Review: Experimenter's Briefcase for Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a tremendous device for controlling things around the house, but for many applications it is overkill. A platform based on a microcontroller is then more appropriate. The ESP8266 is a popular platform for IoT applications that connect via WiFi. It is Arduino based, you can find many cheap ESP8266 boards and you have access to various analogue and digital pins.

Since its introduction over 25 years ago the USB port has become the de-facto standard for communications between a PC and its peripheral equipment. In the meantime, in an effort to reduce the plethora of non-standard wall-wart mains adapters, most other devices with built-in rechargeable batteries like mobile phones, tablets etc. use the 5 V supply pins of this port for charging. It’s even possible to fit a mains outlet wall plate with a built-in 5 V supply and USB socket. With the introduction of Quick Charge the power supply communicates with the device being charged to negotiate an output voltage. A compliant charger can output a higher voltage and current beyond the typical 5 V / 2 A rating of the standard USB charger. With so many essential devices relying on a fully-functioning charger and so many different fast-charge standards emerging it is convenient to have a single unit that can quickly check that the charger is doing everything it should...

There are other books about learning to program in Python on the Raspberry Pi, but Dogan Ibrahim aims this book at a specific target audience: electronics engineers.

Disassembling electronic devices, broken or not, can be very instructive. After recovering a dead 30 W LED floodlight in the dumpster and taking it apart a so-called (sequential) linear LED driver was discovered.

If you use microcontrollers, play with Arduino or do other things that involve open-source software, you will most certainly have come across GitHub. After Sourceforge and Google Code, GitHub is currently the place where people share their work. All sorts of open-source projects can be found here, ranging from simple single-file Arduino sketches to huge cloud applications consisting of hundreds of repositories containing thousands of files. Things like CAD files and plain text articles are posted as well. Elektor Labs also publishes on GitHub. In this video we explain how to get our (and others') stuff from GitHub, a question we have to answer way too often.

Software Defined Radio or SDR is a radio technique that relies on software to do most of the hard radio work. The Elektor SDR Hands-on Kit helps you to get started in this fascinating and often mysterious world.

An incremental rotary encoder requires two signals for encoding rotational direction and speed; three signals are needed when it has an integrated pushbutton. In this video we show how they can be combined into one.

This is a submission from electronics service provider Eurocircuits. The company is presenting itself at embedded world with the trade fair motto "Right First Time", from PCB design to assembled printed circuit boards. Eurocircuits needs a total of 6 working days in its plant in Hungary to manufacture the printed circuit board and to populate it with electronic components.

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS), a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, with Riscure, a recognized vendor of security tools, services and training for connected devices, announced a collaboration to advance the development of secure and resilient 5G networks, devices and services.

This is a submission from Rutronik on the 2.4GHz RF front end module (FEM) nRF21540 from Nordic Semiconductor. It's a "plug and play" range extender that improves range and connection robustness, when combined with the multiprotocol wireless SoCs of nRF52 and nRF53 Series or other radios. It requires just a minimal amount of external components.

This is a submission from Keysight Technologies on their Security Operations Effectiveness survey. It shows that security professionals are overconfident in their tools with 50% of respondents reporting that they have experienced a security breach because one or more of their security products was not working as expected.