Power over Ethernet Flashlight

2013/12/29 1 Comment

Sometimes you learn about an interesting IC and you build an entire circuit around it for no other good reason… This project is one of those!

The TPS2378 is an IEEE802.3at (Power over Ethernet) Powered Device controller, featuring internal pass MOSFET for loads up to 25.5W, Type 1 (a.k.a. 802.3af) compatibility and auxiliary power source support.

The IC is normally used together with a DC-DC step down regulator to power a network device (the PD) from a PoE compliant switch or injector (the PSE). A proper 802.3at device requires an isolated power supply with some safety characteristics that makes it not trivial to implement, and there are many DC-DC ICs with integrated PoE controller to make it easier, but as I wasn’t really interested in that part I just went for an easier project with just the PoE controller and some ballast… And what better ballast than some high power white LEDs!

This project is a small PoE flashlight, that can be powered by any 802.3af or 802.3at compliant injector or switch. It can be used as a PoE tester, or if you get trapped in a dark datacenter at night!


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LED Light Replacement for AC Halogen Lamps

2013/11/18 2 Comments

LED based home lights are becoming more and more common each day due to their higher efficiency, and their price is starting to fall to an affordable level. Most commercial AC LED lights on the market are meant to replace 230V E27 lamps, as that socket is big enough to fit an AC/DC converter inside.

I have recently found myself with some floor and roof halogen lamps that I wanted to convert to LED, but I wasn’t able to find a commercial replacement for the 12V AC powered G4 lamps and I did not want to replace the power supply, so I decided to run my own design!


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This project is a small LED based lamp designed to replace AC halogen bulbs, and to fit in a small 3cm diameter PCB.

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Inside a Hantek DSO-2090 USB Oscilloscope

2013/07/10 118 Comments

As part of my electronics test gears, I’ve recently got myself a cheap USB oscilloscope: a Hantek DSO-2090.

The DSO-2090 is marketed as an 100 MSPS with 60 MHz analog bandwidth, though the full sample rate is available only when using a single channel. As Hantek also sells similar models with higher performances, I immediately took the device apart to better understand how it works and to see if it can be pushed a bit more, especially regarding the realtime sample rate.


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This post is a basic analysis of how this oscilloscope works with some consideration of its limits, and it may be interesting to better understand how a basic DSO works.

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USB to 100BASE-FX Optical Fiber Network Card

2013/05/26 26 Comments

Optical fiber is an intriguing technology, deployed all over the world connecting computer networks with the speed of light (well… almost).

Unfortunately, due to the inherent complexity of fiber network installation and management, optical fiber devices have never found their way in the hands of the user, and are usually deployed only by professionals for things such as backbones, long hauls or really fast interconnections.

Luckily enough, older optical fiber Ethernet components, especially 100MBit ones, are now available as a reasonably low price, so I decided to design a couple of USB to 100BASE-FX network cards just for fun and to learn more about working with optical fibers.

This project contains two complete hardware designs for USB to 100BASE-FX network cards, one with a 1×9 transceiver and one with an SFP slot. Both designs are based on the ASIX AX88772B chip, and fit in a compact Hammond 1551 series box.


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Also, there are some useful links and information about designing with OF transceivers and SFP modules.

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Power Manager: Soft Power Control of USB and Low Voltage Devices

2013/03/22 10 Comments

One frustrating aspect of firmware or kernel development on commodity hardware, such as cheap evaluation board or production devices, is the necessity of power-cycling the target device to reboot it every time the developer needs to load and run a new software build.

It sometimes happens that a development board is designed with proper management electronics to ease software development or automated testing, but in most cases the developer has reset the board manually, and sadly quite often reset buttons are unaccessible or just non-existent, requiring the developer to unplug and replug the power cable. If this ends up in your workflow and at the end of the day your fingers hurt, something is wrong.

This project is a small AVR/V-USB based board to control the power supply of development boards and other low voltage and USB powered devices. It allows to program a sequence of events for the output ports, has LED indicators for port status, and additionally provides power measurement on both USB and main power channels, and uses a bootloader for easy firmware upgrade… All in a solid and funny looking Hammond blue box!


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Eagle Library for Hammond 1551 Boxes

2012/11/25 Leave a comment

Hammond Mfg is an American company who makes many different product boxes, mostly famous for their aluminum “Stomp Box” series, widely used for both DIY and commercial guitar effects units.

Browsing through the company’s products, you can find a whole range of small translucent plastic boxes that are really well suited for small electronic PCBs, and can give a good product-ish look to any hobby project.

In this post you’ll find some hints for designing PCBs for Hammond boxes, and an Eagle library with PCB outlines for some of them.

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DIY Cheap Internal WiFi Antenna

2012/06/02 13 Comments

Some time ago I put my hand on a couple of broken Axis network cameras which were about to be trashed. These cute small devices have an image sensor with a plastic lens, a wired and a WiFi interface to connect to an external network, and many other nasty features.

The cameras had a busted Marvell power supply, which probably broke ahead of time because of the high working temperature, and once replaced with an LD1117 (I know, not the best of choices…) they were as good as new.

The one thing I did not like about these cameras was the cheap WiFi antenna, which is mounted far away from the casing and gives an old bulky feeling to the device.

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This post is a tutorial on how to build an internal WiFi antenna to modify this kind of devices!

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LED Lighting on a Budget

2012/02/27 Leave a comment

LED based lighting is slowly entering the market of home lights side-to-side with traditional incandescent bulbs (which are phasing out in many countries) and more recent gas-discharge lights.

One of the best known advantage of LED lights is their power efficiency, which can be quite high when compared with traditional lights, but if you like to do a DIY light system for your house the most interesting aspect of LED is that you can dispose the single diodes in many ways to get the desired light effect.

LEDs can be obtained in many ways, and if you have some broken LED laptop display to tear down, then you can recycle that LEDs to do some ambient lighting in small environment.

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Here I’ll show a couple of example of how to use LED lights from broken laptop display, explaining how to drive the LED with series resistor or DC/DC converters.

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