The Hatchery

Hi, I'm Kuy. Here mental eggs are laid and candled; cracked, beaten and sometimes scrambled.

[kuym]

Inside the LG BP620 3D Blu-Ray set-top player.

Its main board (pictured) is made using a high-volume-optimized combination of solder reflow (top) and wave (bottom).  Dimensions of this board are roughly 120mm x 100mm, and it connects to the off-line switch-mode power supply and interface break-out board, which is a single-sided phenolic construction, by means of the 1x16-pin 2.54mm through-hold header CN150.

The power board provides 5.1V and a front-facing USB port (exposed through the bezel) as well as a button cluster handling eject, play/pause, stop and power buttons, and a 4 x 7-segment LED display for time etc.

The Wifi board (using an inexpensive Ralink single-chip implementation frequently found in super-small low-cost USB-wifi adapters) is connected by USB to the main CPU via connector CN803.  It includes 5V, GND, D+ D- and a special wake-up signal.

Interestingly, two apparently different RAM BGA chips are used for the main memory - I didn’t check to see if they share the same pinout.  I wonder if they’re actually for different purposes and have different specifications?

[kuym]

I'm in an Amsterdam hotel, so I'm basically on another planet. The room and bathroom are one, curved glass doors close around the toilet and shower pods. An iPad mini controls all room functions and it greeted me by name as I walked in. You can AirPlay to the TV mounted directly over the bed.

[kuym]

Photo box

As I develop my photography skills, I have realized there’s a major bottleneck to my workflow on the data backend of the art.  After you capture photos and video, what happens to those frames? In the era of chemical photography, you could simply preserve images by archiving them in physical boxes.  These days that’s more complex - photographers still put frames in boxes, but those boxes run varied and complicated software, and moreover the way we use those boxes is equally varied and complicated.

Most advanced amateur photographers back up some proportion of their photos on something that resembles a desktop PC.  More often than not this is a laptop, but because of size constraints, much of their photo storage is typically external and not very portable.  In either case, photos are almost always on magnetic disks in a fixed location.  Because this storage mechanism is ad-hoc and based on a computer that’s not always there or powered on, remote access is usually out of the question.  Furthermore the big issue is that when these disks (either internally- or externally-attached) fill up, additional ones must be added and/or data must be migrated to a larger disk.  In both cases, complexity grows and the approach quickly becomes unsustainable.

It's clear to me that the solution is to have some sort of abstract box into which e.g. SD cards are placed which takes the contents and archives it safely (meaning there are two or more copies, ideally also a third off-site cold copy) with no human involvement.  The system should de-duplicate photos, so archiving an already archived memory card without first erasing it does not result in duplicates. The process should be entirely hands-free, and no more complex than charging a smartphone (or indeed a camera battery) - just plug it in and wait until an orange light turns green.  Finally, images should be viewable in a web browser from anywhere in the world, with one-click access to download the camera-raw image for any photo to open in e.g. Photoshop.  It should be possible to archive new, processed images (e.g. photoshop documents) through the browser from anywhere too.  Finally, mobile apps and an API for extensibility would complete the basic feature set.

If the abstract box's storage exists locally, then expansion should be simple.  When more disk space is needed, a new 3.5" hard disk can be slotted in. When the abstract box is full of disks, a new abstract box can be bought and plugged in alongside the old one.  If the storage exists on the cloud, expansion should occur automatically and limitlessly with smooth, continuous storage pricing rather than pricing tiers.

[kuym]

Logiblock LN50, circa early 2014. At its heart is a Nordic nRF51822 Bluetooth chip, essentially a naked silicon die with small bumps on the bottom like a BGA chip.  What an amazing way to get a chip into a product, if you have the skills and tools to do it!

This probably the finest OSHPark board I've ever made.  It's hand-built too.

The whole purple PCB is about 12mm high by 18mm.

[kuym]

Lasso iBeacon BLE tag teardown.  Uses a TI CC2500 for Bluetooth LE, how sneaky!  Note also how they use the positive terminal of the battery as the antenna, with a series inductor to block RF from reaching the power net.

[kuym]

Have you seen this clever packaging solution Amazon is now shipping? The combined cardboard and stretchy plastic assembly is made by Sealed Air corp, the same as the inflated plastic air pillows normally seen in Amazon packages.

[kuym]

Dropcam Pro Teardown

I couldn't find any teardown photos of the Dropcam Pro so I decided to make some myself.  The two large round green PCBs are the top and bottom of the main PCB, including the application SoC, an Ambarella with a ARM inside, and the WiFi chip, an Atheros AR8233X.

The Dropcam Pro's image sensor is on a separate PCB which mates with the main application PCB via a Hirose-type board-to-board interconnect.  One of the most novel aspects of this design is the image filter tray, which contains two adjacent filters which can be slid back and forth (left and right in this photo) by means of the two solenoid coils, visible to the far left and far right under their mustard-yellow insulating tape.  The tray contains, presumably, a daytime IR-cut filter and a night-vision IR-pass filter.  The connectorized yellow/white cable visible in the bottom-right is the input to this dual-solenoid actuator.

[kuym]

Memorial bridge over the Waal river near Nijmegen, The Netherlands, commemorating the heroic defense of the region by the U.S. Army, 101st Airborne division.

[kuym]

San Francisco Mission at sunset, 20th St between Bryant and Harrison; 18th St and Harrison.

Sony RX100 Mk. III

[kuym]

Current status

[kuym]

Embrace burned Friday morning at sunrise, Burning Man 2014.

Sony RX100 Mk. III

[kuym]

The last set from Le Diner SF 2014.  Ben Folds played an amazing set of piano solos for us.

[kuym]

More from Le Diner SF 2014.

[kuym]

More from Le Diner SF 2014.

[kuym]

Le Diner SF ("White dinner"), Friday Sept 12 2014.

[kuym]

Mojang's powerful effect on AAA game developers

I think the biggest effect Microsoft's purchase of Mojang (makers of Minecraft) will have is in the planning and financing of large titles.  Remember Grand Theft Auto V?  It took many years and untold resources to create, everyone was extremely excited about it and it broke all kinds of sales records.  And yet now it's on the minds of nobody.  Minecraft, on the other hand, probably never had a marketing and ad spend worth mentioning (it seemed entirely organic) and yet people are still discussing and playing the game, even five and a half years after its release.  How could you be motivated to work on a masterpiece like GTA when you know that the game will vanish from the collective consciousness after a mere two or three months?

[kuym]

Unfortunately my Zojirushi hot water dispenser (model CD-FAC22) self-destructed recently.  I came home to discover the bottom was filled with brown liquid and there was a screw sitting in it.  The screw had fallen out of the bottom of the lid due to the ABS plastic it fastens to having decomposed for reasons I cannot establish.

Certainly the water level was really low when I found it so I imagine it had attempted to maintain temperature while the water slowly evaporated away until some thermal stress or chemical attack disintegrated the lid's ABS plastic until the screw worked its way out.  I have no idea how long this had been happening but there were no signs until this catastrophe struck.

Rather than be frustrated and throw out the unit I'll see if I can find a new lid and improve the design.  I saw this as an opportunity to redesign the control PCB (shown) to detect low-water conditions (there's no dedicated sensor for that) by instead checking for the slope of temperature over time given the heater power over the same period.  Because less water will take less time to increase by a given temperature (at a fixed input heating power) we can estimate mass and thus volume and thus liquid level.  Unlike the old controller I want the new one to gracefully shut down when the water volume is below 10%, or about 200mL.  I may even put a radio IC (WiFi, BLE, etc.) on the new design to alert me through the cloud of a low water condition or a safe shutdown event.