Amplifying Mobile Phone Signals

Mobile phones have become a necessity to us in this era because of the way they help us stay connected and to stay connected we must ensure that certain relevant things are present, one of those things is having good reception and signals, so there aren’t any disruptions in our connectivity and the service carriers ensure this by providing high amounts of coverage, so there isn’t necessarily any need to amplify mobile phone signals. Still, certain cases in which the reception is outright horrible due to interference or any number of external factors. This would cause you to look for ways on how to fix that issue by looking for a way to boost the number of signals you’re getting, you can do that using a few different methods, but one of the most common ways is through the use of a mobile phone signal booster which is an easy to use utility and gets rid of any signal/reception issues that you happen to be facing. The mobile phone signal booster basically does what the name implies. It takes the existing signals you have no matter how scarce they may be and then begins to amplify those signals so that…

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Building simple constant current power LED driver

Usually, when we need to drive low power LEDs, we don’t care much about power losses. What we do we add a current limiting resistor, and that’s enough. For instance, for 20mA LED, we choose between 300Ω-1kΩ resistor when powering from 5V. But a different situation is with power LEDs. The currents are much more prominent here, like 1A and more. Adding a resistor to limit the current isn’t an option because power losses become significant. Here you need a constant current driver to drive it safely without wasting energy. It happens that I have Cree XR-E Q5 XLAPM-7090 LED lying around. It requires a 3.7V driving voltage and can take up to 1A current. There are several light intensities given at specific currents:

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The Benefits of Learning to Code for Different Professionals

A job market focused on practical skills has changed how companies hire employees. Tight budgets and intense competition leave little time for employee development. Applicants who immediately add value have an edge in the hiring process. The value of a skill is often driven by scarcity. A drastic shortage of programmers is fueling a boom in computer coding schools. Various professionals with different backgrounds learn coding in an intense format, which spans 8 to 12 weeks. The perception is that these students are career changers from dying industries. However, coding has career benefits for current programmers and web development teams, as well. That outside of IT can also enhance their careers with coding skills. Here’s an overview of how learning to code can benefit you:

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Setting up CoIDE with GNU tools

For some time, I’ve been using Codebench ARM GCC tools for developing software for ARM microcontrollers. As IDE, I used plain Eclipse, which I had to configure by myself. It worked pretty well, and there is nothing wrong with this. Anyway, sometimes it gets a little annoying to keep an eye on configurations and manual settings. So I decided to give a try CooCox IDE which claims to be free and open. It seems that it already supports all the microcontrollers I like to use. Along with this change, I am also moving to a different GCC tool collection. Codebench free tools are great, but on the other hand, there are some limitations. One of them is release times. They release their free tools twice a year, so updates and other improvements cannot reach as fast as you’d expect.Another thing I am concerned – disabled hard float functionality. If you would like to ta take advantage of the floating-point unit in Cortex-M4, then you get stuck. If you are not using a hardware floating-point module, this tool works fine, and you can stick with it. Anyway, I wouldn’t say I like limitations, especially with free tools, so I switch to…

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Xamarin Mobile Developers

If you haven’t heard of Xamarin before, you must have lived under a rock. Xamarin has been gaining more and more popular among mobile application developers. This framework for cross-platform app development works is straightforward, but the result you get will surprise you. You write one shared C# code having complete access to all SDK possibilities and native UI creation tools, and at the end, you get a perfectly native mobile application. Xamarin works wonders both as an Android development and as an iOS development tool. It is based on an open-source implementation of .NET – Mono. With Xamarin, you can use native UI development mechanisms and native UI elements for each platform, and the UI code layer is the only one you’ll need to write specifically for each platform.

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Product Design Services

Every day we see objects around us, the best of which possess a combination of functionality and aesthetics.  Turning ideas into innovative products is a task for industrial design specialists.  Product design service plays a primary role in this process. The main challenge in product design is to make the future product attractive and functional at the same time.  The success of a product depends on appearance, ergonomics, and usability.  Therefore, product design today is trendy. The main objective of industrial design is to determine the functionality and features of future products. In this regard, a product may be distinguished by its adaptability for mass industrial production. Tough competition demands advanced innovation from manufacturers to increase sales.  One strategy to maintain competitiveness is to develop a new design or upgrade an existing product. In turn, developing tailored solutions requires the use of experimental design studios and appropriate software.

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You know basics of ARM. Whats next?

You’ve probably noticed that day by day, and more complex hardware gets closer to a user. Of course, I am talking about microcontrollers and processors. Several years ago, it was a challenge to have running Linux on board. Now almost everyone has Raspberry Pi and doing crazy things. As I have noticed, not many hobbyists are building their boards to get things done. There is a wide variety of ready-made developing boards depending on size, speed, price that it looks not worth spending time on what’s already done. Everyone seems to be grabbing Arduino and building amazing projects. In a couple of years, enthusiasts used to crunch ARM projects like cookies. This is thanks to the choice of cheap development boards and improving free software tools. But the most critical role in this is the manufacturers. They finally noticed that the hobby market could be a powerful driving mechanism. Ignoring it means losing the game. Now almost every hardware company is trying to get their development board closer to the maker and hacker community because they like to build stuff and spread the word about it.

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Choosing right programmer for AVR microcontrollers

Once you start building something with microcontrollers, one thing you need to take into account is a programming adapter. This is a device that allows uploading compiled code into the chip. I don’t know if this is still fun to build your DIY programming adapter, which is not guaranteed to support all chips, nor will it be safe and reliable. AVR microcontroller niche is one of the most interesting when talking about programmers. If you look at the AVRDUDE configuration file, you will find that there are about 50 of them. Many of them are DIY, while others are official. When I started with microcontrollers, I also was looking for a cheap and easy to build programming adapter. So I have built several if a few years. The first of them was RS232 based programmer that worked with then-popular PonyProg software. Later followed LPT port programmer:

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Using current limiting resistors on AVR I/O pins

Today I want to talk about protecting digital Inputs of AVR or any other microcontroller from over-voltages. When you look at most microcontroller circuits found on the internet shared by hobbyists, you don’t find any input protection. Some argue that this is not needed or don’t understand in most cases how it works. Let’s see how a simple resistor can save the day. Lets see at simplified version of digital input of AVR microcontroller. We can see there that input uses CMOS logic where the transistor is switched by voltage. According to the AVR datasheet, the gate control voltage should stay within the -0.5V to VCC+0.5V range. If we power our device with a 5V supply, we need to ensure that the pin input voltage stays in the range of -0.5 to 5.5V. When the input voltage source is taken from the same power supply, we don’t have to worry much about it. But what if AVR is accepting digital signals from other sources like sensors, other devices powered by their power supplies. Can we be sure that voltage will always be within safe limits? This is why there are two clamping diodes (sometimes called ESD protection diodes) used. They…

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