Most ZIF sockets aren’t exactly cheap, but TQFP sockets are in the range of insanely stupid pricing. I’m pondering a TQFP programmer that I can pop the chips into, but most of these little guys are $150 or so. I asked Bunnie, one of the more hardware savvy people I’ve met about it – and he came up with a place that has them for a mere $50. $60 if you want the clamshell stye. Given the hours of searching I put into it, I thought I’d share this one.
I used to sport a pretty decent Tenma soldering station, but it moved on and I’ve been settling for lesser irons since. I finally upped my game a bit with a new dual purpose soldering station: the Aoyue 968 SMD rework station. Ian put together a pretty decent review of his on Hack-A-Day (one of my successors – who’s doing a fine job by the way) I ordered mine up from Amazon – you can support my work/site/kids by using this link and ordering if you want one.
I gave the rework pencil a workout with some normal solder and a un-cleaned pc board. It worked like a champ. The temperature controller works very nicely, and takes some time to cool things off when you shut it down to prevent damage to the heating element in the pencil.
I managed to slice my finger on the fume collector mounted to the soldering iron – I’ll put a bit of effort into cleaning up the sharp edge but it wasn’t a big deal. It could pose a problem during tip changes.
The station itself is large – I mean pretty big, but it fits nicely on top of my 7633 oscilloscope ( which is pretty huge) so it doesn’t bother me. If you’re short on space, you might consider sticking with a pencil iron that stores in a tool box, this is a workbench size too.
Mad scientist factor: mid to awesome. The blue lit air flow indicator is great. Make sure you pull the pump retention screw on the bottom or you’ll be in for some serious noise. All in all a great tool, but the digital temp indicator is only for the reflow side – not the soldering iron. If you depend on decent temp feedback on your iron, you should consider picking up a dedicated temperature controlled soldering iron.
I’ve been waiting patiently for a freakin Android phone on Sprint. After waiting and waiting, I ordered in iPhone. The App store is proven, the dev kit is easy to get, and even Stanford put out tutorials on programming for it. Sorry sprint. (Thanks for raising your fee and letting me out of mah contract early.)
I’ve got a few hobbies that I personally think have no more risk than spending your life on a couch. That said, they do tend to produce more slight injuries (unless you have a really evil couch).
Every so often I enjoy sliding down a snow covered mountain. Sometimes the mountain likes to help me stop sooner than I’d planned. Since mountains aren’t usually very soft, I like to put something between me and them.
I finally had a chance to get Mediatomb (a uPnP media server) working from my powermac. Now it’s happily serving up video to my DirecTV HR20/21s. Given a fresh install of leopard, here’s what you need to do….
A while back (like a year), the boys at Neuros sent me a Neuos OSD unit to play with. They didn’t really ask me to do anything specific with it, but send it they did. When it came, I unboxed it, and promptly put off playing with it because I was too busy. I was also a bit dissapointed that it couldn’t output anything HD – having just put in my 720p projector, I just didn’t have a good place to test it.
A couple days ago, I picked up a Sonic Impact ipod video dock for under $40 at Sams. I was trying to think of a good test config and remembered the Neuros. After I set up the Neuros on my network, it easily found my samba share of media. Playback was just a couple button pushes away on the remote – and it works very well.
If you live by iTunes, by all means go for an apple TV. If you prefer to keep things a bit more portable, then check out the Neuros devices. They’re pretty cheap, they’re Open Source so you can hack away on em, they even have development bountys for features.
Right now I’m thinking that a Neuros would make an excellent in car video player. Just store some moves on a big CF card or an external USB drive, hook up some power and you’ll have a hardware player that doesn’t make any sound, doesn’t look like a stealable iPod, and you can just hide it under a seat or in your dash.
(Hell, you can probably use your ipod as an external drive for it if you have to)
Yakima makes some handy roof racks, but personally, I think that they charge way to much for their matching lock cores. Luckily, you can modify the cores that come with the gear to match on your own. It’s a quick, easy project and it’ll make your key ring smaller. Read on to find out how.
I’ve been pretty quite for a little while. I’ve been busy putting together my new office. We had a garage that was just full of junk. I’ve been busy studding it out, insulating it, adding drywall, a huge window and a handy exterior door. While I was at it, I ran a new 20 amp power circuit, added some recessed lighting and three way light switches. Nearly all the drywall is hung, now I just have to motivate myself to tape it up and get ready to paint it.
I’ve got a throw rug and some work out mat style floor to use temporarily, but after a while the cold hard concrete will get covered in some sort of carpet.
I finally got around to building a fairly small photo box for lighting small project pieces. This little guy was shot inside the box with pretty cruddy lighting. I upped the levels a bit, but for a first try with just florescent light, I’m happy.
The box itself really is pretty small…
It’s a cardboard box with white flannel taped in place of the sides and some heavy white bristol paper lining the back and bottom.
Earlier this year, I got the chance to add a Sumo Sac to my family room. It’s essentially a gigantic beanbag filled with an entire couch (sans wood chips). My model weighs in at a mere 60 lbs. When it’s stretched out, it’s absolutely huge. Virtually everyone who sees it immediately tries to jump on it. (Even forty year old computer programmers)
The sac arrived unceremoniously on my doorstep with a fedex tag attached. After dragging it across the floor I let it roll downstairs to my basement lair. I immediately regretted this, as I realized that any small creatures in the way would have been crushed, deep fried and made to resemble a spider roll at the sushi place.
Inside the shipping bag, I discovered the actual sumosac wrapped inside a plastic bag. (They package the sac for delivery by dropping inside the plastic bag and vacuum packing it to get the size to a manageable shape.)
Totally unwrapped, the bag looked alot like a giant piece of tofu. From there, the waiting began.
The sac took a few days to mostly expand, and a good week in my colder basement to fully expand. While I was waiting, I decided to check out what was inside the bag. Instead of traditional foam beans, they chose to use shredded urethane foam – essentially the same as shredded couch cusions.
After a few days, the Sac had mostly expanded, but quite a bit of the foam was still stuck together. I put my 15 inch powerbook g4 in the shot for scale. (That would be a full size couch hiding behind it.)
After a couple of weeks of use, the full size of the bag becomes apparent. (My wife is about 5’9″) to give you an idea. If you’ve got the space for something this big, I suggest picking one up. It’s great for watching movies, playing video games or cushioning your fall from a 5 story building. (don’t try that at home, kids)