Total: 8 posts.
Recently, I wanted to test a Pokémon Ruby cartridge I’ve had lying around for a while. It had quite a lot of playtime on it, so I was keen to see if the save data was still intact. After powering on the GBA, I was greeted with an unfortunate, but somewhat expected,…
The PCBs I designed for a simple LED controller just arrived. They were manufactured by Seeed Studio. The controller has a single FET to set the brightness of a connected LED strip using Pulse-Width Modulation. The PWM signal is generated by a PIC microcontroller and can be adjusted with a single piezo…
I made this tool in 2002 to extract the Grf resource files of the game Ragnarok Online (alpha version). I reverse engineered the file format by analyzing the files with a hex-editor and guessing the compression used. The files turned out to be compressed with a variant of the LZ-compression algorithm. The…
The underground waste containers in my neighborhood used to have an access system based on Texas Instruments’ TIRIS RFID tags. The tags contain a 64-bit read-only identifier that is read using a low-frequency (LF) electromagnetic field of around 134 kHz. Data bits are modulated using Frequency Shift Keying (FSK). Since the system…
I had some space left on a panelized PCB I wanted to etch, so I decided to fill the remaining space with a small project I had in mind. The idea was to make a small infrared transmitter, controlled by a PIC microcontroller, that could run off a single lithium cell (CR2032).…
I just received my new portable frequency counter in the mail, so I decided to take some pictures of it. The counter is a Yaege FC-1 from 409shop, but it’s also available from a lot of other stores for about $50. The FC-1 covers a wide frequency range (10Hz – 2.6GHz) and…
Welcome to the new and improved Qluster electronics website! A lot more content will be added in the near future. In the meantime, check out the article I wrote on a simple LIRC transceiver.
The image below shows the general purpose infrared-transceiver I’ve built to control all kinds of devices remotely with the help of a computer. It is fully compatible with LIRC and has a long operating range due to the power transistor and buffer capacitor. Another advantage of this design is the low-drop regulator…
