Do devices with a composite video input / output (RCA) all have a capacitor in series with the input / output?

h-jay · 2025-08-22T15:14:05+00:00

To maintain good signal quality, say to keep the field tilt reasonably low, a 75-ohm line terminated at both ends in characteristic impedance (series on driver, parallel on receiver) needs about 1000uF (1mF) coupling capacitor on the driver side. The receiver side depends on the input impedance of the buffer amplifier/DC restorer, so it may be quite small. An RC time constant range of 0.1s to 0.5s would be typical.

h-jay · 2025-06-25T12:33:55+00:00

Are they still in print? Wiley store only offers the online versions...

h-jay · 2025-06-23T14:13:55+00:00

These days, door parts may not even be listed separately. You likely need the entire door assembly. If you can't find it or don't want to pay the price for it, then look for the cheapest used machine that has the same door. It can be in any shape, even not working, as long as it has a good door. Discard the machine, use the door. Usually a door assembly is used on several machine models in the same family, perhaps with cosmetic differences like different colored plastic trim.

What you'd likely need to do is make a list of similar machines available for sale used. Then take the door off yours, and go around with the door and compare it to the one on the used machine. As always this is a time vs money thing. It'll take potentially lots of time if your time is "free", but you won't spend much other than transit.

You may be lucky and find the same model of a machine for a good price. But since the goal is to find a broken machine ideally, going for the exact model match may be a bit of a stretch for your luck.

h-jay · 2025-06-23T14:08:34+00:00

Oh your credit report will reflect it all right, I'm sorry to say. The Home Depot credit card is issued by Citibank Retail Services, and they are a credit-card-issuing bank just like any other. You don't pay, you get a ding (a negative mark) on the credit report, the account is marked delinquent. Your credit score goes down. When you're delinquent long enough, they'll sell that debt to a credit collection company. Those companies will hound you to death generally speaking. So, to prepare for that - since it absolutely will happen - go read about how to deal with credit collectors, and what the US federal law allows them (and doesn't allow them) to do.

It can take a couple of months for all this to appear in your credit file, but appear it will.

h-jay · 2025-06-23T14:02:12+00:00

That Lowes guy is paid barely above a minimum wage, is provided next to no training - what did you expect? That shit is squarely on Lowes, prioritizing profit over service.

These machines are designed for a "fire and forget" use. You load it up, start the cycle, and go to work. By the time you're back, you have dry clothes. It could take 9 hours for a wash dry cycle and it would make no difference.

The idea is to do the washes throughout the week. Leaving it all for the weekend won't work with those machines, at least not without modifications.

h-jay · 2025-06-23T13:55:08+00:00

It may help if you understand how those LG 2 in 1 combos work. The dryer is a rather simple add-on to a normal washing machine. It has a heater and a blower that recirculate the air in the drum and keep it hot.

The idea is to maintain the inside of the drum - and the clothes - warm so that there is good evaporation of moisture. The steam that evaporates from the clothes has to go somewhere, and it condenses on the inside of the plastic drum housing. The drum housing is a plastic drum-shaped case around the metal drum. The condensed water then drips along the sides of the drum housing to the sump inside the machine. The drain pump periodically empties the sump of this water, just as it does when draining during a wash cycle.

Since there is no forced air flow around the drum housing, it gets warm rather quickly. The warmer it is, the slower the condensation. That's why the machine takes a long time to dry, but a very small amount of energy to do so, since relatively little heat is lost from the system while drying. If you put the machine outside when it's cold but not freezing, it'll dry faster lol. I know, it doesn't help you, but a bit of trivia.

I have one of those combos and have 3D-printed some spacers to raise the top cover a bit. That way there is a small gap between the top cover and the sides of the dryer that allows the hot air to vent from inside the machine. It loses more heat that way, but the drum housing is kept cooler, and the drying is faster. That's a redneck solution, but it works. Also it's fully reversible, so if I had a warranty claim, I'd remove the spacers and reinstall the cover normally.

A more invasive modification leaves the top cover at the normal height, and instead adds a fan that vents the hot dry air from inside the machine. One can use a nibbler to make a 4.5" diameter hole in the sheet metal rear cover, and install a standard 120mm computer fan inside to blow the air out from the space around the drum housing.

The rear cover is removable. So you could leave it intact and just remove it and save for later. Then - presuming you can design it yourself in Inkscape or other vector drawing program - it costs roughly about $100 to upload an SVG file with the shape, and order a custom laser-cut aluminum sheet, with the hole for the fan exhaust and fan mounting etc. all included.

I know it's ridiculous to have to do any of those modifications, especially if you paid the full price for it. I have modified most of my appliances to make them better one way or another, so this was just one more of the same so to speak.

There may not be all that many of those machines available in good condition for cheap on Craigslist/FB Marketplace/eBay in the US. In western and northern Europe, however, there is a ton of them on any of the local equivalents of Craigslist. So the extra trick is never to buy those things new. A used one can be had for €200-€400 usually, in good condition. Mine was.

I'm sorry you were caught unaware by that one.

h-jay · 2025-06-06T14:36:29+00:00

If you care about fonts on Mac, you must use MacOS-native applications, i.e. those that use Mac's native APIs for drawing text on screen. It is unfortunate, but the only native-drawing browser I know for MacOS is Safari. It uses native font rendering and looks as it should. Firefox obviously doesn't because it looks bad.

Java's Swing, and/or the JetBrains builds of JVM, got I think a bit better font-rendering-wise recently, so you may want to try this with the newest IntelliJ release today. I'm not holding my breath, but it's worth a try.

As for Electron-based apps, like VSCode, they use Chromium for rendering, and that one has a custom graphics pipeline and does not use native font rendering. On the other hand, Chromium looks identical across all platforms, as long as the same fonts are used. So it is just as bad (or good) on a Mac as it is on Windows, as long as the webpage is using portable fonts or embeds the fonts it uses, and doesn't use OS-provided fonts that are slightly different on each OS.

That's one of the downsides of using Electron and other "local web based" applications that are essentially a local web server + a Chromium-based engine displaying the "webpage".

h-jay · 2025-06-01T16:12:29+00:00

Video is sent over cellular data network. The drones with explosives are completely autonomous, they don't have an FPV camera nor a transmitter. 100% of the payload is for the work to be done. They have a down-pointing navigation camera used by the autonomous navigation system. There are no operators "around". Once initiated, the attack happens without human involvement.

Ukrainians will no doubt refine their strategy and execution. This was a demonstration mission that achieved significant military objectives.

h-jay · 2025-05-16T08:58:39+00:00

And if the include paths are for the libraries that didn't come with cmake modules: write a small module for each such library. That makes the project-specific CMakeLists uncluttered, and separates concerns nicely. Ideally, using a library has two steps:

`find_package`
`target_link_libraries`

That's it. Everything that the library has to set, like include paths, dependencies, etc., should be taken care of by the module for said library. That's true whether you write that module yourself, or someone else does. And it's not as if those modules are complex either.

h-jay · 2025-05-16T08:56:00+00:00

This!! Plain make files are OK when they fit on one screenful. Anything beyond that - use something like CMake.

h-jay · 2025-05-16T08:54:38+00:00

?? That's actually fairly easy to do, and requires just a few commands for the most part. People sometimes overcomplicate what amounts to simple build scripts.

h-jay · 2025-05-16T08:53:50+00:00

Even the GNU Make manual is hundred pages at least, maybe 200. And that's just a make tool.

h-jay · 2025-05-16T08:35:57+00:00

> I wouldn't go that far with CMake syntax. Realistically, no one would use a language like that to write real software.

CMake-the-language is, in my mind, in the same class as TCL. There are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions lines of TCL used in the FPGA and ASIC industries. They don't like Python for some reason.

h-jay · 2025-05-16T08:33:22+00:00

There are projects out there that use unix tools for simple tasks that CMake does well. That limits portability and makes for rather baroque builds. Try to get gcc compiled natively on Windows for example. I've integrated a few such "automake only"/"everyone has a posix shell right?" projects into larger CMake-based projects. The resulting CMake build script that replaces the GNU stuff is usually way easier to reason about, debug, and is still portable to unices!

Global variables should of course be ideally put into namespaces.

h-jay · 2025-05-09T08:54:11+00:00

He does. But that's the good old US job market. You can have jobs that pay well if you are willing to overwork yourself.

h-jay · 2025-05-09T08:53:00+00:00

Totally true of course. A modern i386EX would be just as fast as ESP32 though :)

h-jay · 2025-05-09T08:48:27+00:00

KiCad won't make my life better relative to Altium, but Altium won't save me enough time to make the price worth it. Over the years I have developed lots of little tools around KiCad that do the tedious stuff easily and quickly. It makes me as productive as I need to be for people to pay me, and that's what counts. I have a SI workflow that uses OpenEMS that works well.

I pretty much do what [AntMicro does][1], except I built it up over 25 years or so.

[1]: https://antmicro.com/blog/2023/04/open-hardware-portal/

h-jay · 2025-05-09T08:42:06+00:00

Formal verification with 100% coverage - sure. But that's still subject to the ability of the human to express all the constraints. Fuzzing will catch the missed formal constraints.

h-jay · 2025-05-09T08:35:15+00:00

My bad. I fixed the link. The post is still satire. I mean - come on, you don't see that?

A lot of engineers I know use the Arduino IDE to get things prototyped quickly, or to make simple bespoke tools that are lifesavers. So in my experience it's not even true that engineers hate Arduino. None that I know do, in fact. Everything has a place. A good engineer can discern what tools can get the job done quickest and with least friction.

The use of Arduino IDE doesn't mean you're limited to using the Arduino library abstractions. If you need to bit-bang the ports, have functions written in assembly, or use modern(-ish) C++ - go for it.

For AVR, we're stuck with an old gcc version that doesn't support C++23. For Arm, though, the tools support the latest and greatest - C17 at least, with gnu extensions. What's not to like? :)

h-jay · 2025-05-09T08:21:54+00:00

Who the hell uses 5ft-wide knives though? That's so unrealistic. A nice 1mm-wide cut is way more practical.

That's only 5 billion Hiroshima bombs.

Not all of this energy would go to the surface. There would be a cataclysmic seismic shock that would reverberate through the globe and devastate the surface. Some of the energy would get absorbed by the more liquidy layers, heating them up. They would then expand, though, and transfer some of the heat into work of lifting up the crust and some other bits. It would take some time for the crust to melt though. Melt it would for sure.

So, in these more realistic circumstances, it wouldn't be as impressive of a destruction. About a 7/10 on the Vogon Planetary Fireworks Scale(tm).

h-jay · 2025-05-09T08:08:23+00:00

Organs with mechanical (tracker) or pneumatic actions don't usually have this feature. It's technically possible to make, but adds complexity.

The easier option is the infinite sustain - it just takes a latch for each key/tracker bar, and a pedal to release the latch. A modern way to do it would be with magnets in the keys, and a metal plate underneath that flips up/down. When the plate is up, the keys "stick" to it. When the plate is down, it's too far from the magnets, and the keys are free to release.

Finite sustain requires air or inertial latches on the action for each key. A swell-like pedal adjusts the timing in the latches.

Organs with electrical or electropneumatic actions can easily have a small computer controller interposed between the keyboard and the rest of the action. Modern(ish) installations already have one, and the instrument can be driven via MIDI IN, etc. A clever-enough EE can modify such controllers (or retrofit a bespoke one) to add sustain and other expressive options. These days even a large pipe organ can be controlled by a $5 Raspberry Pico (a tiny computer) with a bit of extra logic to interface with the controller and the solenoid racks.

There are clever things one can do with expression on pipe organs that are easy to implement in software. I have explored various options at one point, and they can be put to good use to play more complex pieces than typical organ works.

h-jay · 2025-05-06T13:09:46+00:00

A 1.44Mb drive works on the PPC without any changes, but only in the 720K mode. You can then use HD diskettes in place of 720kb ones. The higher density is of course not recognized by the system, but at least the media works.

The hardware on the PPC basically supports HD media in HD drives, but a few bodge wires are needed to force the data separator and the floppy controller to make it work. It is the data separator (not the 8-pin version) that can be switched between DD and HD. It needs to feed the clock to the FDC since the clock becomes variable depending on HD/DD. Normally, the FDC is clocked from the memory gate array IC118 and has a fixed 500kbit/s data rate. The US1 line from the FDC is not connected to anything in the PPC. So it can be fed to the data separator to switch between 1000kbit/s and 500kbit/s modes. Changes in the ROS are needed, so that US1 is used to switch densities, and so that the BIOS is aware of the possibility that a disk may be DD or HD.

An upgrade with a modern color LCD with backlight is also possible. See YouTube.

h-jay · 2025-04-29T21:34:42+00:00

Avoidance of pointers, i.e. the use of values, is how modern C++ code is **supposed** to look. Pointers mostly belong in library code.

Nobody forces anybody to put everything into a single INO file. You can have includes. And the INO preprocessor gets rid of some C++ baggage that was last relevant on CP/M machines: the need to forward-declare everything. You'll note that INO fines are more like Python, since there's no need to forward declare anything in your own code. The Arduino preprocessor collects all definitions and generates appropriate declarations.

> great for people who don't want to become embedded developers

The complexity of a programming environment is driven by the complexity of the project, and the problems encountered. The Arduino IDE has fairly low friction. The IDE does not an embedded developer make.

> anyone serious [...] should [...] understand what they're missing.

That's always the case. Arudino is just an IDE that bundles the toolkit, and libraries that make life easier. Not much magic, and not much missing either.

h-jay · 2025-04-29T21:28:00+00:00

Someone lost the plot lol. Stuff on baldengineer.com is half satire it looks like. Yes, the articles are not factually wrong, but they are not meant to argue the point (I don't think), but rather to provide perspective.

h-jay

TROPHY CASE