After long idleness finally a new post. I just installed a LED stripe in our living room, which I purchased on Ebay. The  ordered set came with a power supply, a controller and even a small remote control to adjust the colors. Unfortunatly, the IR receiver was broken at first (actually, it didn’t surprise me that this China stuff didn’t work instantly). After a quick controller repair, it was ready to glow!

I’m looking forward to some good movie evenings with smooth ambient light…

Finally! I got the hardware part of my MuMa (short for Music Machine) project finished a step further. All components and parts are now mounted. I surprisingly didn’t have too many incidents during the assembly process. At the first view, it seems that my circuit layout is proven- at least optically! The next step is to verify the hardware electronically. For this purpose I additionally placed some testpoints, which might come in handy…

Today, I spent almost two hours with rivets pressing – in number 160 pieces. I also protected the PCB with solder lacquer against corrosion. The first components have been mounted, but I decided to continue at Saturday…

After a few weeks of hard work, I finally managed routing the PCB for my MP3 Player project. The going was tough, since the layout is quite complex (2 layers – top and bottom). I decided to dimension the PCB for euroboard size (100 x 160 mm). That makes the player not small and cute, but a perfect evaluation board for testing and debugging. I had to insert over 150 vias (through-connections), because there were so many routes and insufficient space between components.

Yesterday, I had the chance to etch a prototype board at my previous employer (thanks Peter for the great support). The result is well worth seeing.

After Easter I’ll start drilling the holes and press the rivets for the vias – hopefully without any incidents.

Have you heard about Joost? It’s a new Free TV over Internet software based on P2PTV technology. Joost (pronounced “Yohst”) is a new venture of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and KaZaA).

I got the chance to be part of the small circle of beta testers. From the first second I started Joost, I knew this will be “a big one”! The quality of the shows, even in fullscreen-mode, are amazing. I’m also very surprised of the smooth stream. Even your ears don’t get disappointed: the audio comes in high quality and is crystal clear.
At the moment, Joost offers about 30 channels: music, series, celebrities, news, etc. It’s still a quite limited choice, but certainly entertaining. Besides watching, you can also rate shows and chat with other individuals on the channels.

Joost definately has the potential for another hype! Let’s see how long it takes until it goes public and rules the world…

First impressions of Apple’s iPhone look very promising. Too bad, the European launch is not until October…
To get some idea why the upcoming gadget will rule the mobile market, watch out the Video I found on YouTube!

These days I’m hard working on the schematics of my MP3 player project. It took me quite some time to understand the interface and power circuit of my OLED Display (thanks to Admatec AG). Hopefully, I’ll find some time to implement this part into the schematics tomorrow!