Articles about hardware

1. The titan implosion

   TL;DR, this was a triumph of stupidity and greed over good engineering.

   Engineering design standards are often written in blood, in the sense that these standards often came into being after accidents involving serious loss of life. The CEO of Oceangate ignored them, apparently because they got in his way of saving costs. As it turns out, reality is not susceptible to CEO bullshit.

   Unsurprisingly, “move fast and break things” is not a good strategy when lives are at stake.

2. Testing a Basetech energy monitor 2000

   To monitor the power usage of my electric motorcycle and appliances, I bought a Basetech EM2000. Before using it for real monitoring, I wanted to test it to get a feel for the accuracy

3. Repairing a USB flash drive

   Recently, one of my USB flash drives, a Kingston DataTraveller 100 G3, stopped working. It didn’t register at all in whatever PC I tried it in. So in this article, I will attempt to repair it.

4. Setting the Razer ornata chroma color from userspace

   This documents how to set the (static) color on this keyboard from user space using libusb (built into FreeBSD) and pyusb.

5. Using the FT232 with Python

   In this article I will try to document how to with with the FT232H using Python on FreeBSD. I will be using the Adafruit FT232H breakout board.

   Note that since I’m using FreeBSD, the library provided by FTDI doesn’t work. However, the library provided by Adafruit was written for Python 2, and doesn’t work with Python 3. I tried tinkering with it a bit to get it to work with Python 3, but that did not work out. In the end, I went with pyftdi since it doesn’t require a native library and it just works.

6. Measuring particulate matter with the PMS5003

   This article details how I used the Plantower PMS5003 particulate matter (“PM”) sensor on a PC or laptop, using an FT232H breakout board to make the connection.