Until I get the chance to unbrick the Dingoo, here’s some hardcore electronics pr0n:

Ooh yeah, check out that sexy board!

/me starts thinking about LEDs…blinken flashins… glow…

I’m not much into the winter olympics. Don’t have too much to say about it. Not terribly interested in it. Sure it’s nice to see Canada win a few medals, but I’m not sitting there watching it on tv or anything.

The only winter olympic sport that I was ever marginally interested in was the biathalon. It just seemed like a good combination – the boredom and drudgery of cross-country skiing, punctuated now and then with gunfire. Back when my folks had one of those ‘nordic track’ exercise thingies in the basement, I bought an air rifle and that made the make-believe basement skiing much more fun. Every 10 or 15 minutes you stop with the skiing and plink some targets.

Anyhow, I did end up watching a few minutes of something. What struck me most, was that the starting pistol seems to be some kind of orange plastic electronic doodad. It had like a xenon bulb at the tip that went ‘flash’ when the guy pushed the button, and the loudspeakers made a ‘bang’ sound. And that’s when I sort of thought, WTF?

I mean, is this just a Canadian thing because we’re so afraid of guns? Or is this actually a common olympic / sporting thing now? Where they use toy plastic electronic guns that make a ‘bang’ noise and go ‘flash’?

If they still do the biathalon, are they allowed to use real guns in that? I mean, I think it was 8 or 12 years ago when I last paid attention and they were using these funky super-expensive .22 rifles that were more or less specifically designed for olympics… but who knows now? Maybe they use laser-tag guns and blinky target lights that go ‘beep’.

I’m pretty sure the biathalon was based on the concept of having to hunt for your dinner in a snowy environment. All this technology and safety and stuff waters things down, IMHO. I’d rather see them just grab whatever the heck they were comfortable with or was the most fun. Like an actual hunting rifle? .303 or a .30-06 or something. Ski for a few minutes, then BLAMO! they obliterate some target 300 yards away.

I saw the news about the tragedy on the luge track last week. That was sad. They said that the Vancouver luge track was the fastest and most dangerous in the world. After the olympics are over, do they have a ‘special winter olympics’ like they do for the summer ones? Do they have all the same events? Will they be sending special olympians down the same luge track?

Anyhow, the winter olympics really just boils down to two things… first, there’s only a month or so till the next F1 season starts. And second, there’s only a few months till the World Cup. Not that I’m much of a football fan, as in, not at all, but I like the way the World Cup brings lots of nations together to kick a ball around. And I like hearing phrases like “injury time” and “time added on”. Canada typically sucks at it, so I root for England instead.

That’s about all I have on my mind for olympics. Cheers!

Mmmmm…. electronic jiggery-pokery… circuit boards… hacks… blinking lights…

(Found this sexy picture over at HackMii.)

As I usually spend New Years alone, it has become a bit of a tradition for me to buy myself a new toy that I can disassemble on the 31st of December. In the past, it has frequently been something in the Amateur Radio genre, but this year I opted to do a Nintendo DSi.

I’m not much of a gamer, and I pretty much suck at almost all video games. I’ve had a DS for a while but the only game I was really happy with was the crossword game. Then I gave my DS to my mum so she could play that brain age thing. Anyhow, so I decided to get the DSi so I could take it apart. I like electronic gizmos. I like taking them apart. I like hacking them or breaking them or just finding out how they work.

The DSi has been around for a while now – feels like a year or so. But there’s very, very little info out there about hacking it. Really there’s just one site that has no news, just aggregates info from gaming sites. I don’t want cheat codes or that sort of thing, I want to mess with the hardware. It’s got 256MB of Flash storage, 16MB of RAM, and a 32-bit ARM processor at 133MHz. With the built-in WiFi and dual screens and SDHC expansionality, there’s more than enough oomph in there to run Linux, among other things… (Remember the Zipit?)

There’s no info that I could find about the software – is the DSi operating system a complete customized Nintendo thing? Or maybe the GUI is Nintendo but there’s something else under the hood? The CPU is supposedly custom made for Nintendo so that might preclude it doing other things…

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When playing around with electrical or electronic stuff, it is important to note that 165volts at 330uF is very different than 330volts at 165uF.

And the results from applying 330v to something that probably is only rated for 200v, can be spectacular.

Some good circuit info in here.

555 and 556 Timer Circuits