Welcome to Infinus Electronics! Join me as I document my journey exploring fun stuff 😉

Winter Logger

One of the (many) weird quirks of studying in the University of Cambridge is that our terms only last 8 weeks. Yes, the number of days we are officially “studying” is less than the number of days we are ostensibly on “holiday”. Of course, it never works that way, and Cambridge is probably one of the only places where going to uni feels exactly like going to secondary school. Over these long break, we are told that our rooms are going to be used for conference purposes, and that we would have to move all our stuff out to a tiny, cramped storage container....

January 30, 2023 Â· 20 min Â· Infinus

I2C EEPROM Tester with CircuitPython on a Raspberry Pi Pico

As part of the Winter Logger project, I got myself some DIP EEPROMs from eBay which were ostensibly AT24C256’s, mostly because I didn’t feel like buying yet more stuff that I probably would never use just to pad out Mouser’s £33 for free shipping minimum order. This is what I got: Suspicious
 With all the counterfeit semiconductors floating out there, I wanted to verify if I at least had functional EEPROM that wasn’t literally just plastic with some legs tacked onto it - I wanted to test if all the memory cells actually worked....

November 12, 2022 Â· 4 min Â· Infinus

Inline Microphone Preamp

This is an attempt to try to get more signal out of dynamic microphones, as I literally have to max out the gain on my Presonus AudioBox iTwo to barely get a usable signal level, and that is with me speaking right on top of the microphone. This design is based on Project 66 by Eliott Sound Products , with some minor modifications, mostly me just playing around to see what are the effects of changing stuff around....

April 28, 2022 Â· 1 min Â· Infinus

Anamorphic Image Distorter

As makers, random serendipity is very precious to us, as it represents an excellent opportunity to broaden our horizons by trying stuff that otherwise would not have crossed our minds. This project was spawned by a chance encounter with an art museum curator during my stint in Edinburgh. The idea was to create a tool to generate Secret Portraits , also known as Anamorphosis , to make some cool merch that would support the operations of the museum....

September 14, 2022 Â· 5 min Â· Infinus

Patch Antenna Calculator

This is a tool I developed to assist us at the Cambridge University Spaceflight Club to design a patch antenna for telemetry. It is intended only as a very crude estimate, as I have absolutely no idea how accurately I selected the underlying formulae. Input Parameters: Dielectric Constant: Dielectric Thickness: mm Target Frequency: Hz kHz MHz GHz Target Impedance: Ω Conductor Thickness: Όm Velocity Factor: % Results: Patch Width: Patch Length: Feed Methods: Inset Fed: Inset Length: width length qwt_ Probe Fed: Probe Distance from Center: width length dpf Edge Fed: Edge Impedance: Impedance Required for Quarter Wave Transform: Required Trace Width for Quarter Wave Transform: Required Trace Length for Quarter Wave Transform: 50Ω Impedance Microstrip Transmission Line Width: References Patch Antennas for the impedance formulae Quarter Wave Transformer Microstrip Width Calculator for microstrip formulae DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A CONFORMAL OMNIDIRECTIONAL MICROSTRIP ANTENNA ARRAY ON CYLINDRICAL SURFACE Study of a conformal UWB antenna designed on various non-planar surfaces Design and Studies on Non-planar Conformal Patch Antennas for Air-borne Vehicles

February 28, 2022 Â· Infinus

How to Embed SVG Schematics from KiCad into a Hugo Page

I have recently decided to move Infinus Electronics over to Hugo, as WordPress with its weird styling issues and super hard to understand file structure made it way too frustrating to debug and customise. So far, working with Hugo has been a blast, and having worked with frameworks like Laravel and Flask before, the whole organisation of pages by file hierarchy has been a lot more intuitive. And transparent. The issue My first post written on this new platform is the Battery Powered +48V Phantom Power Supply , which of course, had to show a schematic from KiCad....

December 25, 2021 Â· 7 min Â· Infinus

How to Include Jupyter Notebooks in WordPress

So, you’ve just exported your Jupyter notebook as a .html file, and are about to embed it in your WordPress post. While it may be tempting to just copy and paste the generated html code in a custom html code block, you’ll probably find out pretty quickly that doing so entirely messes up the css of your theme, leading to issues like the sidebar loading at the bottom of the page instead of at the side, fonts and font colours being altered in unexpected ways, etc....

December 30, 2020 Â· 4 min Â· Infinus

How to "Disable" Solidworks Visualise Boost From Starting On Boot

Why quote marks? Because while I’m sure there is a proper way to disable this behavior, I couldn’t find it within 5 minutes of Googling, it was 2.30am, I was tired, my laptop battery life was taking a huge hit from it keeping the dedicated GPU on at all times
 So, I decided to go the barbaric route, and just kill the task after its started. Even the way I’m doing that is pretty crude as well....

December 22, 2020 Â· 2 min Â· Infinus