Recent Posts

1

General Technical Chat / Re: GFCIs and Treadmills

« Last post by m k on Today at 06:11:18 pm »

When she runs an extension cord into the house and plugs it into a non-GCFI circuit, the treadmill works fine.

Extension cord from one area to the other is a no-no.

There is a safety barrier between areas.
Don't break it.

2

Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff / Re: Connecting old handheld Magellan Explorist GPS to computer via serial

« Last post by soldar on Today at 06:10:59 pm »

whip the back of and find somewhere on the pcb to solder 4 wires,if theirs space bodge in a  4 pin jack socket

Um, no. It is waterproof, hermetically sealed with rubber all around. I do not want to destroy it unnecessarily.

3

Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff / Re: A naive question about automotive CANbus sniffing and spoofing

« Last post by ataradov on Today at 06:10:57 pm »

how are they getting access to those controls so easily?

It is not easy. They find and exploit those vulnerabilities and reverse engineer protocols and checksum/encryption schemes. This is why they work on very specific car makes and model years. It is still a lot of cars, but it is not going to get easier for them to support newer cars.

I don't think it is open/closed source issue. It is more about trusting a third-party system of any kind. It might seem to work fine in most cases, but what if there is some corner case they have not handled correctly?

Ans yes, all the automotive code I have seen was pretty poor with a lot of legacy code that just gets carried forward for ages.

4

General Technical Chat / Re: GFCIs and Treadmills

« Last post by Sal Ammoniac on Today at 06:10:25 pm »

If it were belt static, then the treadmill should work fine during heavy/high humid days.

The garage has an air conditioner/heater and the humidity is rarely above 40-50%. That's something to look into, however. I can try turning off the AC and running a humidifier in the room to see if that makes any difference.

5

Microcontrollers / Re: Help porting 2 functions from C++ to C

« Last post by pcprogrammer on Today at 06:05:49 pm »

Thank you for taking a look to the code,but I can guarantee that the spi function is working fine.Try to send something with the command glcd_data(0xff) it will show a bar in the display.

I don't have a setup ready to test this, but I will take your word for that part working. Still leaves you with non working code. In what you attached the error with the font reading is still faulty.

Check radiolistener his post and fix that first and see what else is not reading the font data in a correct manner.

6

General Technical Chat / Re: GFCIs and Treadmills

« Last post by BrianHG on Today at 06:05:12 pm »

If it were belt static, then the treadmill should work fine during heavy/high humid days.

7

General Technical Chat / Re: GFCIs and Treadmills

« Last post by themadhippy on Today at 06:01:57 pm »

GFCI outlets are designed to flip their breakers if there is too much power flowing through the ground port. Because treadmills and incline trainers use the ground prong on the outlets to disperse static electricity, if you plug your machine into a GFCI outlet, it will likely trip the breaker

WALOB ,first i can easily trip an rcd (gfci) without ANYTHING escaping to earth and secondly  static discharge through the ground wont cause an imbalance of current between live and neutral  so the device shouldnt trip.sounds more like there trying to cover  up there iffy design

8

Computers / Re: Australian Government Invests $1BN on Aussie Quantum Computing Startup

« Last post by coppice on Today at 06:01:07 pm »

Is there any evidence of a quantum computer doing anything better than a traditional computer, or is it just all theoretical?

There is good evidence that a quantum computer could do a few useful niche things at great speed if they can massively reduce the noise. There is no evidence at all that a quantum computer will ever be any kind of general purpose computation machine, so the name computer is a stretch. Can they massively reduce the noise, and get some serious entanglement? Who knows, but you never learn to do anything without a lot of effort, and those niches may prove to be highly valuable.

9

Beginners / Re: 5V buck converter debugging

« Last post by __steven on Today at 06:01:02 pm »

I think I'm going to find the IC heating up, given that it developed an internal short. I could get an IR camera to pinpoint what part of the IC is hot but is this going to be valuable info? Or are you suggesting some external part of the circuit may also be heating up and that could be the root of the whole failure?

I believe, based on your description, that there was an issue on the board and when increasing the power available to the IC it was able to destroy itself. I am suggesting that the failure was on the board external to the IC. The internal short was likely a secondary failure caused by the first.

Using continuity (with audible beep) mode on my multimeter, probing at the nearest connected component (e.g. C4) on the same net so that I don't have to get the probe on the very fine pitch IC pad. I skipped checking for shorts between a pin and adjacent NC pin, maybe it's not a safe assumption that those aren't internally connected to something?

I would suggest using resistance mode just in case you have a higher impedance short that would not give you an audible continuity beep. NC pins are defined as not carrying a bond wire to the die so I believe you made a good assumption not checking them.

I would suggest trying again. Bring it up to 4 volts and check some waveforms, I am hopeful with that information you will find the issue and be up and running 

10

Test Equipment / Re: RuiDeng Riden RD6006 DC power supply

« Last post by bateau020 on Today at 06:00:26 pm »

Is there anyway to use the Riden RD6006 flashed with the great Unisoft firmware with Sigrok? I would like to do power logging

https://sigrok.org/wiki/RDTech_RD_series