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Mine also has the port

I tested mine before putting it back, it was a CR2032 and measured 3.22V. That's of limited use though because I wasn't checking it under load, but it weakly suggests the cell is good and has a fair bit of life left. (A quick look online suggests 3.1V to 3.34V as the unloaded voltage people see...

Heh it's been 15 years since I last logged on here... THANK YOU cold_steel for so concisely describing both the problem and solution in one post such that a Google search just saved my ass. (I had replaced the PSU with no luck, reseated components and tried all the other low hanging fruit, so...

A trick that I expect would avoid this is to just use bigger diodes. If the current for the application fluctuates between virtually nothing all the way up to say, 300mA, and you're using diodes rated for 0.5A, then you'd expect the voltage drop to change significantly. But if you spend an extra...

For the record, 3v EL inverters are not difficult to come by, and if the inverter is designed for 3V, the EL will be just as bright. I have a few 3V ones, some I even picked up at a store a few years back for $7 that run on watch batteries. (They were little EL raver bracelets for $7 with a cool...

daragon: Maybe build a solar panel strip into the kb that charges an extra battery during the day, and turns on the backlight if it's dark and the kb is in use? That's how I'd do a wireless kb mod - it either wouldn't look as good, or would look as good but not last as long, as what you could...

An HC4017 is pretty simple to use if you have a regulated 5V power supply - which you do since it's a computer. It's just a box with a + and - pin for power (5V), ten output pins that it cycles between, (they are all negative, except the currently active one which is positive), a clock input pin...

Go to a PC recycling store (or a thrift store) and buy an old or busted printer for a couple of bucks. Inkjets and dot matrix printers have a precision belt system for moving the print head back and fourth all set up and ready to be extracted. Replace the stepper motor with a DC motor, and...

Why doesn't someone make an LED keyboard with visual feedback (via an extra USB plug), such that (once the necessary drivers are loaded) when you use a drop-down menu option that has a hot key (such as Cut, or Paste - CTRL-C / CTRL-V), the corresponding keys on the keyboard light up as if you'd...

An easier way to cycle through 100 LEDs (easier in the sense of far fewer components) would be to use ten banks of HC4017 chips, each wired to 10 LEDs, with an 11th HC4017 chip to enable the banks in sequence, creating a 100 LED sequence. That way, you should only need two resisters, one...

Sure I have, and if you think you've found Sony batteries that somehow offer 300% better performance than equivalent spec non-big-name batteries, more power to you. But I have never found such batteries, and so have stopped wasting my money on Sony accessories. I guess I should have been...

Like I said, you seem to have missed the difference between lowpass and highpass - the caps in inverters are in series with the cables, NOT across them. All of my inverters have these caps, I'm well aware of them. Also, your note that confer.pdf does not warn against capacitence is flat out...

Theshado27: I just did some homework, since my original assessment was my own, but it looks like if I'm wrong, I stand in excellant company alongside the engineers that build CCFL units, (among others). http://www.ergpower.com/pdf30/confer.pdf...

I don't think brand makes much (if any difference) to chemistry. They all operate on the same reaction. There are some differences in vent design, etc, but I think the only big concern between brands is that their method of obtaining the mAh rating may differ, and so a direct comparison is not...

Since the USB voltage is already regulated, you could just run it though a couple of diodes to get the necessary voltage drop instead of using another regulator. Check your specs on the PSP - you want to know that the 3.6V figure is the voltage of the input jack (in case the 3.6v refers to...

And for the record, you could have swapped it out for a 10uF cap from radioshack, it would just be a lot bigger (physically), since it would likely be electrolytic instead of tant, but fine electrically, since I don't think radioshack sells em rated any lower than 16V, and few cards generate...

In my experience, the brightness problem is usually/partially to do with how the cables are laid, not the resistance. If they are laid close to each other, or sleeved together, you are very likely to get loss of brightness, or loss of light entirely. See my post in this thread for a more...

I don't know how the circuit operates, so I don't know if this is a useful solution, but you could put a memory capacitor on the chip that generates the patterns. Chips don't need much to keep their state when they're not driving other logic devices, so providing the cap just feeds the chip (a...

Schpanky: But is maxing out the PSU a problem for the PSU? Ie, for all I know, someone might want to avoid maxing out the first PSU by using a second because they won't be getting the maximal amount of power/cooling out of the peltier if the PSU isn't up to it, rather than because there are...

Modern machine (it was a very high-end laptop a year ago), not loading lots of pictures, nor in rapid succession, just normal browsing. How unusual is the problem? I know I've looked around and I now know I'm not the only person to have it. The only thing potentially out of the ordinary with my...

>Why not just mod the case to accept the hub's circuit board? It's for an external drive, so space is too tight. :( I guess I could chop up or saw up the circuit board to make it fit, leaving some stubs of PCB to drill holes in to use for bolts to mount it with. It ain't going to be a happy...

In theory, the manufacturers of some of those hubs probably got their sockets from a place like Farnell or Mouser or whatever, so they're probably availible at a few bucks a piece, but on the other hand, maybe saving $30 isn't worth the hours of searching. (Allthough, looking at the pin designs...

Does anyone have a source for gold-plated USB sockets anywhere? (either type A or B) (The usual silver colour isn't a good match for the case mod, gold would be much better) I've tried GIS, Mouser, and Digikey, but haven't spent the necessary multitude of hours it will take to search them...

I was hoping this would go away with the new version, but it's no different - when I open pages in new windows (which is frequently), Firefox doesn't release the extra memory those pages used when I close them. After a while (a day or more), this means that Firefox could be using nearly a...

I'm not sure, but since the xbox locks the drive using the ATA security set, you've probably locked it at that level. Knowing the password, you're already better off than me - I had a device write random garbage to the password an expensive 2.5" drive. That was 3 years ago. I'm still trying...

Computer cutting alone doesn't make for a professional finish - the finished cuts are rough and so you'll still need to do filing and polishing. The advantage of computer cutting is that it gets complex designs cut with precision, it doesn't produce finished smoothed cuts, just very accurate...

I remember at uni I could bang out a 600 word essay quite quickly the night before it was due, so entering the competition is not necessarily a large time commitment :) /already have a dremel. and a bazillion attachment devices for it. OTOH, having two dremels would mean I wouldn't need to...

The brightness problem is partially to do with how the cables are laid. If they are laid close to each other, or sleeved together, you are very likely to get loss of brightness, or loss of light entirely. See this thread for a more detailed explanation.

I get the distinct impression that Tycho believes more in artistic and cultural freedom, while Gabe believes more in strong IP restrictions and copyright enforcement. So yeah, ask Tycho :-)

I'd suggest visiting the cookware section of a department store. As for the design idea, does it have anything to do with fruit? ;)

I'm working on a peltier-cooled external drive. The power-supply for the external drive says the output is 1.5A at 12V and 1.5A at 5V. My multimeter shows that the peltier, when connected, is drawing 12V 2A from that supply. (It will happily draw 3-4A on a larger supply). Furthermore, because of...

Nice. I don't even want to think how you did that spiderweb cutout in the front... :-)

I'm assuming the sleeving made the difference because you were putting both cables in the same sleeve and thus raising the capacitance. If you were putting each cable in a different sleeve, then there are some other possibilities.

You're getting too much capacitance between the wires. Separate the wires as far apart from each other as you can. If you have the tube turned on while you do this, you will notice the tube going on and off and the brightness changing as you move the wires around. If you put each wire in it's...

I'm thinking heat is another factor that limits how big a drive you can mod. I imagine almost all of the heat normally vents through the thin metal top-plate, but when you replace that wide thin metal plate with a thick plastic insulator, any modern high-capacity drive is going to overheat. So...

Superstoner: Wow, awesome job. That's really good to hear. Any tips or special tricks that you thinked helped? How did you go about cleaning the inside of the modified top? (That seems to me to be the hardest part to be sure about).

compslckr: It wouldn't surprise me if that will be the fate of this one, since it's my first attempt. I'm currently looking into building a small cleanroom, since I aim to mod a 60Gb drive, which will be even more risky :) (This drive is a practise run) Out of interest, what were the...

Mod-job on an old 2Gb drive, plenty of flaws, but most don't show up in the pic :D so I thought I'd post it: The colour changing based on HDD activity isn't as balanced as I want, so that part is still a work in progress, but hey, I have an animated pic of it, I figured I might as well...

Hehe, still on the clicking line of thought, I was thinking "But it wouldn't sound random like a geiger counter - the bursts would come and go, but they'd sound too ordered". Then I had brainwave! (Uh-oh,,,) Fragment the drive! Have all the files scattered across it so seek times are much...

You use IDE pin 39 for lights, but I'm still working on getting the alternating effect working to my satisfaction (I'm starting to suspect that the LEDs are not mismatched, but that the problem is the in the way I implemented it), so that part is still a work in progress :)