Recent content in Posts on Dieter Vansteenwegen / Boxfish
Introduction Yesterday my neighbour came in asking to take a look at his electric folding bike. It had been beaten up during transport in his van and the controller on the steering wheel no longer responded to the power button. He had taken it to two different bike mechanics, but both of them weren’t interested. The brand was unknown to them (and likely to just about everyone) and, most…
Update (06/11/2025): I found out that “**names_are_hard**” is the lead developer behind Magic Lantern, added that information in-line. Also fixed a typo. Introduction I was recently looking for a replacement for my ageing (ancient?) entry level Canon 600D. I came across a cheap 7D Mark II body (7d2 from now on) that was sold as “broken, for parts only”. This repair was a…
Introduction If you need help with: Repair of electronics Design of electronic systems Software Please send me …
Introduction 6 years ago I acquired an HP 8640B that needed work (see HP 8640B Part 1: initial state ). Over the last few years, I managed to clean up the unit cosmetically, but not dive in to it any deeper. Until now. I recently found some time to work on it again and started looking at the power rails. I knew that (at least) the -5.2V rail had intermittent issues, and had noticed the caps on the…
Code can be found at the Github repository . Builds/executables are not available but if anyone has use for them, I’d happily create one for you… What? Simple, basic control of brightness and test patterns/mode for the Novastar MCTRL300 (and possibly others, but I don’t have others to test). It does not allow you to configure your screen. It can be used during testing or (I can…
The “problem” I’ve been wanting to have an high-impedance (Hi-Z) probe for some time now. Up until now I’ve been searching for something like an HP 85024a which comes up on the second hand market from time to time. It would be overkill for my needs, but still nice… :) Recently I came across an old Elektor/Elektuur article from April 2004 titled “Poor man’s 1GHz…
Introduction I regularly repair tiles of Unilumin 2.6mm Upad that have broken pixels. Since the pixel pitch (distance between the center of the pixels) is only 2.6mm, that leaves only about 0.5mm between the pixels. Not enough for soldering with conventional means. To do this, you do require good eyes or magnification as well as an hot air station. 96x96 pixels on a 25x25cm tile Damage by ripped…
The issue Multiple times an hour my wireless connection would drop out for a couple of seconds, then come back up. If this happened while streaming media, most often it would not be noticeable because the media buffer would handle the hiccup, but during regular surfing this would lead to disconnects or unreachable pages. Troubleshooting Looking through the dmesg output I found plenty of tracebacks…
The issue I had this crappy issue with with the pCloud Linux (AppImage) client (version linux-x64-prod-v1.9.7 ).It would get stuck syncing a “Local sync” folder, where the Preferences screen as well as the CLI would hang at a certain amount of files and size to be uploaded. Troubleshooting Having no logs to go by (and less than useful technical support on their end), it took me quite a…
Update January 2024: I don’t use many of the separate tools for linting/refactoring/formatting anymore in favour of Ruff . Configuration for Ruff has moved is done in my pyproject.toml template I’m still using AutoDocString to ease docstring creation and MyPy for type checking. Introduction The following is a brief guide to reinstalling/setting up Visual Studio Code (VSC) on a new…
I am a *very* big fan of TiddlyWiki5 ( github ). I use it to document just about anything I figure out while working on projects, setting up systems, … Anything I would otherwise quickly forget. It makes it easier to add structure to random tidbits of information, and forcing myself to document while I work on something helps to stay focused on a certain goal. I noticed some of the official…
Introduction Finally, after two years of renovations and two children, I am revisiting the idea of a small home server. I don’t expect it to do much: Media server File backup Some docker containers Grafana Possibly pfSense or another firewall Whenever I’m accessing a remote system (even when using SSH in my internal network) I prefer to start a TMUX session. That way, if I get…
Warning This still isn’t working as I think it should. Especially the linting and autocomplete still doesn’t work (leaving only the PyMakr module which works partly, in fact). For example: import pyb still does not add autocompletion when typing something like s = pyb.<CTRL + SPACE> . Most likely this is because I used a combinations of tools that shouldn’t be used together. Need…
See the edits below the text for two more possible causes I’ve encountered with this machine, both causing the same error. This post was originally created on WordPress, where it received a number of useful comments. Until I’ve migrated comments from the Wordpress site, you can find the original post here . Introduction Our Ikea Välgjord dishwasher stopped working last night. When…
Introduction I recently acquired a second-hand Hytera PD365 DMR radio. Hours of trying to program the radio learned me that this is a bit of an odd one out in the Hytera range of radios. I spent * a lot * of time trying to connect it to my computer to read out the memory and program it. I found a lot of information spread out on the internet, but lots of it is not applicable to the PD365.…
Introduction I recently acquired a HP 8640B signal generator. A quick summary of the specs shows why this is an interesting piece of equipment: 500kHz to 512 MHz (option 2 adds a doubler, extending the range to 1.024 GHz) Available power range is -145dBm to +19 dBm, within +0.5dB across the full frequency range Extremely low phase noise (less then -130 dBc at 450 MHz, 20kHz from the carrier) Fine…
Introduction I recently acquired a fairly well preserved HP 8711A network analyser. As sold, this is an economy model, offering only scalar measurements, although vector information can be acquired through the HP-IB bus. What makes this unit interesting, is that the hardware is the same as the never released 8712A, which has vector capabilities. Some changes in the bootrom allow the user to…
Introduction The company I work for has an OpenVPN server running. Recently I wanted to install the client software on my Windows 7 desktop and my Linux laptop. Our IT guy kindly supplied me with a executable to install and configure the client under Windows and a config file and certificates for Linux. Windows 7 worked immediately but under Linux I had to do some extra steps to get it working…
Introduction I’ve been working on my wireless tally system for a while now. Apart from the connection to the camera (for which I want to use a different connector to alter the appearance of the camera as little as possible) it is finally finished. Looking back, this has taken me much more time than I expected. But as this was the first project that I wanted to do in a more professional way…
After lots of troubleshooting my wireless tally project/product is nearly finished. The prototypes have been tested in the field and proven to work as expected. Next up are the finishing touches: etching the boards with the final adjustments, populating them, programming the microcontrollers and fitting everything in the enclosures. An early prototype boards: An early version of the transmitter…
Part number confusion As I am currently working on a project that involves XBee modules for wireless data transmission I had to look for the best type of module. There are a dazzling amount of different versions and plenty of websites that explain the the different lines of modules (Series 1, Series2, Pro vs normal versions,…). It was much harder to match the version and antenna type that I…
Introduction I was asked if I could repair a “broken” Panasonic LCD projector. The lamp would start up, flicker for a couple of minutes and then shut down. No error messages where displayed. Light! But only for about a minute or two… The owner had send it to Panasonic to have it repaired but was told that the LPS (lamp power supply) board needed to be replaced, at a cost of…
Introduction After setting up my router to run dd-wrt I’ve used PuTTy to ssh into the router to start my desktop machine to work on it through a RDP session. After spending months looking up the correct MAC address in my phone and typing the commands by hand I finally took a bit of time to write a small bash script on the router so that I could simply run the script each time I needed it.
Introduction For a while I’ve wanted to learn about Linux, the way the OS works, what can be done with it, if it’s reasonable to change to it as my main operating system… As well as dual booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 on my laptop I thought I should try and set up my home server running a Linux distro. This way I’d be forced to learn my way around the command line,…
Introduction About two years ago I bought a Hartenberger “Maxi Compact” dive light for about €60. As this was a 10 year old dive light with a halogen bulb and a well-used battery pack I think that was a fair price. Anyway, the plan was to use the housing for a modded LED light. At first I just made a second battery pack, the first one was just (not) enough for one dive with the…
Warning: salt, corrosion and dirt up ahead Introduction Since I began diving about two years ago I’ve mostly rented gear whenever I needed it. What I like about renting things is that you get to try different brands and models, and little by little start finding out what you like/don’t like/need/want/hate about certain gear. You also get some time to figure out how things work and what…