I'm a 31 year old UIUC Computer Engineer building mobile apps, websites and hardware integrations with an interest in 3D printing, biotechnology and Arduinos.
Retrofitting USB port on older APC Back-UPS
Before companies have standardized on USB, it was pretty common to find some strange connectors on equipment. Especially if they don’t want anyone to accidentally plug in the wrong thing. APC battery backups are a perfect example of using a RJ-50 plug to connect the USB signalling cable. To be fair, the RJ-50 plug with 10 contacts [...]
Dell RPS-720 Cable Pinout
If you own a Dell Redundant Power Supply unit (e.g. RPS-600 or RPS-720), hopefully you have the original 4 cables it came with because they are very difficult to find and you can’t even order them from Dell. There are not many details about these cords online which adds to the mystery of them. Interestingly, they are not as [...]
Increasing EBS disk space to a running EC2 instance
One of the best parts of running a cloud solution is the ability to make some “hardware” level changes without even a reboot. First, in the AWS Console, go to the EBS Volume Screen and hopefully you have labelled your EBS volumes with human readable labels (or you will have to click on each volume and see what instance it is [...]
AWS T2 vs T3 Performance
Amazon just came out with the new 3rd generation of burst-able EC2 servers and to keep things short, you should shut down your t2 servers and restart them as t3. t2.micro 1 Core from an Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40Ghz (released 2013) 1GB Memory 3227 Geekbench Single-Core 3025 Geekbench Multi-Core 15.5 GB/sec Memory Bandwidth [...]
IR Codes for Insignia TV Remote NS-RC4NA-14
I’m currently working on a project that will create an small ultra cheap IoT device that will link to Alexa or Google Home to allow you to control any IR device with your voice. Its in the ballpark of what a Logitech Harmony Hub can do but for a fraction of the cost. In doing that I needed to get the IR codes of my [...]