Kurt Tomlinson's Blog

How to Fix a Car Key Fob

My key fobs have been acting a little funny recently. Only some of the buttons on one of them would work reliably. The other one was getting shorter and shorter range until it stopped altogether. I replaced the batteries in both of them, but that didn't fix the problem in either one.

car-maintenance, electrical-engineering | 2017.11.05 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Modding a Franklin R850 Wifi Hotspot for a Car

I just got a new car with Android Auto, and I'm doing a little bit of work to make it work the way I like. The first problem with Android Auto is that it (mostly) requires a data connection for navigation. In this post, I add a hotspot with free data to my car that turns on and off automatically with my car.

electrical-engineering | 2017.10.15 18:32 | Kurt Tomlinson

Solutions to Common Altium Problems

Typically I enjoy using Altium at work for schematic capture and PCB layout, but occaisionally it'll give me some problems when I try to synchronize my PCB file with my schematic. When syncing, I'll get a lot of error messages about unmatched nets and failures when matching unique identifiers. In the past I'd try my best to backtrack what I'd changed in the schematic until I could get an error-free sync. Recently I found there are a couple things that I can do to quickly and easily fix these problems in 99% of cases.

electrical-engineering | 2017.07.09 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

How to Choose Decoupling Capacitors

I recently took a class about EMI (electromagnetic interference) and EMC (electromagnetic comapatibility). For me, the highlight of the class were the PCB design tips. Among those tips were a set of steps for designing the bypass capacitor network for an IC on a PCB.

electrical-engineering | 2016.12.25 06:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

LED Night Light Tear Down

I recently bought a pack of LED Night Lights from China on Amazon. They were very cheaply made, so of course I wondered what they were like on the inside. Today I tried to unplug one from the wall to move it to another outlet, and the front cover came off. Since it practically disassembled itself for me, I decided to take a closer look at its circuit and figure out how it worked.

electrical-engineering | 2016.10.23 21:41 | Kurt Tomlinson