How to desolder an electronic component

By martinm, in DIY and Electronics, september 05,2014.

Quite a while ago, we offered you a a brief soldering tutorial. Given the success of this post, we thought that you'd perhaps like us to explain how to desolder an electronic component without losing your mind...

An Excel RTD Server for Yoctopuce sensors

By mvuilleu, in Measures and Programming, august 29,2014.

Almost two years ago, we showed you how to access Yoctopuce devices from Excel by creating your own Excel add-in using Excel-DNA. Today we are going to show something simpler and even better: read any Yoctopuce sensor from Excel, with instant live refresh, without even recompiling a single line of code...

Resurrecting an old clock

By mvuilleu, in DIY and Internet of Things, august 22,2014.

Somewhere in the middle of rural Germany, there is an old mansion with a front clock, which used to chime the hours once upon a time. It's an old and tired mechanical clock, which was probably never very accurate and which now sometimes stops. As it's not possible to set it to time manually (it doesn't have a free wheel system), it was condemned to a standstill. Until last week, when, with the help of a few Yoctopuce modules, we built a pacemaker for it...

Record the lean angle of a motorbike

By Sébastien Rinsoz, in Measures, august 14,2014.

In a motorbike race, the most spectacular is the way drivers lean their motorbikes in curves. Television channels often broadcast videos of on-board cameras and inlay the highest angle reached. For Grand Prix, this information is retrieved by telemetry and broadcasted in real time. But is it possible to produce a video of the same type (but not in real time) using a Yocto-3D and a GoPro?

Launching a model rocket without Raspberry Pi

By martinm, in DIY and Internet of Things, august 08,2014.

Not long ago, we came across this post explaining how to launch a model rocket from a smartphone by using a Raspberry Pi, a WiFi dongle, a relay board, and a pocket WiFi router. We wondered if we could make it simpler by using Yoctopuce modules. Moreover, we couldn't pass a reason to play with model rockets :-)