Author: asarangan

On AWS, there aren’t any images of Slackware. If you want to run Slackware, you have to create one from scratch. There is a howto on this topic. Although it was very helpful, I still ran into several issues that required a deeper investigation. This post is a summary of the steps I had to…

On X-plane, manipulating the Garmin 430/530 keys using the mouse can be cumbersome. Yoke keys can be assigned for these functions, but there are not enough keys on a typical yoke to make this assignment. One solution is to buy a full blown panel such as this one from Realsimgear. But it is expensive. Besides,…

Attiny 45/85 microcontrollers are very popular among hobbyists because they are cheap (about $1 each) and can be programmed to do many simple functions. But one thing lacking in these microcontrollers is an integrated USB interface. Many larger microcontrollers come with USB interfaces, but they can be an overkill for many small jobs. One way…

This CNC foam cutter was built from a kit by https://rcfoamcutter.com. It basically consists of two carriages for the horizontal translations and two towers for the vertical translations. I’ve built two prior CNC foam cutters (not using this kit), and the main challenges with those DIY designs were uneven sliding friction and wobble. These problems have…

Normally, a bridge rectifier chip is used to convert AC to a pulsing DC. However, it can also be used to make a DC circuit insensitive to input polarity. This is really handy because I have destroyed more circuits than I like to remember because I accidentally switched the polarity of the power supply. The downside…