Hack Correlation

See my first article for a short review and teardown: http://hackcorrelation.blogspot.de/2016/02/inside-stuff-racechip-car-tuning-thingie.html First off let me start by saying I consider this fair use, as the instructions and website do not explain what the settings do, how the unit actually functions and what effects it can have. The description below refers to a single-channel Diesel engine (single common rail). Settings First off, most of the users will just want the simple explanations, here's a graph that should be in the manual: The chart above shows 4 possible settings and their effects. The first rotary encoder controls how much 'extra power' is requested. See 9E vs. BE vs. 4E The second rotary encoder controls the RPM high range (endpoint). See BE vs B7. The encoders go from 8 (minimum) through 9, A, B, C, ..., F, 0, 1 ... 7 (maximum).

I bought a cheaper-than-usual Ricoh / Pentax GR APS-C camera on ebay that had a few minor issues. One of the most visible ones was dust on the sensor, so I will show you two methods that I've used to clean it up - the hard way first , followed by the easy way . First, to get the position of the dust spots a shot was taken with F/16 against a white background. The exposure was manually set to be as high as possible (while still retaining information), pre-focus was set to the closest position (macro). The resulting image was then adjusted in Irfanview (Auto adjust colors) to get the highest contrast. F/16, 1/3s, MF to closest position Preparation You need a very clean room, no dust, have a dust spray available and preferably wear gloves to avoid getting fingerprints. All parts that cannot be cleaned after assembly (LCD cover backside, LCD, sensor) should be placed facing down on some lint-free material. While removing the screws take note of their length, color and...

In search of a cheap and light notebook that I can use it for light tasks - such as Udacity courses and connecting lab equipment - I stumbled upon Odys Winpad V10 on offer at Amazon. While the Lenovo Miix 830 seemed like a good deal at the moment it suffers from poor battery life, limited USB connectivity while charging and lack of keyboard+touchpad. Most Bluetooth keyboard with trackpad on market now have issues and are overpriced, so the Odys seems like a good fit. This is a short review followed by a look inside the 'docking' unit. Initial impressions The unit is very heavy for its size, ~670g for the tablet and ~670g for the keyboard. The keyboard/touchpad base does not contain any other batteries or peripherals. Battery life is pretty good, I got >6h for light work and the battery bar estimated >14h while idle and connected to the HDMI output with the tablet screen off. The built-in touchpad is pretty bad - the bottom touch area is reserved by the left ...

I wanted a second try on my bench power supply build, something that would allow me to programmatically control the output voltage via an 'Arduino'. The supply already has two buck converters inside the unit, both controlled by their feedback resistors, so it was only natural to try to create a programmable resistor. Resolution The feedback resistors are in the potentiometer with ranges a few kiloohms. Since I'd like the output voltage to vary within 0 and 30V with a 50mV precision the needed resolution is 30/0.05 = 600 steps. That means a way to vary the output with 10 bits (1024 steps). A cheap 8-bit DAC ( PCF8591 ) would provide a resolution of only ~120mV. We should not confuse resolution and precision, but I will break the rules for now. Why a DAC does not work Third, just a DAC is not sufficient as we need to have the feedback voltage adapt to the output voltage. We could feed the input through and ADC, sample it, calculate and output the correct DAC value ...

I bought my unit half a year ago, so you can say I have plenty of experience using it. It functions as a man-in-the-middle between the ECU and the injectors. I believe it alters the injectors' on-time and perhaps even the timing with regard to the TDC. See also:  http://hackcorrelation.blogspot.de/2016/04/racechip-tuning-box-part-2-reverse.html Short review I wanted to lower the consumption of my 3L V6 diesel engine to slightly more frugal values, don't care as much about power. Sure, some extra low-end torque would be nice as I feel my particular car is lazy in shifting up. Well, to my surprise, the unit actually does something, so it's not just a random box a la OBD-tuners. By the way, you cannot tune an engine through OBD, the engine protocol is filtered out by a gateway. Just some diagnostics are allowed through. The highway mileage improved from 8L/100km (30 US MPG, 35 UK MPG) to less than 7L/100km. With the default settings (the unit can be adjusted) the l...

Similar to my Windows tools post , this one focuses on tools that make life a lot easier - on Android - or help you pinpoint and troubleshoot problems. AdAway If you cannot live without an ad blocker, this is probably the best one to use. Requires the F-Droid store. Root Explorer Quite expensive at 4 USD but I think it's worth the money - if you have root that is. You can find files, pack/unpack archives, change permissions, move stuff around, handle multiple tabs and work with SMB and FTP shares, Google Drive, Dropbox. There might be some free alternatives (ES File Explorer, Root Browser) around but at that time (~2012) there weren't many tools like this.. Titanium Backup Another paid tool, even more expensive (6 USD, I might've paid less) but I've used it hundreds of times. It does require root as well. You can back up an almost complete state of your phone/tablet and restore it to another device. The backups can be shared between accounts, so you can ...

A friend asked me to help him connect the HT21D temperature and humidity sensor to a TI board. He's using the TM4C123 board while I'm using the older LM4F Launchpad. The first thing to know is that neither of the boards have pullups adequate for I2C. You need to add a 4.7k resistor from SDA to VCC and another one from SCK to VCC. I've tested it with 1k resistors and it works with those as well. The second thing is that the Stellaris boards have several I2C modules, so you need to select one. Even worse is the fact that the Energia library by default chooses the Boosterpack: if(i2cModule == NOT_ACTIVE) {   i2cModule = BOOST_PACK_WIRE; } So you first need to go into this folder "\hardware\lm4f\libraries\Adafruit_HTU21DF_Library-master\" and edit two files as explained below. Adafruit_HTU21DF.cpp From: boolean Adafruit_HTU21DF::begin(void) {   Wire. begin() ;   reset(); To: boolean Adafruit_HTU21DF::begin(int moduleNo) {   Wire. setModule(modu...