Prying Eyes
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Vizio VTAB1008 tablet: symbiosis of man and machine
Patrick Mannion, Director of Content, January 19, 2012There’s just something about the 8-in. Vizio VTAB1008 Android tablet: You take it out of the box, turn it on, start using it, and immediately get attached to it. More -
Teardown: The power inverter - from sunlight to power grid
Steve Taranovich, Contributing Editor, January 13, 2012This teardown of a solar inverter card traces the path of harvested DC power from the photovoltaic panel, through boost conversion, power inverter and massive filtering of the created AC power signal required by the power grid. Surrounded by monitoring and microcontroller magic along with safety standard adherence, we uncover the mysteries of solar energy harvesting electronics. More -
Unleashing the power of Tegra-2
Patrick Mannion, Director of Content, December 15, 2011The less-than-$300, Android 2.2-based ViewSonic gTablet has the horsepower to make it competitive with high-end devices—that is, if you have the stomach and time for rooting and hacking. More -
The Apple iPhone 4S teardown
EDN staff, December 9, 2011A teardown of the iPhone 4S - including an interactive video, board shots and disassembly photos - reveals how it differs from the original iPhone 4, and which semiconductor companies are the major design-in winners. More -
The Scrubbing Bubbles power sprayer
Paul Rako, Technical Editor, November 17, 2011A brilliant design costs you only pennies per spritz. More -
Evaluate your application's energy-harvesting vibrational profile with a Slam Stick
Margery Conner, Technical Editor, October 20, 2011To know whether your application is suitable for vibrational energy harvesting, you must determine its vibrational profile. Mide Technology's Slam Stick data logger and open-source software can ease your profiling task. More -
The 24V, 300W, BLDC Kollmorgen motor integrated controller
Paul Rako, Technical Editor, September 22, 2011A motor mixes mechanical and electrical beauty with questionable thermal design. More -
What's inside a smart meter? iFixit tears it down
Margery Conner, Technical Editor, August 25, 2011When iFixit's Kyle Wiens had the opportunity to tear down an Elster smart meter, he jumped at it—not to come up with a repair manual but to evaluate the health and safety issues that seem to surround the utilities’ installation of smart meters. More -
Chumby offers opportunity for home engineering
By David Blaza, Vice President, UBM Electronics, August 4, 2011Because anyone can submit an app and Chumby Industries has been very open to hacking the Linux kernel, there are several ways to change the firmware with OpenEmbedded to tailor the Chumby One to your own needs. More -
The Tektronix 1101 oscilloscope-probe power supply
Paul Rako, Technical Editor, July 28, 2011A mechanical design is at once a masterpiece and an expensive expedient. More
PRYING EYES
In EDN's Prying Eyes, we peer inside an end-user consumer gadget, a reference design, or any other interesting electronics-enabled thing we can get a good look at. (We've done a vacuum cleaner, a bus, a cereal-box toy, and even a rocket).
Unlike your average bill-of-materials teardown, Prying Eyes aims to illuminate the tough design decisions the engineers responsible for the design had to make.
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