Electronics

I have a custom Arduino board project to share including bonus steps at the end on how to program a blank ATmega168 or ATmega328 with your Arduino sketch directly from the Arduino IDE environment using an USBTinyISP programmer from Adafruit.

I’m going to hack a Christmas photo frame I got a few years back when my son visited Santa Clause. The photo of him sitting on Santa’s knee came with a nice frame that had 5 LEDs that flashed when you turned it on.  It ran on two AAs and used a “chip-on-board” to control the flashing pattern of the LEDs.

The problem was that this thing flashed all 5 LEDs four times a second! We could never leave it on because it would drive you nuts.  Ever since I purchased it I have wanted to hack it so the lighting was not so annoying. This is going to be mostly a video posting but I will put in some “how to” notes, helpful links, photos, circuit and code so it will be more useful to you for adding such a hack to a project of your own.

Below is a video of me describing the problem and proposing the project.  A few things did change after the video but I will note the changes below.

Below is the original board from the photo frame.  The “chip-on-board” is under the black blob.

READ —>: (more…)

(part 2 of 2)

You may want to read part 1 first.

The person whose Seagate micro USB drive I was trying to fix bought a second working unit from eBay for under $20 bucks.

Below are the two Seagate micro USB drives. One working unit from eBay the other not working and needing data recovery if possible.  The task? Switch the platters and hope the working unit will read the old disk.

Disassembling the new unit to get out the platter

READ —>: (more…)

(part 1 of 2)

A coworker’s mother had irreplaceable data on this Seagate thumb drive.  Normally I would just say sorry you’re out of luck but I thought I would be nice and at least check for a broken wire or trace. 

Turns out it was not a standard solid state thumb drive but an older 6gig micro hard drive.  Cool! If I couldn’t fix it I know I sure would have fun taking it apart.  Such devices normally only come apart but this clever little drive disassembles quite nicely and was easy to clean and put back together. 

READ —>: (more…)