Categories
Story Time

Raspberry Pi Repair

Two years ago, I blogged about an issue with my Raspberry Pi 3 A+. I accidentally shorted out the 3.3V voltage rail with a GPIO pin which was probably set to put out 5V and since then, the Raspberry Pi stopped working properly. In my last post I wrote, that I was going to purchase the corresponding voltage regular IC and attempt to repair the Raspberry Pi on my own.

Unfortunately, this story happened two years ago and I was not updating my web site for a very long time. Thanks to a visitor called Christoph who wrote me an email asking for a status update on my repair, I now decided to give you all an update on my repair.

Categories
Rant

Selling on Facebook

I hate it, but it’s still the biggest social media platform of our time: Facebook. In the recent years Facebook became also more and more popular for selling stuff.

For almost a decade we had eBay Kleinanzeigen here in Germany with probably 99% market share when it comes to “online garage sales” like Craigslist in the US.

With pages and groups, Facebook also established itself in that market and recently they even added features to specify prices an other selling criteria to posts. What’s great and the worst about it?

Usual comment on a facebook selling post
Categories
Good To Know

Keyboard Modifier Keys

Modifier keys like Shift, Ctrl, Alt and Cmd on a Mac keyboard

Never heard of modifier keys? Maybe you didn’t, but for sure you are using them every single day. Keys such as the Shift, Ctrl and Alt are technically called modifier keys. What I surprisingly learned about them, read below…

Categories
Good To Know

Killed my Raspberry Pi 3 A+

You can’t be proud on everything you do, for most great achievements, failures were made before. Well, my project isn’t finished yet, but I already made a huge failure, does that count?!

Voltage Regular (PMIC) on Raspberry Pi 3 (MXL7704-R3)

For sure I have toasted a lot of electronic components so far in my life. Mostly caused by working too fast without letting my brain enough time to calculate the consequences. I guess, as a maker who has mostly practical knowledge, this is rather normal. Most electronic components are priced well under one Euro and therefore it’s not too bad, if such a component dies. However, a genuine microcontroller, purchased from a well known distributor can easily cost 10 Euro per piece. If such an IC releases its magic smoke, it starts to hurt.

Not comparable to a Raspberry Pi though. These single board computers cost more than 30 Euro and it’s a real pain to loose one of them. So what exactly happened you might ask…

Categories
Story Time

Obtaining a laser cutter

As a true maker, what do you need? I think that is everyones own perspective, but for me this is at least a 3D-printer. Preferably a printer, that was built from scratch. Some basic electronic tools such as a soldering station, a huge pile of wires, pliers and of course some electrical components and modules. While you can do a lot with a 3D-printer not everything is satisfying to do with it. For example creating a small box takes hours or even days – depending on its size. That’s where the dream of a laser cutter comes into play.

CO2 Lasercutter
Categories
Good To Know

RTCs are very sensible

MiniWordRTC

I was working on a project which involves an RTC (Real Time Clock). These RTCs are used in mostly all devices which keep time. And you know, there are a lot of these devices out there. From your wrist watch, to you wall clock or radio alarm clock next to your bed, RTCs are used everywhere.

My idea was to build a very small word clock using these 8×8 common cathode LED matrix modules. You don’t know what a word clock is? Well, it’s a clock which tells you the time by reading words, such as “It is half past nine o’clock”. Each LED of the matrix is assigned to a specific character or word for the clock and the microcontroller coordinates to light up the required LEDs in order to tell the time.

Sounds complicated, is actually pretty easy – or at least it should be.

Categories
Story Time

Reboot ranger81.de

If you have visited my page in the past you may notice, that from today on, there is something different. The page has a new look and most of the old content is gone. It was a hard step for me to take removing blog posts starting from 2004 but it was necessary.

It was mostly outdated and kinda “unimportant” for someone else than me. Also the blog software (FLog) was great but wasn’t updated since probably 10 years. Of course I did some manual updates, but I do not want to have too much effort with my site.

This is why I switched to WordPress and a new site topic: Being a maker.

Oh, and also the site language changed completely to English to have a bigger (possible) audience.

I hope, you enjoy the new content to come.