The Salvage: Composite to RF Converter

This is one the first in the series of The Salvage. How to salvage old electronic equipment for valuable parts and IC's. Today we will look at an old, locally made Composite video to RF converter. I bought this to connect my Playstation 2 with an old TV at home.

Moving Blog from Wordpress to Blogspot

I have moved from my wordpress installation to a blog on blogspot. This move may seem contrary to what I thought before. But I needed something simple to deliver information with the flexibility of an editable interface.

The free account on Blogspot allows you edit your basic HTML template and create HTML/Java Script Gadgets which is not allowed on the free account of Wordpress. As for my wordpress installation on the server, it was too flexible to maintain and my free hosting (www.freehostia.com) suddenly stopped parses from external IP's, in short I could not use Google Analytic and Askimet without paying them for an upgraded account. I do not want to do this for my for now.

Anyway, everything is working fine. I will be writing on a lot more topics now. Keep an eye on the side bar categories and the Pages.

PHUN simulation: Rocker-Bogie Design for CE Bot

We are working on a project by Crazyengineers.com, the CE Bot (visit the link for more information and see Appendix for more links). While discussing the appropriate suspension/chassis design, we thought about implementing a Rocker-Bogie system inspired by the Mars Roves Spirit and Opportunity Designs.

To get an idea on how the Rocker-Bogie design would work, I tried to simulate the construction on a free fun 2D sandbox physics simulator, PHUN. The simulations are 2D, i.e only lateral suspention simulation is possible, cannot simulate roll and yaw.

My visit to CNN and GeoTV @ Dubai, U.A.E. Part 2

You must have have read about my visit to CNN in the previous post where me and an old friend of mine visited the Middle East CNN office. We finished off by exchanging cards, not exchanging, she gave hers. We exited the office thinking how lucky we were to see an inside of a CNN office. While getting down the lift, we stopped on the 3rd floor because of the colorful direction boards and company names. We came across companies like Cybertronix, 7 Cube etc, but none were open, so in the spur of the moment we decided to visit Geo TV (Urdu News Channel from Pakistan). Half of the whole 3rd floor was given to them.

My visit to CNN and GeoTV @ Dubai, U.A.E. Part 1

Last week a friend of mine, an old family friend, landed here in Dubai, Emirates. His name, Aamer Mansoor Trambu, a final year student of journalism, Mumbai, India (presently in Ryerson Uni, Toronto, Canada as an exchange student). We had our friendly exchange of life stories and usual recording of random video clips for our own music video (he wanted to showoff what he learned at the school of journalism and I wanted to showoff my Adobe After Effects skills). By the end of the day, suddenly, we decided to do something I had always wanted to for a long time. Visit random companies and pester them with a million questions about their work (and ofcourse learn at the same time, while keeping their irritation at a minimum). So we decided to head to CNN at Dubai Media City.

Now before I talk about the visit, I want to get something off my chest. Generally students, as far as I know in my college, think its not possible to get companies to show them around. This might be because our college professors never encourage us nor tell us how to go about requesting companies to do that and, sharing the blame, the students themselves are never interested. Very few students have tried it (successfully, but never shared their experiences, I don't understand why) and very few professors have told us to do so (these few professors are the reason I am still interested in engineering. For sure, if you try it the right way, companies would love to show you around as long as you truthfully tell them why you are there.

PC Parallel Port Interfacing Technique – Part 2

Introduction

In this tutorial we will flash a LED (Light Emitting Diode) connected to your printer port socket. Reading the first part is recommended to get a general idea of what you are up to.

Connections
To connect a LED to your port first you have to know what it looks like. Shown below is the most common type of connector you can find on a PC.

LPT Pin Out [courtesy:
http://www.wkretak.pl/readarticle.php?article_id=5]

PC Parallel Port Interfacing Techniques – Part 1

Introduction

In this tutorial I will introduce the PC Parallel Port and how to identify its address for use in home electronic projects. Remember, the whole process and learning takes time but is fairly easy later on.

The LPT or Printer Port [courtesy: LadyAda,
http://www.ladyada.net/make/digg/programinterface.html]

The Parallel Port is (updated 2010) was the most commonly used port for interfacing usual devices like printers and scanners. It’s found commonly on the back of your PC as a D-Type 25 Pin female connector. Did you know it can even be used to make home projects?

Robot Navigation; "Where am I going?"

J. J. Leonard and Hugh Durrant-Whyte, in the last decade, briefly described the general problem of mobile robot navigation by three questions:

"Where am I?"

"Where am I going?"

and "How should I get there?"

I was shocked to realize that these 3 basic questions which we, of course take for granted(!) are actually immensely complex implementations in robotic systems.

What I found interesting is that to date there is no truly elegant solution for the "Where am I?" part. A collection of many partial solutions can roughly be categorized into two groups: relative and absolute position measurements. Because of the lack of a single, generally good method, developers of automated guided vehicles (AGVs), unmanned flying vehicles (UAV's) and mobile robots usually combine two or more methods, one from each category. These two super-groups can be further divided into sub-groups as shows below.

MIT Open Course Ware

MIT OCW (Open Course Ware) is an amazing initiative from one of the world's best engineering universities, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA).

The OCW provides online coursework on various topics ranging from Architecture, Engineering, Management to Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The course work can be found in formats ranging from PDF files to recorded class lectures.

Visit the main website to find topic of your interest. They keep updating the pages so I'm not going to post many links here except one.

As an example, here is a video on Basic circuit analysis methods, Kirchhoff's Voltage Law (KVL) and Kirchhoff's Current Law (KCL) method. (Lecture by Prof. Anant Agarwal)

How to FM tap your neighbors telephone

In short: "Listen in to the telephone conversation on your radio!"

But before you try this, a disclaimer:

All information provided in this post is for educational purposes only. I do not support nor encourage this monkey business. If you choose to make this device; you, and only you will be responsible for the consequences. Happy building!

Lets move on.

I had taken my old Landmine Landline (wired) phone and thought of making it a cool spy device. You know like in the Bond Austin Powers movies, only difference being, this one's a little bigger. Click on a image to "enlarge" it.

I don't have to explain what I'm going to do with this or what this is.












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