Posts from Michael Kafarowski
First Steps Into The Mesh Imagine an encrypted text communication network that is owned by you and your community, one that requires no subscription fees, works with little or no connection to the power grid, while serving as a gateway into meeting interesting new people and building skills in electronics. This is mesh radio! With mesh radio, you can send and receive text messages across a city -…
BIC Pencils as Pivots for 3D Printed Parts I’m working on a 3D printed project that requires rotational motion. With purely 3D printed parts, options for creating smooth rotation are limited. Layer lines and print orientation limit the strength and smoothness of a pivot. Ball bearings can be integrated into a printed part but are large and expensive. Simple materials like toothpicks may not…
Repair of a Marine Ammeter I found a marine-rated digital ammeter at a thrift store, but when I got home I was disappointed to find it wasn’t working. In this article I’ll show how I found the problem and repaired it. Table of Contents Safety First Issue Investigation Circuit Analysis Taking Measurements Repairing the Unit Lifetimes of Electrolytic Capacitors Conclusion Safety First…
100% Human Written 100% of my English text is human-written and is comprised of my own opinions, thoughts and experiences, expressed in my own voice. This includes any published and unpublished writing, as well as correspondence such as comments or emails. This policy applies to both my personal and professional life. I may edit images or photographs from their raw form using industry-standard…
Kafarowski Family Turkey Recipe Turkey dinners are a family tradition for Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas. We typically make the turkey for a 1pm lunch for 4-8 people. Ingredient preparation starts around 7am, the turkey is prepped and into the oven by 9am, and usually comes out to rest around noon. This is the recipe I’ve captured and formalized from collected recipe clippings,…
Notes on ZorinOS My personal values and policies towards my online privacy, data sovereignty, and tolerance to advertising have evolved, especially since the beginning of 2025. After nearly 25 years as a Windows user, I decided to switch to an Ubuntu-based distribution called ZorinOS. I’ll explain why it improved my life, and how I’ve modified it to run better. Table of Contents A…
Totality - An Eclipse Reflection On April 8th, 2024, the shadow of a solar eclipse made its slow dance across North America. The path of totality would pass tantalizingly close to my home city of Toronto, but from my home we would “only” see 99.56% occlusion. 99.56% is so close to 100%. If you were wealthier than 99.5% of Canadians you’d have nearly $10 million . But for a solar…
Fix The TWSBI ECO Cap Falling Off The Tail Introduction After cleaning and reassembling my TWSBI ECO for the first time, I found that the cap wouldn’t stay on the tail while writing. It was very loose and would fall off easily. If you find yourself struggling with the same problem you’ll learn how to fix it in this article. If you’d like to watch me perform this fix, check out…
Version Control for KiCAD PCB Projects In this tutorial, we’ll explore a method for organizing multiple revisions, creating backups, and allowing teams to collaborate effectively on PCB and schematic designs. Table of Contents What is Version Control? Guide to Setting Up Version Control for your PCB Designs Get Subversion Create and Setup A Subversion Repository Revision Tracking File Locks…
Unit Testing Your Embedded Code Directly In STM32CubeIDE Introduction In this tutorial we’ll learn about how to make native unit testing easy for your embedded STM32 projects. We’ll start with a default installation of STM32CubeIDE - ST’s Cube-flavored distribution of Eclipse, and by the end of this article, you can begin writing unit tests or performing Test Driven Development…
Intro to TouchGFX Embedded Graphics Introduction In this tutorial, I’d like to introduce you to ST’s TouchGFX GUI framework, and get you started on building GUI applications with your own hardware. This is the beginning of a series of posts on TouchGFX and embedded system development. Each post will build on the previous - we’ll start from a simple demo using the TouchGFX…
Advancement of Standards Lately it’s been rare to see a product release that really wows people, but the Apple event yesterday came pretty close. Two points that I found pretty interesting were the new Touch Bar and the distinct lack of ports other than USB-C (and a 3.5mm audio jack). In this article I discuss my thoughts on the significance of these two changes. That New Feature The Touch…