Buying International Standards Cheaply

When you are designing hardware products, you have to adhere to quite a few industry standards out there before you can officially sell in an international market Eg: EN60950-1 for device safety, EN301489-1 for EMC etc. When I was starting out there were hardly any resources out there to tell you what is what and how to even pass these certifications. I see quite a lot of startup founders struggling with this in their early stages and usually choose to not comply with standards just because they don’t know what it is(Also testing it is expensive). Standards usually cost quite a lot of money(hundreds of dollars) and startup folks struggling to make ends meet just wouldn’t have the funds to buy them.

One website which I highly recommend to everyone will be https://www.evs.ee/en/ It’s a standards website that lets you download most of the international standards at less than 1/10th market price. It’s maintained by the Estonian Govt. Do check it out if you ever need to buy or explore standards.

Another source is India’s own BIS website https://www.bis.gov.in/ to purchase standards. Prices are low and you will mostly find Indian versions of the International standards which are mostly cut/copy-paste of the original ones(maybe a few edits here and there). The website though is badly maintained.

In my personal opinion, I don’t think the Indian government should be in the business of selling standards for price for at least the Indian companies(even if prices are cheap). If you want your companies to start increasing their quality to compete with the world, this information should be out there for free and not behind any paywalls. These standards should be introduced into the Engg curriculums as well so that students can learn this in their colleges and not hear about it for the first time in their jobs.

If you liked the post, Share it with your friends!

Gameboy Teardown and Repair

Gameboy
Gameboy Teardown
Gameboy Teardown
Gameboy Teardown
Gameboy Teardown

Launched in 1989, it’s probably one of the most iconic handheld game consoles ever created. When I was a kid, I spent quite a few hours playing Tetris and Nemesis(Plane Shooter). This is probably what improved my hand-eye coordination. I found the old Gameboy back home and it refused to turn ON. So thought of doing a teardown and repair.

The console contains a custom CPU by Sharp LR35902 clocked at 4MHz. It had 8KB of S-RAM. There is a stereo headphone jack and Piezo speaker for creating those nostalgic Nintendo sounds. The swappable cartridge gets loaded on the back and it communicates via a 32-pin connector. Communicates data via Parallel link with 16bit Address line and 8bit data lane. People over the years have done so many mods on these cartridges to make them even WiFi-enabled with ESP32.

Coming to the repair, It had 30yrs of dust and grime on it. Cleaned out every bit of it, retouched a few solder pads and voila device turns on with iconic Nintendo startup sound. But the display seems to be toasted. Displays on Gameboy’s are based on monochrome Super-twisted nematic LCDs capable of showing 4 shades of olive green. They work by aligning and twisting the Liquid crystal molecules via an electric field. Seems that the crystal layer is damaged and leaked in my unit. This is probably a no-fix till I buy a new replacement screen from AliExpress or so. There seem to a quite a lot of videos on YouTube showing a retrofit IPS display on these Gameboys to create a better high contrast screen. This console might well be one of the most modded/hacked consoles over the years.

One quirky thing about this unit is that it can be powered externally via a 6V DC barrel power supply(apart from 4 AAs). Since this was released long back, it had the issue that the centre pin was negative(which is not a norm these days). So be careful trying to power these with the latest DC power supplies. Make sure polarities are proper.

Gameboy Teardown
Gameboy Teardown
Gameboy Teardown
If you liked the post, Share it with your friends!
1 92 93 94 95 96 118