More Raspberry Pi Power Saving (Part 3)

Be sure to read part 1 and part 2.

Further adding to the Raspberry Pi's superfluous power draw are the linear 1.8V and 3.3V regulators (RG1 and RG2 respectively). Currently in place of the 3.3V regulator is the NCP1117/SE8117TA (which in turn feeds the 1.8V regulator in series). People are reporting that a modification of RG2 to a switch mode variant sees reductions in power consumption between 10 to 25%. I will not be looking to replace the 1.8V regulator as it seems to only offer marginal improvement on top of replacing RG2).

Raspberry Pi Model B to Model A Conversion Cleanup - Part 2

Be sure to see part 1. A lot of the components on the board are now redundant as they are no longer used/connected, so for cosmetic reasons we can now remove these from the board. The easiest way to remove them is to load a soldering iron tip with solder and flood the SMD components. They should just flow away and join with the solder lump on the tip and leave a nice clean finish.

Firstly on the top, you will want to remove the components in the spaces marked red. You can also remove the RJ45 connector if you wish.

First Raspberry Pi Model A 512MB Off The (Re-)Production Line - Part 1

Who wants to wait (or pay highly inflated prices for pre-production run) for the Raspberry Pi Model A, when you can have it now for a low price of $36AUD complete with a 512 MB RAM update?

Cosmetically and functionally the Model A has removed the LAN9512 IC, Ethernet port and the secondary USB port. Under the hood, they have also designed the PCB to accommodate both Model A and B configurations, depending on the placement of a couple of components. In this series, I will be converting the Raspberry Pi Model B to a Model A with 512MB RAM.

Let's first compare the two boards by eye. On this page they have nice pictures of the Model A board. Looking at these pictures and our current board, we essentially want to remove the extra components from the Model B to match the Model A.

Setting up a Multiple Channel VGA Recording Machine

We recently required the need to record several VGA signals from an optical video switching unit. We decided for our purposes that the Epiphan VGA2PCIe would be best suited to out needs.

Samsung GT-I9000 (Galaxy S) Touch Screen and Keypad Repair

A mate of mine recently left his Galaxy S outside in the rain, floating in a puddle overnight after some overzealous drunken antics which rendered the home button unresponsive. Sending it back to Samsung for repair would obviously require payment as it had easily set off the water damage sensors.

Windows Hidden/Not Connected Device Removal Script And Devcon Musings

I recently needed to create a quick script that uninstalls any devices that have since been disconnected from the system (or fail to be seen). Normally these devices can only be found if you open a command prompt and enter the following (then show hidden devices):

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

start devmgmt.msc

The problem arose when I had a large number of touchy USB data aquisition devices that required this to be performed regularly, which becomes very tedious. This is where the devcon utility comes in handy. Although there are a few small problems; the devcon utility has issues removing hidden devices. A lot of people claim this is because it just in fact doesn't do it, as there is apparenly a flag in the program that prevents you from doing it out of the box and modifying the source is the only way to go (I have looked through the source, and I could find no such thing that would cause this behaviour). This is flat out incorrect, you can indeed remove hidden devices with devcon out of the box (provided you have the correct version for your Windows installation, more on this later).

ESXi Automation (KMS Post Followup)

I finally got around to creating a small script which automates the process of starting up all of the machines outlined in the post, KMS Activation With Less than 25 Machines and VMWare ESXi after I found that the counter in the Windows KMS server resets itself after 30 days. This is of course OK with current machines, but when adding more machines it is not of course desirable.