Void

I have finally come around to install Coreboot on my X220 laptop. It is an X220 with a Core i5-2520M and 16 GB of DDR3-1600 RAM.

Coreboot is an open source replacement for the BIOS/UEFI firmware of a variety of laptops and mainboards. Coreboot needs to be combined with a payload component, since Coreboot itself doesn't do a whole lot besides hardware initialization. The payload I am using here is SeaBIOS, which implements the features of a PC BIOS.



It allows you to boot most PC operating systems, including those that rely on the classic PC BIOS features. For UEFI support there is the TianoCore payload. It is also possible to use the GRUB bootloader as a payload or embed a Linux kernel as a payload (if the flash chip is large enough).

I have been asked for a schematic of my C64 power supply a couple of times. So here it is.



The correct value for the transformer's primary rating depends on your mains voltage, of course.

For a detailed description of my circuit, please have a look at the original article.

Since the wide availability of blue LEDs, manufacturers of electronics devices tend to use blue LEDs as power indicators. They especially seem to like those extra-bright blue LEDs.



I, on the contrary, find them pretty annoying. Am I alone here? Do people actually like them?

Recently, I have been asked by Farnell if I were interested in taking part in their free product road test program. As I like tinkering with electronics stuff, I said yes and chose the STM32F4-Discovery board as an item to test.



The STM32F4-Discovery board is little development/evaluation board from ST to promote their STM32F4 micro controller series. The STM32F407 on the Discovery board consists of a 32 bit Corex-M4F ARM processor (which can run at up to 168 MHz), 192 kB of RAM (112+16+64 kB), 1 MB of flash memory and lots of peripherals (timers, DMA controllers, DACs, ADCs, two USB OTG ports, ...) and of course lots of general purpose I/O pins.

The original power supply of my C64 was broken. Unfortunately it was one of those power supplies where everything inside the case has been glued into one big block filling the entire case. Repairing such a mess seemed next to impossible.