Arik Yavilevich's blog

Fochica™ – Forgotten Child in Car Alert

Jun

20

2017

Over the last 12 months I have been working on an interesting project with an important mission: to prevent forgetting children in vehicles. Kids who are left alone in cars are likely to suffer a heat stroke, often with grave consequences. Naturally, this is a bigger concern in hot countries, such as Israel, where I ...

Fixing a bad STATE pin on an MLT-BT05 BLE module 22

Apr

4

2017

This is a follow up article to the detailed review of the MLT-BT05 BLE module. In that previous post I mentioned that I got some MLT-BT05 modules with their STATE pin floating. No working STATE pin was an issue for me and I decided to investigate the cause. Update: same issue was observed with Bolutek ...

Efficient DC 12V to 5V conversion for low-power electronics, evaluation of six modules 33

Mar

24

2017

I am currently working on a vehicle-installed Arduino project. The device is designed to be powered constantly and I decided to use the car battery as the constant power source. I am designing the device for low power consumption, consuming 50mA or less, ’cause who wants to get stuck with a flat battery, right? Car ...

MLT-BT05 BLE module – a clone of a clone?? 147

Mar

17

2017

Previously I covered the HM-10 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) module and its clone, the CC41-A. Those are two popular modules that allow simple BLE communication through a serial interface and are handy with Arduinos and other hobby micro controllers. Make sure you read that article first as it provides important background for this curious update. ...

HM-10 or CC41-A module? Automatic Arduino BLE module identification 97

Dec

6

2016

Lately I am working a lot with Arduino, which is a new field for me, hence fewer posts. Arduino is a very popular entry level embedded electronics platform. My latest Arduino project features Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication. Arduino boards have no built-in BLE capabilities so I was looking to add a BLE module to ...

Capturing and reversing wireless keyboard signal

Sep

4

2016

Recently I have made a presentation at the “Software Defined Radio Israel” meetup about my work capturing and reversing wireless keyboard signals. I focused on a “Rapoo E2700 keyboard and track-pad” but we also discussed the broader challenge of such capturing for SDR enthusiasts. The project involved capturing 2.4Ghz wireless signal with an RTL-SDR dongle ...

Arduino sound level meter and spectrum analyzer 330

Aug

27

2016

Recently I have been doing some projects with the Arduino electronics platform. One of the projects involved benchmarking certain motors and required me to measure noise levels. I will cover that project in more detail in one of the future articles, but now I would like to write about the process and best practices of ...

Why use – Fosphor, a GNU Radio real-time spectrum analyzer? 3

Aug

1

2016

Lately I have been experimenting with Software Defined Radio, SDR, which is a software-based radio signal processing system. I find this field intriguing. I can capture all kinds of signals in the air and get a better understanding of how technologies and gadgets around me operate. During my exploration of SDR I discovered one tool ...

Immersive Computing and the Experiential Age

May

31

2016

In the past year or so I have been closely following and partially involved in the Virtual Reality space. Interesting things are happening in the VR space since about 2012, when Oculus and Palmer Lucky brought in the consumer VR revolution in the form of DK1. A short summary for those, who have not been ...

Understanding and improving VMware snapshot integration in FreeNAS 8

Mar

6

2016

Those who followed my previous posts know that I am using a storage server called FreeNAS in a VMware virtualization environment. There are several benefits of why one would use a storage server rather than just a trivial storage solution. Two of such major benefits are snapshots and replication. In this article I will discuss ...