Vaporizer Rebuild

August 1, 2013 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

vaporizer-rebuild

Wait! Don’t click away yet. Yes, this is a vaporizer project, but it has the distinction of being the most electronics engineering oriented post on the subject we’ve ever featured. [Mm Nn’s] vaporizer broke so he decided to fix it. After poking around inside it became clear that pretty much everything was trashed. So this ended up being a complete rebuild of all the support circuitry, with the heating element being the only electrical component he could salvage.

He started looking around for a power supply capable of driving the element from the Arizer V-tower vaporizer. He hoped that he could use a computer PSU but ended up having to buy one to suit; a Mean Well rs-100-24. He drives the system with a microcontroller (programmed in assembly) using PWM to adjust the element. Speaking of, there is a sensor built into the heating element that [Mm] isn’t using because he couldn’t figure out how to read from it. If you’ve got some ideas let us know in the comments.

HackRF, Or Playing From 30 MHz To 6 GHz

August 1, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 49 Comments

Up on Kickstarter, [Michael Ossmann] is launching the HackRF, an inordinately cheap, exceedingly capable software defined radio tool that’s small enough to lose in your laptop bag.

The HackRF was the subject of a lot of interest last time it was on Hackaday – the ability to receive up to 6GHz allows the HackRF to do a lot of very interesting things, including listening in on Bluetooth, WiFi, and 4G networks. Also, the ability to transmit on these frequencies means a lot of very interesting, and quite possibly slightly evil applications are open to anyone with a HackRF. Like the RTL-SDR dongles, the HackRF works with GNU Radio out of the box, meaning all those cool SDR hacks we’ve seen so far will work with this new, more powerful board.

Compared to the USB TV tuner cards that were so popular a year ago, the HackRF has 10 times the bandwidth, is able to receive up to 6GHz, and is also able to transmit. It’s only half-duplex, so to receive and transmit simultaneously you’ll need two HackRFs, or maybe wait for a hardware revision that will hopefully come sooner rather than later.

Below you can check out [Michael]’s presentation at Toorcon where the HackRF was unleashed to the world.

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