You Have Been MouseJacked!

Wireless mice, especially the older ones, can turn well-protected computers into vulnerable systems.

In these uncertain times we would like to briefly update you on the way Elektor is handling the current corona virus related situation.

It is instructive, easy and even fun to play around with the free circuit simulator LTSpice every once in a while. In this video you will first learn how to analyse and understand a simple opamp-based square wave oscillator taken from an “old” datasheet before changing it into a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). Building the circuit on a breadboard shows that it really works. The simulations are of course available for downloading to get your own experiments up and running quickly.

You don't always need a nicely etched professional-looking plated-hole printed circuit board to obtain good results. Soldering components to sturdy wires can get you pretty far as shows this video about building a passive tone and volume control for your amplifier.

Open source projects ESPHome and Home Assistant turn home automation into a set-and-forget system instead of endless fiddling with MQTT brokers and clients and what not. When things become that easy, I become interested, and so I set out to finally realize my dream of connecting the doorbell of our home to our Wi-Fi network. The goal is to detect doorbell rings in Home Assistant so that they can be relayed to places where the doorbell cannot be heard.

You can spend many days on YouTube watching videos about anything from tutorials to blogs to art to TV shows and what not, from silly to impressive. Out of this huge audio-visual ocean we dragged up a jewel that we would like to present here.

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.

Fabulous open source projects like ESPurna, ESPHome and Home Assistant make home automation much easier. Instead of spending many hours on developing communication protocols and other low-level stuff, you can concentrate on defining automation rules for your connected devices. What makes these projects even better is their support for many commercially available products. Seamlessly integrate your own ESP-based devices with e.g. Ikea Trådfri, Philips Hue and Zigbee-based lamps and switches.

People often ask us how to download something from or how to publish on GitHub. Here is how.