use for about four years. There is no sc...
Wednesday, April 19, 2023

KiCad 7 vs Altium 22

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 Both software evolves fast, so we compare the specific versions. Altium is a feature rich package, exceeding KiCad in all capabilities.  Ho...
Thursday, April 6, 2023

Building KiCad from Source

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KiCad has become increasingly capable of taking on large PCB designs.  It's good to take a look at the source code.  We'll try to th...
Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Lead Acid Battery Charger to Lithium Ion Battery Charger

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I have a spotlight lamp that runs off a small 6V lead acid battery which no longer holds charge.  I replaced it with some used laptop batter...
Thursday, November 17, 2022

Microsoft Wireless Mouse Power Circuitry

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 The Microsoft wireless mouse takes two AA batteries in parallel.  Tests show that it can start at 0.8V and run down to 0.7V provided that t...