Turns out there are some changes going on this year for Defcon badge hackers. Joe Grand, designer of the badge for the last 3 years has announced plans to pre-release some of the specs of this years design before the conference. (traditionally the badge details have been a big secret and eagerly anticipated until opening day)
I was all ready to publish an entry last night on how horrible most of the PCB design tools I’ve used are, when today I stumbled upon the new version of Cadsoft Eagle v5.0 and OH MY! did they ever fix alot of the headaches from before.
The interface has been polished up, non-standard buttons have been changed and functionality is much more intuitive. It still has its quirks from what I have seen, but the new version shows a real leap in their development of the product. I was able to finally put together some designs that had long sat on the shelf due to my inability to figure out certain bugs in either how the software was designed, or how I was trying to use it.
I strongly suggest going and checking it out. I will be publishing another longer article soon on some new things I’ve been working on and what functionality in the new version helped me accomplish those goals. Look for the info as soon as I can get them together…
Oooh, it’s almost like Christmas this morning…
And its mornings like these that really explain why I can’t keep a girlfriend. 
But anyway, I stumbled upon a super-cheap source for LED’s on Ebay. The store is called “LED HK” and if you guessed the HK stood for “Hong Kong” you would be correct. Are they counterfeit? my guess is - quite possibly - Yes! Are they cheap though? definitely. They have a wide variety of colors and a fair selection of sizes, go check it out… 100 for $2.00 can’t be beat…
BTW - No SMD yet that I can find for you super-hardcore experimenters…
I found this awesome quick reference guide to SMD (Surface Mount Device) / SMT (Surface Mount Technology) part sizes this evening. Very informative! and a great resource for anyone getting started…
Fixed the Tivo with a new power supply. A bit of advice to people having troubles… No lights, but spinning fan and HDD is most likely a power supply. Tivo booting with a “Welcome to Tivo… one moment please” (or something close to that) is almost certainly a problem with the hard disk drive. In my case, I had swapped the Master/Slave jumper earlier in my troubleshooting. All good - for now…
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