Live from Serbia with Mike Harrison

Welcome back, Mike Harrison (@mikelectricstuf)

• Mike is in Belgrade with Chris, both attended and gave talks at Hackaday Belgrade (will be posted eventually)
• Mike gave a talk about the Eidophor
• They will also both attend Resonate.io but neither will speak.
• The fun continues in the UK!
  • April 19th - Beer and electronics meetup! We'll be at the Yorkshire Gray on Theobalds Rd starting at 6:30.
  • April 20th - "Nerd Nite" event
  • April 21st - There is an Open Source Hardware Users Group meeting.
• Mike recommends learning (uppercase) cyrillic to help get around places like Serbia or Russia.
• Consulting projects continue to get more interesting, you can see them on whitewing.co.uk
  • There is a new project that was installed in terminal 2 of Heathrow airport
  • Holiday decorations in Hong Kong
    • There was a fixture to program physical locations of the assembled PCBs.
    • All high level comm was done using RS485.
  • Selfridges on Oxford St
    • Mike saved the setup time by starting a truck using a drill battery.
    • Uses the APA102.
    • Test jigs are critical in field jobs, especially time critical ones like busy installs.
• Trade shows for other industries
  • Mike went to one for wearable tech, ended up going to underwater exploration instead.
  • Saw the company that makes the underwater buoy that Mike tore down. (Sonardyne)
• Museums
  • Tesla museum was underwhelming, but Mike saw the first ever radio boat.
  • Chris and Mike went to the science museum together and saw the Galaksija (previous guest Voja Antonic's design)
• Devices
  • Mike has been designing devices using loads of 0402 white LEDs. He also gets $0.01 4mm LEDs on aliexpress.
  • Osram Duris E
• Reverse engineering
  • Mike has experience reprogramming analog(ue) phones. This was done by modifying or moving the ESN of a device.
  • The Sony D50 service manual that Dave tore down had a great service manual. Some of the old phones used to have those, but they were hard to get. 
  • The eeproms were something like 9346
  • Mike had to write disassemblers and then read the output to figure out what was going on. He also ended up tracing program flow using a logic analyzer
  • Vodaphone had prepaid phones, others were not well implemented and ended up giving away free calls. 
  • Mike ended up emulating the Dallas UID chips with a small board in order to reprogram the ESN.
• The last time Mike was on an Amp Hour episode he talked about using PICs.
• Write the bootloader first...and make sure it's rock solid!

Image linked from Twitter, also features @szczys