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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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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