{"id":3356,"date":"2015-02-23T13:49:42","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T20:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3356"},"modified":"2015-02-23T13:49:42","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T20:49:42","slug":"odd-lots-275","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3356","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.raspberrypi.org\/xenon-death-flash-a-free-physics-lesson\/\" target=\"_blank\">The xenon flash problem with the Raspbrry Pi 2 board has been explained reasonably well<\/a> on the Foundation site, by Liz Upton. Key seems to be that U16 is not a typical SMT chip encased in black resin, but a naked BGA (Ball Grid Array) chip, which allows light to hit the chip&#8217;s silicon directly. <a href= \"http:\/\/hackaday.com\/2015\/02\/08\/photonic-reset-of-the-raspberry-pi-2\/\" target=\"_blank\">HackaDay&#8217;s Brian Benchoff says that a cheap green laser pointer will also do it<\/a>, suggesting that the wavelength of light hitting U16 matters crucially. Hey kids, this is a science fair project: What wavelengths of light trigger photoelectric emission on an exposed silicon die? (Many thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"https:\/\/learn.adafruit.com\/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-2-model-b?view=all\" target=\"_blank\">Adafruit has a nice benchmark page for the Raspberry Pi 2<\/a>, which also provides detailed descriptions of the differences between the new board and the older boards.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2015\/02\/strange-show-spotted-high-above-mars-surface-remains-mysterious\/\" target=\"_blank\">What&#8217;s going on in the Martian atmosphere<\/a>?<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s a single SMT chip at the heart of the Baofeng radios I described recently: <a href= \"http:\/\/blog.nutsfactory.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/RDA1846.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">The RDA1846<\/a>. I would love to see this on a cape\/shield for one of the popular embedded boards, especially the Raspberry Pi. Not quite a true SDR, but mighty close, and I&#8217;d guess damned useful for radio tinkering. (Thanks to Bob Fegert for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>By the way, <a href=\"http:\/\/pofung.org\/baofeng-vs-pofung\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Baofeng&#8221; and &#8220;Pofung&#8221; are the same company<\/a>. It sounds like they were trying to make &#8220;Baofeng&#8221; easier to pronounce for Westerners, but in truth I don&#8217;t think it was much of a problem to being with, and I admit I was confused when I first ran across &#8220;Pofung.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/map.ipviking.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Norse&#8217;s real-time IP attack map<\/a> is very cool in a <em>War Games<\/em> sort of way, but it takes <a href= \"http:\/\/www.norse-corp.com\/blog-thursday-140320.html\" target= \"_blank\">some study<\/a> to figure out what exactly it is that you&#8217;re seeing. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wa6otp.com\/radio.html\" target= \"_blank\">a nice collection of homebrew radio projects<\/a> from Jim McNutt WA6OTP, with pictures and schematics. Fine work!<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2015\/02\/13\/north-and-south-poles-important-climate-differences\/\" target=\"_blank\">An interesting short introduction to the geophysical differences between Earth&#8217;s north pole annd south pole<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/io9.com\/a-history-of-the-most-impractical-weapons-ever-used-in-1686102835\" target=\"_blank\">More crazy weapons<\/a>, including but hardly limited to the Panjundrum. I&#8217;ve always liked the Triebflugel, which was a great idea until you had to land it, kind of like <a href= \"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/McDonnell_XF-85_Goblin\" target= \"_blank\">the XF-85 Goblin<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>That&#8217;s not a monkey on that marathon runner&#8217;s back. <a href= \"http:\/\/www.ibtimes.co.uk\/meet-tomatan-wearable-robot-that-feeds-you-tomatoes-you-run-1488706\" target=\"_blank\">It&#8217;s a tomato-dispenser robot<\/a>. I guess we&#8217;re in somebody&#8217;s vision of the future. It certainly isn&#8217;t mine.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The xenon flash problem with the Raspbrry Pi 2 board has been explained reasonably well on the Foundation site, by Liz Upton. Key seems to be that U16 is not a typical SMT chip encased in black resin, but a naked BGA (Ball Grid Array) chip, which allows light to hit the chip&#8217;s silicon directly. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[45,15,43,128],"class_list":["post-3356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-ham-radio","tag-hardware","tag-humor","tag-rpi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3357,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356\/revisions\/3357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}