Month: July 2017

A beefy electronic load (#P4)

This is a ranty introduction to the electronic load project – photos, circuits and more will be available in part 2 next week!

So…I’ve been torturing power supplies (and to a lesser extend: batteries) for ages. Usually to check their health status by comparing the current peak performance to the claimed values in the datasheet. Once you see voltage rails dropping where they should not, it’s time for a replacement of the unit, or in case of specialized PSUs, for a swap of the electrolytic caps.

But the crudity of my testing always bothered me – hooking up power resistors, measuring voltage and current, manually connecting and disconnecting the DUT, never hitting exact performance figures because of the limited selection of torture devices I had around. […]


Lenovo Thinkpad R400 LED Display backlight fix (#P3)

Yes, it’s running in the “projects” category, as “quick and dirty weekend fixes” isn’t available yet :mrgreen:

While I was hosting my brother, he casually asked me when I will fix his display. Umm…what?
Turns out, his Lenovo R400 was showing vertical stripes again. Like these:

(jup, stolen from some Apple customer help page – I didn’t take a photo at the time. I guess the bug is a watermark, isn’t it?)

Update from 23rd of December in 2020: By pure luck, I found this one from the previous issue while shovelling old photos and other data onto my server. […]


Back! Well, sort of… (#E4)

Hey folks, I’m back! ;)
Two months off the blog seemed like a long time, but actually it wasn’t. After filing taxes and hosting my brother for a week, I also got snail mail from the long-forgotten dispute with the German propaganda agency “ARD ZDF Deutschlandradio Beitragsservice”, formerly known as GEZ. And as they finally decided (after 1.5 years!) that they don’t care about my arguments and they also snooped my new address from the registration office, they let me know. I had the choice between accepting paying 18€ A MONTH for one-sided fake news that I don’t listen to (not even having a TV or radio to do so) or to start a pointless legal battle – so I went to court to just do that. […]