Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Because I’m kind of a nut for all this electronics stuff, I have a few old PCI cards sitting next to my desk as office decoration. One of them is a 4MB VGA graphics card from ~15 years ago. Another is a 10/100 ethernet card from roughly the same vintage. They are useless today, but they look cool, and are pieces of history. While looking at one of them, I thought it might be interesting to explain what all the little pieces on them do. Computer PCI cards are often pretty sparse for visible components though, so to facilitate this article, I’m including a picture of a breadboard I had at home. It’s kind of a mess, because I was experimenting with several things all at once, but there are basically two circuits. One is a boost converter (tucked away on the left side) and more towards the center is a 555 timer circuit.

This is a much better example of components that are easily visible. You can see their shapes clearly and I can do a much better job explaining how everything works because I built it, but the same components work basically the same way on any hardware, including my PCI cards.

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# First we have a black rectangle with metal legs coming out of it on either side. This is a 555 timer IC (integrated circuit). This particular packaging of the chip is called DIP (dual inline package). There are other packages like SMT (surface mount technology) that can result in a smaller physical footprint, but they are much harder to use on breadboards or by hobbyists who can only use their hands. This is the same 555 chip I mentioned two weeks ago in my turn signals article. I’m not doing anything fancy with it here. It’s just configured to generate pulses to drive an LED.
# This isn’t super visible here, but it’s a black package, with a metal back and 3 metal legs. It’s an LM317. This chip is a simple linear voltage regulator. It’s used to drop voltage to an adjustable value efficiently and easily. When dropping voltage like that in a circuit, heat may need to be dissipated. The LM317 has a metal back so that a small (or large) heat sink can be attached.
# There are actually 6 of these visible on the board. This one is an electrolytic capacitor. It stores charge and then can release it very quickly. Capacitors are often used for buffering choppy signals (among many other things) or providing a more continuous voltage when output may drop for very brief periods. There are two capacitors on the lower left that are doing exactly this. The boost converter circuit outputs an inconsistent voltage if a load is connected drawing power. The capacitors help buffer this while the circuit has time to charge up again and deliver another pulse. This all happens ??very?? rapidly so the output appears relatively constant. There is also a ceramic capacitor on the board as well. The tiny blue thing above the 555 IC is also a capacitor.
# This semi-circle black plastic component has 3 metal legs beneath it. It is a transistor. I could write several articles about transistors and their many, many uses. They can be used as electronic switches, amplifiers, drivers, and countless other things. In this circuit I was using it as a simple LED driver. This isn’t really necessary to run an LED, but it was a helpful exercise in learning how to calculate the transistor circuit that I needed to use.
# This black cylinder is a diode. A diode is a device that only lets current pass through in one direction. Usually the direction is indicated by one end being a different color. In this case, it’s the silver cap on the lower side. This particular diode is called a Schottky diode and is characterized by a low forward voltage drop. Generally about half that of a standard silicon or germanium diode. All diodes will cause a drop in voltage because of how they are constructed, but sometimes it’s necessary to have as little drop as possible, as is the case in my boost converter circuit here.
# This metal donut with a coil of wire around it is a toroidal inductor. Inductors come in many shapes and configurations (some look just like electrolytic capacitors). An inductor is also an energy storage device, like a capacitor, except instead of storing charge directly, it stores energy in a magnetic field. When the magnetic field is allowed to collapse, a current is generated. This allows for a different kind of circuit buffering. Here, it’s being used as an integral part of the boost converter circuit.
# Tucked underneath the inductor is a MAX757 switching voltage regulator IC. This is brains of the whole boosting process. Essentially it provides the fast switching necessary to boost a voltage signal higher than the input. For example, with my setup here, I can take a voltage as low as 0.7VDC and based on how I have the circuit built around the MAX757, it will boost it up to 5VDC. It will actually accept any voltage between 0.7VDC and approximately 4VDC and produce a fairly smooth 5VDC output. Some switching voltage regulators (like the MAX757) are adjustable, meaning by configuring circuit values around the regulator, you can change the output. In my case, the output voltage is controlled by a simple resistance divider. By swapping in a different resistor value, I can change the output from 5VDC to 3.3VDC. These switching regulators can also be used to reduce voltage, just like the LM317, except they are more efficient because the extra energy isn’t converted to heat.

Hopefully this was an interesting explanation of a range of components. It’s certainly a lot to cram into a short article!

I remember the first day I got a new computer, ok a new-to-me computer. It was a hand-me-down PC of sorts. I think it ran some DOS operating system and the screen was always orange. AOL had just come out and I loved nothing more than the sound of my modem and the eventual entry into a chat room where I learned things like 🙂 was a smiley face and 😛 meant I was sticking my tongue out.

Fast-forward many years and my basic AOL symbols are now referred to as emojis. I admit the basic smile is probably still my most commonly used one, but there’s a world of emojis out there and they can make everyday conversations just a little bit more fun.

I use emojis frequently on my iPhone and iPad, but it’s just as easy to use emojis on your Mac once you know where to find them. On your Mac it might not be as obvious where you might find these because you can’t just pull them up from your keyboard (unless you know the shortcut). If you want to insert a smiley face in a post with Messages or a note in Mail, you need to use the characters viewer. To bring up the Character viewer in most Mac apps, choose edit > emoji & symbols or use the keyboard shortcut: Command-Control-Space. When the characters viewer opens you can insert an emoji from a few different ways, you might need to play around and see which method works best depending on which app you are using.

*While the curser is active in a text area, double-click a character in the viewer.
*Drag a character out of the viewer and into a text area.
*Drag a character out of the viewer to the Desktop to create a text clipping with it. Then drag that text clipping anywhere you can type.

Once you insert a character or emoji, it will appear in the frequently used category. You can feel free to add your most commonly used emojis to your favorites category. You’ll find all the same emojis on your Mac as you do on iPhone, making your conversations on your Mac now just as fun as those on your iPhone or iPad.

As many of you know, I read a lot of science fiction and one of the things that constantly amazes me is how quickly science fiction turns to science fact. Self-driving cars, drones, tablets, smartphones and smart homes were all the stuff of sci-fi- but now are almost commonplace.

I remember just 5 years ago at CES when I saw my first drone. There was a guy in the parking lot doing an interview with a reporter with the drone. A few more drones made their way into the show in the next year but this year there were literally hundreds of drone booths. Small Dog Electronics sells drones from the largest manufacturer, DJI and also from GoPro once they actually ship their Karma drone. The DJI Mavic is a compact drone that comes with a camera and the Karma is similar but uses GoPro cameras on a special gimbal. I really haven’t figured out what the market is for drones other than hobbyists and those that want to make movies of their outdoor adventures.

There were some odd things there, too. Like smart ladies high heels that track fitness but also adjust height and temperature.

Alexa was everywhere. The Amazon AI devices, Echo, Dot and Tap where the hit of the show. Actually, not the devices themselves, I didn’t see an Amazon booth, but the connectivity. Everyone was announcing connectivity with Alexa including locks, lights, fitness gear and just about anything you can imagine. Forget robots (there were plenty there) but this artificial intelligence was everywhere. Many of the same companies were announcing connectivity with Google Home and Apple’s HomeKit but this was Alexa’s show. Ford and VW showed Alexa in their cars, Whirlpool had Alexa controlling washers and dryers and Samsung had Alexa controlling their automatic vacuum cleaner.

While I find Apple’s Siri way smarter than Alexa, Apple has missed the boat by not utilizing their technological capacity with Apple and Beats to come up with a killer device to bring Siri to the home. That’s my editorial observation and I’ll bet there are a bunch of engineers working hard in Cupertino on this. Nevertheless, Will and I had a mission and that was to find new products that are HomeKit compatible.

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We were successful on the 2nd day when we went not to the Las Vegas convention center but over to the Sands Exposition Center where all the smart home, drones, heath and fitness and 3D printers were housed. We had great meetings with a number of vendors such as Honeywell, Kwikset, First Alert, Elgato and Withings. We will be bringing in a number of these products. We were also searching for another HomeKit compatible lock and I have always liked the design of the August locks. While they didn’t have a booth, we noticed that they had a hospitality suite. It was getting late in the day and we decided to make our way to the Venetian and the 30th floor where their suite was located. We walked in unannounced to a suite with one guy in it. We told him what we wanted to do and about our plans for our home automation displays at our stores and he showed us the products. He introduced us to the sales manager next door and we discovered we had been talking with the CEO of August. Long story short, we should have August locks for you really soon.

Virtual reality was also huge at the show with lots of the booths having VR setups to show their products or to show their VR set-ups. It was funny watching people with VR glasses on playing a game or virtually climbing a wall. It always looked like they were playing whack-a-mole.

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No CES show is complete without looking at the automotive section and the TVs. We went to the big booths by LG, Samsung and Sony and were again amazed by the OLED TVs, the smart refrigerators, washing machines and other gear. I particularly liked the automated in-home dry cleaning station and the automated laundry folder. At the automotive section we were wowed by the very cool looking Faraday Future car as well as some of the futuristic designs from others.

I have been to a lot of shows and I always judge the success by whether it changes our business at all. This show will as we gained some great new vendors, had productive meetings with current vendors and took a peak at what they future might be like. I got home and decided to try one of those Samsung vacuums so I told Grace that I got a new robot. She seemed a bit bored and said “yeah, big deal, what does this one do?”