80 Countries and Counting...

Four and a half months after hitting 70 countries and 6,066 page views, my blog has finally reached out to readers in a total of 80 countries and 8,448 page views.

While it is no mean feat of an achievement, I believe more can be done to create awareness of its existence if readers would simply recommend my blog and work to friends and post it in electronics forums or discussion groups.

If you have benefited from what I shared, or even enjoyed what is posted, then please do me a kind favor by sharing the link (visio-for-engineers.blogspot.com). Better still, drop me a line (comment) so I know what my readers are thinking or would like to see in the blog.

Thanks again for visiting and making it happened.

Artosyn Drones

Received a query from a blog reader:

I just started a job this month which requires to RE some functions on a RC controller which has an Artosyn AR8001 and AR8003 chip on them but I am unable to find the datasheet on the internet. Any idea to approach this?

My reply:

The AR8001/AR8003 are a complimentary pair of image transmission modules customed parts by the Chinese company Artosyn Microelectronics. It is therefore unlikely you'll find any datasheet online for these two chips, especially if the company only sells their drone products and not the standalone ICs. 

If you're doing PCB-RE just to understand the design, or to produce similar products, the only workable way is backward signal annotations: 

1. Treat the AR8001/AR8003 as black boxes
2. Locate pin 1 as reference
3. Find out the power and ground pins
4. Trace out the address, data and control pins using known ICs or onboard CPU
5. Since these are image transmission chips, look out for video amplifiers and trace their pins back to these ICs. 

Hope the above pointers will give you something to work on.

An example of a RC controlled drone with imaging capability:

Partial list of main component parts (Chinese descriptions):

From Sketches to Streamlined

After some deliberation, I've decided to include the Rigol DS1052E into the Case Studies chapter of my trilogy book. As mentioned, someone by the name Hellene had done a superb job in reverse engineering this piece of equipment and placed the schematic diagrams online. Though he did not complete the whole unit, it does provide a good picture of a commercial digital oscilloscope, except for one problem: it's done in rough pencil sketches.

Below is a sample of the Channel 1's front-end:

I'd figure if I want to include his work, I'll need to clean up the schematics and do an overhaul using Visio. It's definitely much easier if I just copy and paste from Hellene's work but my sense of being a professional writer got the better of me. Here is the Visio rendition:

The rest are still in the works but readers will be pleased to know that they are getting a better deal with these pretty schematics when they buy my book. It will not be anytime soon, but I'm hoping that it will be released before the end of this year.

Meantime, do go to Amazon or the icon or menu links above to take a look at my other PCB-RE books, and consider supporting my hard work through honest purchase so I can continue writing and drawing these beautiful electronic artworks. Thanks!