Electronics

Two failed LCD monitors, nice Samsung 216BW 22" widescreen displays. Much better than my current monitor. Having had some success repairing failed LCD monitors in the past, this was worth a go. Get the screwdriver...

I previously posted about my experience repairing a Viewsonic display. The post continues to draw web traffic at a surprising rate. Thus I will post about my experience with this monitor, in hopes the information can be of use to others who have trouble and need some information.

I consider myself a electronics hacker. There are always a couple electronics projects around I am working on. Fiddling with electricity and the magic bits that make out technology work is endlessly fascinating.

I may be a hacker, but then there are master hackers. Folks who's hacking goes to a higher level. Sometimes the result is just awesome...



Via Hack-a-Day.

Hawai'i is an island of amazing clouds. As the wind sweeps around the dramatic high altitude topography of the island it creates a dramatic cloudscape. The resulting scenes are often the target of my camera, but the motion is hard to see in a single frame or a short segment of video. Time lapse is the answer, allowing the fascinating flow to be seen in the resulting video.

There are so many targets available for time lapse photography, from clouds to tides or simply the day to day activities around us. Since I have had the Canon G11 I have been unable to capture time lapse. The G11 lost a very nice feature found on the G9, an intervalometer mode when shooting movies. The earlier model created movies with 1 or 2 second delays between frames, allowing nice time lapse sequences to be filmed. The G11 does have one feature that compensates, a connector for an external shutter release. Combine this connector with a intervalometer and the camera would again be usable for time lapse work. Better still, the still frames can be full resolution and shot with full manual exposure control, the resulting time lapse could be assembled into very nice HD video.

Many hacks start with a problem. Of course, those of us inclined to break out the drill press and soldering iron when a problem presents will naturally start dreaming up a solution.

In this case the problem was a dark hole where my keyboard sits. We have a nice oak computer desk, designed with a specific slot for the tower, built in power with cable routing, and a keyboard tray. It generally works quite well, now housing my newly assembled workstation. The problem begins with the room lighting, it does not illuminate the keyboard, neither does the desk lamp at the back of the desk, the keyboard is shadowed by the desktop. Often enough I bring up the computer for a quick use with no room lights at all. Much of the time I just can not see the keys.

I am a reasonably good typist, but not a touch typist, I need that first glance to register my fingers to the keyboard. Ctrl-Alt-Del? Not without looking. I need some light.

Somewhere along the line, probably while trying to enter my password by feel, I thought up a simple solution... I just need to put a light bar above the keyboard, something that fits under the desktop. Even better, plug it into one of the USB ports for power and it will come on with the computer.

Enough planning... Just build it!

A piece of acrylic is used for the body, 1/2 thick and cut to 1 inch wide. I cut a channel and pockets into the acrylic with a mill. The lower face of the acrylic was frosted with a file and sandpaper to diffuse the light. A USB cord scrapped from a dead mouse is inserted through a hole drilled in the end. The LED circuit was encapsulated into a pocket with a suitable glue or epoxy. The glue also secures the cable as it wicked into the hole around the wire.

About an hour to fabricate the piece of acrylic, another hour to build, test and encapsulate the circuit, a quick build, now I just need to wait for the glue to cure.

The LED's are ultrabright red, rated at a couple thousand millicandelas, only two are needed to light up the bar, one pumping light into each end. A basic LM317 voltage regulator is used to regulate the voltage to the LED's, this allowed me to design in a pot to adjust brightness, but in the end I just left it at full power. A simple resistor solution would have worked. Power consumption is about 40mA @ 5V, 20mA for each of the two LED's. This creates no problem for the USB port, which is limited to 100mA.

The result is a pleasing red wash of light across my keyboard, quite enough to see the keys and start typing. As I sit in the dark typing this I have no issues using the keyboard. Sometimes the simple hacks are best.

Much of an engineering job is routine, paperwork, meetings, and other repetitive tasks that just have to be done. Working for Keck Observatory is not much different in that regard. But occasionally, every now and then, I get to do a bit of fun engineering.

Four fiber coupled laser modules are required for metrology alignment, each producing 20mW of 658nm red light. Each laser is a very nice little module containing all of the driving electronics, all they need are power and a couple of control lines. The fun starts when the next requirement is figured in, they must be remotely controlled from the observatory network. Practically everything on the summit is remotely accessible. Answer... A microcontroller with a serial port to connect with one of our ubiquitous terminal servers.

Fun!

A box of electronic parts arrives one day. I unpack the box and lay each part out across the bench. I can see, in my mind's eye, where each must go, where I must allow a little more room for proper fit. I simply sit and stare at the collection of formless parts and plan what I must do.. I am thankful nobody can see me, I probably look a little crazy staring at a pile of parts.

In between the meetings and less interesting daily tasks I steal a few hours here or there to design and assemble the laser controller. An hour in the machine shop cutting holes in the case, an afternoon spent wiring the circuit card, an evening debugging code.

This is what I love to do.

These are skills I have practiced since learning electronics in my early teenage years. Laying out a case, drilling holes to mount all of the components. Hand wiring a perfboard circuit card by cutting and soldering each wire from pin to pin in the circuit. Writing the code for the microcontroller in assembly language, carefully planning each line and each bit. The vision of a working whole ever in mind.

It is always a joy when your device powers-up and functions. Little victories each hour, when the power LED illuminates, when it first accepts serial commands from the host computer, when each command actually does something in the circuit. Each step brings you closer to a fully functioning device.

Eventually I am certain it works properly, after an hour of exhaustive testing. Each command tested, each wire has the right voltage, double check the color code against the data sheet. Time to connect a thousand dollar laser module, apprehension heightens as I turn on the power yet again.

Nothing happens... but that is good!

I must type a command at the prompt on my little netbook... on1 10... a glimmer of light appears at the end of the fiber optic. on1 20... just a mite brighter... on1 50... Power is over the lasing threshold and the fiber tip explodes with brilliant red. Go for broke... on1 100... the brilliance is surprising even with the plastic cap over the fiber end. One more command... off... and the light disappears. Again I sit back and savor a little victory just staring at the nearly completed laser source.

An hour later and all four lasers are neatly bolted onto the heatsink. Each has been tested, independently and simultaneously. The microcontroller and hundreds of lines of code performing flawlessly. I turn off the big black power switch on the front, the power LED dims and goes dark. Another day is done, the drive home and dinner beckons. I take one last moment to just sit and stare. It is a maze of colored wire and fiber, but to me it is art, a functional expression of my calling as an engineer.

A new computer! I has been a while, about five years I have been using the same laptop as my primary computer. To be sure, it was a capable machine by the standards of it's day, but the demands I have placed on it recently have been straining the limits. The impetus to update to a new computer has been growing for a while, but finally passed the tipping point.

One of the big decisions was to build the machine myself, ordering an empty mid-tower and populating it from scratch. Motherboard, power supply, RAM, drives, video controller, all ordered separately. It has been many years since I last did this and it has been fun. I wanted to make all of the components decisions myself, as well as providing for easier upgrades in the future based on a modern architecture. This also took some personal education, my knowledge of the technology had gotten a bit behind, a few hours of research needed to catch up. The drives are all SATA, the power supply nice and beefy, lots of cooling fans to keep it cool without sounding like a vacuum cleaner. Processing power to spare, piles of drive space, I hope to have capable workstation for photo processing and video editing.

Operating system? Despite suffering my wife's open disapproval the operating system is Windows XP Pro. Deb had been making increasingly pointed suggestions about a switch to Mac, her MacBook Pro is certainly a beautiful machine. WinXP will be the OS for now, I do not have to buy it, we have a few extra licenses, I know it well, it supports the software investment, and it is stable. There are some engineering applications I use that are Windows centric. I did hedge on the OS, when putting the machine together I bought two smaller hard drives for the OS and applications, the idea was to use on as the primary and one as a backup. This also gives me the option of playing with a second operating system on the second drive, quite possibly some UNIX variant.

Data will be on completely separate drives from the OS, a big 1.5Tb is in there now, but I can hot-plug a second in and use the motherboard RAID features to create some redundancy. I was pleasantly surprised when looking at the cost of terabyte size drives. That amount of storage just seems obscene, I remember programming in the days of 140k floppies. But in this day of photos and HD video I am sure I will use even that sort of space.

I want to do more video editing and have the photographic material for several projects awaiting action. The video I took of flowing lava at Kalapana is just burning to be put together into a very nice segment. The struggle of configuring a new computer is mostly behind me, looking forward to the fun!

I am currently using a Canon WP-DC34 waterproof case with the Canon G11 camera. The Canon case is quite nicely constructed, with access to all of the camera controls. The case is compact, but makes no provision for electrical connections to accessories like an external flash. Thus another method must be used.

With many dive strobes there is another method. To trigger the flash a fiber optic cable picks up the internal camera flash through the clear case and triggers the strobe. This system offers a triggering method that requires no opening in either the camera case or the flash case. The Sea&Sea YS-110 I am currently using supports this method of fiber optic triggering.

The first few dives with the fiber optic cable proved problematic, there were multiple occasions where the strobe failed to trigger. This was common enough to become a real annoyance. Solving the problem took a bit of testing and a little re-engineering.

PVC pipe, bilge pump motors, zip-ties, lots of wire and a little ingenuity... What it takes to build an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

Put the challenge to middle and high school students and you have a great way to teach engineering and science. The challenge may seem daunting, but the kids will prove that it is completely possible. The 2010 MATE Big Island Regional Underwater ROV Competition did just that, with impressive results.

Tens team competed this year, including two from Oahu and another from Kauai. They were joined by a number of teams from across the Big Island, a few of which have participated for several years now.

The mission this year is one based on our Hawai'i volcanoes, specifically the offshore active volcano, Loihi. Years ago the University of Hawaii deployed an undersea laboratory on the volcano. Called HUGO, the equipment worked for several years then failed, probably when the cable attaching the observatory to land was damaged. While HUGO is real, the simulated mission for the aspiring ROV builders is to resurrect HUGO, or at least a mock-up on the bottom of a swimming pool.

The mission is not simple, and no team managed to complete all of the possible tasks. Deploy a hydrophone, maneuver through a cave, collect specimens of an unknown crustacean, measure water temperatures, collect a sample of a bacterial mat, and more. No matter the cave was made of PVC pipe and tarp, the crustaceans from fishing lures and wire, the bacterial mat was gelatin, it was an impressively difficult task.

Even more impressive was watching the teams of middle and high school students navigating their craft through the course. There was a lot a variation in the teams. Some teams had difficulty simply maneuvering. Other ROV's moved quickly and confidently through the course, with tools that made short work of each challenge.

Hilo High dominated the competition, no surprise, this is a veteran team returning to the pool with a lot of experience. Their ROV performed extremely well, showing the difference that good design can achieve. It was the two teams from Highlands Intermediate on Oahu that impressed me. I had the fortune of judging the in pool performance for both teams. Simple, clean designs that preformed beautifully. It was clear that these teams had practiced, the piloting was superb and they were well organized, knowing right were to go for maximum mission points.

This was the third year I have helped judge the competition, the second for Deb. Both of us we quickly put to work. I did safety inspections, then joined Deb at poolside to judge the missions. We may have been exhausted at the end of the day, but we both had a lot of fun.

This year the national competition will take place right here in Hilo. At the end of June the best teams from across the United States, and a few from across the globe, will come to the Big Island to prove who's team and ROV is the best. Hilo High School and a team from Highlands Intermediate both qualified to participate this year. The competition is going to be intense.

It was nice to see science and engineering education getting good coverage in the local press. The 2010 regional MATE ROV competition took up most of the front page of the Hawai'i Tribune-Herald yesterday. A decent writeup with some great photos.

Who is that guy in the hat and purple aloha shirt?

Surprises sometimes fall from the sky. In this case a weather radiosonde attached to what was left of a balloon. I shall continue the teardown of the Vaisala RS80 Radiosonde from part 1 of this article.

One aspect of the unit that I find troublesome is the amount of non-biodegradable material I find in a unit that is designed to be released into the environment and seldom recovered. A fair amount of polyethylene sheeting, both in the parachute and around the circuit boards. The blocks of polystyrene foam represent a material that is of concern when it enters the ocean, taking decades or more to degrade. I find it hard to believe that these materials could not be replaced by more environmentally friendly alternatives. Is the new RS92 model any better in this regard?

Opening the styrofoam around the circuitry I find that there are two assemblies. The first assembly is clearly the sensor and transmitter stage. It is here that the external temperature and humidity sensors attach. The assembly also supports the antennas.

The second assembly is in a styrofoam box wrapped tightly in polyethylene sheet. Inside there is a two board assembly supporting an artistic helical antenna. It takes a moment for me to realize I am looking at the GPS receiver. There are only three wires connecting the two assemblies. My hope is that these are power, return and data. Could it be that if I connect power the unit will start emitting standard NMEA GPS data?

Unfortunately no.

The GPS unit emits doppler data, not location data. Useful to track a radiosonde from a fixed station, but not suffcient to perform other common GPS operations. It appears the GPS from this unit will be of limited usefulness to me in any future project, just a pretty bit of circuitry.

• Vaisala RS80 Radiosonde Teardown, Part 1
• Vaisala RS80 Radiosonde Teardown, Part 3

I never know what I will find when I drive to work. Commuting up a 13,803ft (4207m) volcano is always a great experience, even after three years of doing it. Some of the guys like to sleep in the rear seat, some listen to podcasts as we drive, I like to grab shotgun so I can enjoy the scenery.

But this time the morning supplied something a little different...

The Keck Interferometer is one of the most complex scientific instruments in the world, to find anything more complex you have to look for things like the large particle colliders. A couple dozen computers, tens of thousands of lines of computer code, hundreds of mirrors and optics, five separate infrared cameras, two adaptive optic systems and two ten meter telescopes all have to work in an intricately choreographed dance to obtain the data. All it takes is one element out of action and the entire construct comes to a halt.

One of the old lessons of engineering... When you maintain a complex system there will the problem component, the part of the system that becomes the bane of your existence, creating trouble whenever you turn your back. For me this has been the boresight lasers.

This should be a stupid simple part of the system. A laser diode feeds an optical fiber. This in turn is fed to the beam combiners where the light is launched through the whole beam-train allowing the operators to use the laser beam to carefully align the dozens of mirrors that bring the light from each telescope to the instruments.

The laser diodes keep dying.

I am learning a technology I had hoped never to learn.

There exists something called a PLC, a Programmable Logic Controller. They are used to control many systems that require a complex set of conditions and actions. In the days before the widespread use of computers and microcontrollers it was PLC's that controlled nearly any complex machine from printing presses to sawmills.

I was first introduced to the internal workings of PLC's in a long conversation with my father in-law. He used these devices to control machinery in a large plywood mill where he was the senior maintenance supervisor. I had known such things existed, but until that evening I had never known how they worked. He showed me how they were programmed and how you went about changing the code. As an engineering student I was very familiar with modern programming and microcontrollers, I was a little aghast that anyone would still do something in such a primitive manner.

Having fun with electronics is something any engineer should find time to do. Even if the circuit has no practical use, it can still be a fun experience. Build it just because you want to...

Last Halloween I put several pairs of LED eyes in the plumeria bushes above the driveway. They immediately got attention, the bright red LED's give a surprisingly eerie effect for such a simple device. I had thought of doing these just a few days before Halloween. I like to dress up the area around my real activity for the evening, setting up a telescope in the driveway for the neighborhood trick-or-treat crowd to view.

The eyes looked pretty good, but I wondered if I could make them more interesting. Maybe triggering on light or sound and creating an impression of little creatures in the bushes? The whole idea was simple and yet fun. I just did not have the time to put it together, maybe next year.

That next year is now this year.

The posting I made on fixing my wife's LCD monitor continues to be my most popular archive article on Darker View. The posting has garnered 1,235 hits in the last month alone, despite being posted in February of this year.

This is also my most commented on article, with 42 comments. Many of those are heartwarming thank-yous from folks who ran into the same problem. I had to laugh along with JR, who posted a similar experience recently, as an EE he also has a wife who expects him to be able to fix anything electronic...