μblog: engineering from the trenches

I have made few attempts to keep this space updated and relevant over the past year, but ultimately failed. I have nearly completed my PhD so I have gotten extremely busy with finishing experiments and writing/editing my thesis. I still do analog and digital design in my day-to-day life, except, most of that work cannot be published here directly. I no longer plan on updating microblog, however, I will leave it up for at least the forthcoming months until the end of the internet in case anyone is interested in saving some information. Thank you readers, it has been a great ride!

Update: I had no idea that there were so many readers, so I will not disappoint and will do my best to keep this content up indefinitely. I may add in the future, but it will not be nearly as frequent as it was in the past.

P.S. I will be looking for an industry job in medical device design in the coming spring, so don’t hesitate to contact me if you are looking for an engineer.

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I had the good fortune of running into someone who read IC Friday, at random, and that reminded me that I have been quite delinquent in updating ublog. My work load has tripled over the past few months, so I have been busy, however, I will make every effort to keep this current. Below are my non-work-related engineering projects that are in various state of completion, hopefully I will create writeups for them and you will find them interesting.

• DJ Box — Mini-itx fanless system with wifi to encode and stream, on the fly, audio from my turntables. Welding a custom case (see below) and adding one or two analog VU meters.
• MIG Welding — Might not really be considered engineering, but at least it’s arc welding. My family got me a 140A MIG welder for my birthday in February and I purchased everything needed for steel and aluminum welding, so I will try to make something interesting. Maybe use it to destroy some solid-state relays (on video).
• Functional IC Decapping — IC Friday will not be continued in its former state where chips were bathed in acid and imaged. I think it will be better for everyone, especially myself, if I create fewer but higher-content posts. I am thinking of either decapping some analog circuits without destroying the majority of the package and demonstrating some optical glitching, for example. Another idea is to image the chips but write a clear post on the identification of various sub-circuits on the IC substrate.
• Sleep-State Staging EEG Amplifier — I am have been looking at the most simple method to create an EEG amplifier and LabView combination that is capable of discriminating sleep states. I am then planning to post some data from myself.

Feel free to post a comment if there is something specific that you want to see written up, hopefully I can get to it in a reasonable manner. It’s good to be back!

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I have been looking at getting a netbook for some time, specifically the Samsung NC10. I have been looking around for a netbook with the best performance and noticed that the “best” netbooks from all manufacturers seem to have the same specifications (at the time of writing):

• 1.6GHz, N270 Atom processor (single core)
• 1GB Ram
• 10.2″ LCD (no touchscreen)
• 160GB magnetic/16GB solid state storage
• Windows XP Home

Have the manufacturers gotten lazy and all ended up using the same reference design? A little bit more research and found out that this is related to Microsoft’s reluctant extension of the XP availability. Microsoft has agreed to provide OEMs with very cheap ($32, $26 for developing countries) XP Home licences for “ultra-low cost PCs”. The downside is that ULCPC’s hardware specifications cannot exceed some guidelines set by Microsoft which include the list above. On one hand, these XP Home licences are every affordable thus making netbooks affordable for those who want to run XP, however, ULCPC licensing definitely caps performance for all netbooks across the board. I would rather get one with 2GB of ram and use FreeBSD or Linux.

In the end, I decided to hold off on getting a netbook and upgrade my home theater system instead. I am looking forward to CES 2009 (1/8/2009-1/11/2009), hopefully there will be some announcements of netbooks that are not bound by ULCPC standards. I would really like to see a machine with the forthcoming dual core atom chip, 2GB of ram, and 5+ hour battery life for about $500.

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After a few days in the lab, I am finally catching up with things. Over all, I am happy with the way this HOPE turned out and am considering going to the Next HOPE, maybe to present something. At least one reader enjoyed it too! I didn’t take too many pictures, so here is a whole flickr pool from the meeting. The above image is from sushimako. I will summarize my experience in a typical Clint Eastwood style.

The Good:

• A few interesting talks regarding hardware modification. Audience seemed pleased and interested.
• An interesting demonstration by Ladyada regarding how to hook up a used pay-phone to a skype box. These phones seem to be dirt cheap so I am already thinking of a way to wire one up as a bluetooth headset.
• Round the clock soldering training. The “hacker village” people really outdid themselves and provided ample building tools and helped attendees put together the circuit kits they bought.
• Club-Mate, something like a caffeinated version of ginger-ale.
• Hackerspaces in Philadelphia and Washington D.C. (among others) that I will try to visit.
• A comfortable area with to relax in. This featured hammocks and a large display showing some random videos (more on that below).

The Bad:

• Some single presenters were not prepared to give an hour long presentation and would either repeat themselves or end way early.
• Most of the software security talks were low on content and used overly contrived examples. One penetration testing example had the user obtain /etc/passwd and then use a password cracker, I hope it was using a wordlist and not brute force.

The Ugly:

• The overall smell of the attendees forced the organizers to give away deodorant soap bars by the box load.
• A short documentary was played in the rest area depicting an individual who had eight realdolls (wikipedia entry). That is about 50,000USD spent on latex “companions”. At a point in the video, he decided to introduce his dolls to his girlfriend, who tried to deal with them at first, but then gave up and ended the relationship.

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I am getting ready to leave for New York, NY for 2600’s last HOPE conference. I haven’t figured out all of the talks that I will attend, however, I will surely be going to the 2pm MSP430 talk in Engressia (schedule). If anyone wants to meet up, feel free to leave a comment and I will try to check them periodically. Otherwise, you can simply come find me, above is my latest mugshot.

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My family is moving from Yalta to Washington D.C. so I am taking some time off to get their house ready. I have some spare time to explore the “advanced” features of my mobile phone. Below are a few tools that I found very handy in getting the most of my Verizon smartphone.

• BirdieSync – This tool synchronizes your Windows Mobile phone with Thunderbird. It is quite good for maintainging your address book as well as your tasks. Since Thunderbird can integrate with Google calendar, you can maintain an on-line calendar for your coworkers that syncs with your phone.
• PdaNet – This tool allows you to use your smartphone (with a data plan) as a broadband internet connection. I have had good functionality when I connect my phone with ActiveSync over bluetooth and then initiated the connection. See results.
• Yahoo! Go – This tool is meant to give your phone access to the Yahoo! network of sites. I use it mostly to upload images to flickr. I figure that is easiest to put them on-line for easy access so I don’t have to drag and drop them when ActiveSync connects.
• Google Maps – No triangulation, however, this Google Maps is still very useful. Integrates well with the i760 touchscreen.

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As I had hoped, I finished the 100km charity ride this past Sunday in a little over four hours. The organizers did an excellent job providing refreshments and snacks and the track layout was pretty flat. Near the end of the ride, the sun was out and my bike computer indicated that the temperature was above 40C/105F for the last 1.5 hours, peaking at 45C. I can truly say that I slept like a baby on Sunday night.

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It is well known that written composition is not one of the strong points of most engineering-oriented curricula. The joke around my undergraduate university (George Mason University) was that Computer Engineering majors, such as myself, were totally illiterate as they were only subjected to two English courses in order to maximally combine the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering programs. Most of the other engineering programs had three courses, so although they could read and write, we made their computers operate.

I have been trying to fill the hole left by the one missing English course and to be more coherent in written and verbal conversations, so I have spent a little bit of time looking to avoid common pitfalls in the English language. To my surprise, there is a fairly good list of commonly misused Physics terms as maintained by Donald Simanek. There is some humorous intention, however, it is a good starting point. There is also the list of commonly misused English phrases, as well as a list of English words with disputed usage. I am sure that undergraduate engineering students will continue to loathe their English courses (as I did), however, the bright pupils may use proper grammar and composition as a tool to separate themselves from the rest.

( Photo is from surrealmuse. )

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As promised last week, here is the MAX 660. With computer issues resolved, we now have pictures. Thanks go out to Neil B. for supplying me with this chip.

max660-10x-stitch.jpg

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I decided to sign up to do Tour de Cure this year (in June) to help raise funds and awareness for diabetes research. The event I will be in is the 100km ride in Reston, VA along the W&OD trail. If anyone would like to offer sponsorship (in any value), I would gladly accept. The link to make a donation is at the bottom of the page and the donation is tax-deductible (in the USA at least). Please post any comments or questions you may have and wish me luck. Conversely, if you will be in the Washington D.C. area and are interested in doing this, you can join my friends any I and make it a team effort.

( Donation page for N. Chernyy )

P.S. For extra kicks, the bike above is the one that I will be doing the 100km on. It is not a road bike, but it is really well tuned and rides smoothly.

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