modified: Tuesday 19 July 2022
author: a sleepy robot
markup: script
Halestrom's Peregrinations
Repairing equipment, angering software, researching unusual electronics and hiding in the internet dark ages. Several ghosts have been trapped in the machinery of this site to keep it working into the next century.
Blog Posts
Friday 16 February 2024
NVME is so much more complicated than I expected
3 consecutive disk failures in 3 months. Silicon Power SSDs forgetting data and a Western Digital SSD that locks up under random reads. Number 3 was resurrected through a process akin to changing it from metric to imperial.
Sunday 22 October 2023
Thoughts on the unreleased Tangara audio player
A brief analysis of the Kicad source files. Surprisingly uses two 32-bit microcontrollers.
Sunday 11 June 2023
Repair adventure: A single white LED causing stuck keys on a RN988 keyboard
This was a big brain twister. The circuitry in this keyboard was completely unlike what I expected.
Sunday 29 January 2023
Desk improvements: 3d printed webcam ball socket, lightbar friction mounts and lightbar brightness controller
Heavily improving my webcam and desk lighting adjustability. Several years of work and different projects combined. Abuse of nonlinear circuits to defeat other nonlinear circuits.
Sunday 29 January 2023
Project: RJtoner, a multiway network cable toner/tracer (plus open source STC micro stuff)
For when your cabling is cursed by the light touch of a thousand techs. Uses STC 8-bit 8051 micro with an open source toolchain. Old project from 2019.
Thursday 22 December 2022
Moving emails accounts to a new host, imapcopy with actual encryption
Tunnelling Imapcopy traffic over TLS and everything that went wrong for me.
Tuesday 19 July 2022
Many indoor air quality sensor products are a scam (temperature, humidity, pressure, CO2, TVOC)
The indoor air quality industry is completely broken. A reply to an OpenWRT forum post.
Saturday 21 August 2021
Adventures using and repairing an X131e laptop from 2011
Replacing wifi coax, modifying bios to allow new wifi cards, unsticking tired clock chips, DIY custom power suppy plugs, de-flickering backlight and more. Somehow my best laptop yet.
Saturday 26 June 2021
Why I recommend CGI instead of web frameworks
Includes amusing stories about teaching and learning.
Saturday 17 April 2021
Amplifiers, horse plague, SPICE and home etching
Designs & discussion about a discrete audio amplifier, including some musings on SPICE electronics sims and my tips for etching PCBs at home.
Sunday 24 January 2021
Reply: The software of my dreams (3D to 3D capture and world reconstruction)
A reply to Ross Scott's "The Software of my dreams" video, on capturing game 3D worlds so they can be explored in different ways. Includes thoughts on technical and ethical directions, as well as too many game screenshots.
Sunday 27 December 2020
Diodes part 4: Glowing ionic diodes recreated & my ionic thesis research
Ionic diodes, failures in researching potential transistor-like devices and misdirection in transistor proofs. Lots of pretty pictures.
Sunday 30 August 2020
Meta: site comments, Minisleep 1.20 released
General appreciation + lots of bugfixes and security enchancements in Minisleep
Friday 1 May 2020
Project: Small self-powered speaker
Low power amp-in-a-box, showing off some more messy copper-tape construction.
Sunday 5 January 2020
Prototyping using copper tape and PCB land pads
Trying more techiques than traditional proto/vero/strip board has made things much easier, especially with SMD parts. EDIT: now with sot23.
Sunday 29 September 2019
Fake TL074 opamps - adventures in decapping
Fake greymarket parts, home chip decapping and a borrowed microscope.
Sunday 22 September 2019
Small Thien baffle dust separator
A bucket and a $50 bagged vacuum cleaner make a bedroom that no longer snows dust.
Sunday 25 August 2019
Time safety is more important than memory safety
Why I don't like people claiming you should not start new projects in C
Sunday 18 August 2019
Meta: New Minisleep, site rebased
Tales of converting bash to POSIX shell scripts and a picture of my new crazy software sideproject.
Sunday 5 May 2019
Software release: Minisleep
A tiny wiki engine, designed out of frustration of the other options.
Monday 25 March 2019
Repair: Allied Telesis AT-8000GS 24port gigabit switches
Replacing self-annihilating fans and reverse-engineering console cables.
Sunday 23 December 2018
Long range wifi with helical antennas
My experiences with various homebrew antennas and wifi chipsets. Tips and pitfalls. Also a small review of the Orange Pi Zero H2
Friday 14 September 2018
Seamonkey's gradual showdown
Finding and testing alternative web browsers and email clients to Seamonkey. An in-depth critique of Firefox, Thunderbird and many more.
Thursday 12 April 2018
Meta: Blog comment systems
Comment systems on self-run sites: methods, security, what I've found so far.
Saturday 2 September 2017
Game release: The Echidna Menace
Over the years I've dabbled making lots of small games, but I've always been afraid to release. This game isn't perfect, but it actually has some fun to it.
Sunday 6 August 2017
UI Gripes: Season 1
'HID' stands for 'Human Interface Device'. I don't think I have any of those, and if I do, then they're definately broken.
Sunday 23 April 2017
Making a bench PSU out of a cheap buck/boost module off the web
Modding a LTC3780 board to use different pots, toroidal transformer rewinding and a bit of bodging gone wrong.
Tuesday 28 February 2017
Diodes part 3: a working diode steering circuit
I've made something interesting with my aluminium and soda bicarb diodes: a 7-segment display encoder. Also includes instructions on how to make your own.
Thursday 26 January 2017
Mounting computers on wooden boards
Putting a Pentium 4 rig, power supply and all, on piece of plywood for easy hanging.
Monday 5 December 2016
Project: Wooden synchronous clock
My first time-keeping device, using a stepper motor to control the main wheels and mains frequency counting circuits to keep the time. Full schematic included with bonus errors.
Monday 5 December 2016
Diodes part 2: Homemade aluminium diodes
We're back in the lab trying some new combinations and methods to make diodes. This time: aluminium and wet electrolytes. Getting closer to the idea of just being able to 'dab' diodes onto PCBs, but not quite there yet.
Sunday 31 July 2016
Splitting apart lipo packs
Or "how I managed to do it without cutting open the lipos with a knife" this time. Total success, no lost/damaged cells.
Sunday 31 July 2016
Inside HRC fuses: cheap vs brand-name
An unrelated fuse blew in another multimeter, so I decided to buy some replacements for these white ones too. Previously I was using cheap eBay replacements. No *electrical* comparison/testing is done in this post.
Saturday 18 June 2016
Cutting open red COB Leds
It turns out that red COB leds have blue LED dies in them. Dissection and thoughts.
Saturday 18 June 2016
Repair: DIADEMA coffee machine
Problem: agressively clicking noises on startup lasting most of a minute. Investigations and repair.
Saturday 18 June 2016
Simpler PCB etching/making techniques for simpler boards
Method and results for a few different techniques. No computer/printer required, all hand tools and etchant.
Saturday 18 June 2016
Experimental homemade aluminium and silicone PCBs
Making copper-clad board substitute using aluminium foil and silicon caulk, then etching it. Partial success, lots of problems.
Saturday 18 June 2016
Meta: Quiet in the blogs
Upcoming posts (hours, days), possible changes to the site
Sunday 24 April 2016
Selectable turns AM loop antenna
Basket-woven 10-winding AM loop antenna for my radio. Number of turns selectable using rotary switch. Overview of how I made it. Works very well.
Sunday 17 April 2016
Archives: Robots and lab projects pre-2016
A selection of things I've made over the past several years. Pretty photos, lots of mistakes and a few miscellaneous parts.
Wednesday 13 April 2016
Diodes part 1: Homemade copper diodes
My method and my results. Zener-like diodes made with a candle and water-drop technique.
Tuesday 29 March 2016
Moving away from Arch Linux Part 2: Looking at alternative distros
Trying out new distros: gentoo and Void. First impressions of their live environments, package management and websites.
Sunday 13 March 2016
February element14 haul
I buy electronics on the cheap. Looking around sometimes pays off -- in this case by a factor of a thousand.
Saturday 5 March 2016
Meta: Site fixes and various reflections
Atom feed dates and duplication, thumnails and post summaries. A few thoughts on the present and future. Soon to be released init system.
Saturday 5 March 2016
Repair: busted laptop hinge mounting point
Quick repair. Screws pulled, case damaged and inserts plucked. All hail Araldities, Greek goddess of glue.
Saturday 27 February 2016
State of my ARM Chromebook
After years of usage my laptop has taken a bit of a beating. Stories and solutions to problems that I have encountered using linux on an armv7h laptop.
Friday 26 February 2016
Moving away from Arch Linux Part 1: Systemd
Why I want to abandon my current distro and move to another. Stories of systemd breaking my systems and getting its tendrils into places that I'm not comfortable with. Ooh! Not there! aaaaah!
Monday 8 February 2016
Rebuilding Tankbot
Fabricating aluminium wheel adaptors from scratch. Tanks, bandsaws, custom jigs and homemade tools.
Tuesday 26 January 2016
Meta: Grand site unveiling
Backstory of this website. Why I chose to write my own backend and the architectural decisions I made.
Tuesday 26 January 2016
Dwarf Fortress on old hardware
Running a game fabled for its system demands on 2000 era hardware that moonlights as a magnetic descrambler. Solid state IDE and minimising memory usage.
Sunday 17 January 2016
Repair: Jena 5020 vintage radio
Repairing a hollow-state radio. Breaking everything and getting frustrated at documents that are just barely out of reach.
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