Chat what is a useful electronics project I could work on? For a positive impact.

@sad_electronics my backlog has HDMI eye open monitor. To debug flaky HDMI cables and connections.

Feel free to build it. I would use it.

@sad_electronics Two half-baked ideas I'd like to see realised:
- A USB cable tester with a tiny functional guillotine
- An HDMI to HDMI bridge which can detect ads and put up a screensaver, because I'd rather see nothing than ads in online video

@sad_electronics you know the hunter-seeker from Dune? Like that, but a guillotine.

@sad_electronics@fosstodon.org Build a device that detects:
* Cops' body cameras
* Meta Glasses
* Flock Cameras

@sad_electronics open-source electromechanical BMS that takes banks of parallel lithium cells and switches them in and out of a circuit to control voltage. It knows what each cell's charge state is so it can balance them by switching which cells are on to achieve a desired output voltage.

Could use any number of mismatched cells, so would be great for reusing salvaged cells from different sources.

@sad_electronics a USB disruption debugger that can be connected between e.g. a hub and a hard drive to provide information about why the drive keeps disappearing to the computer.

A USB cable tester that tests actual throughput rather than just finding a rating

@cccpresser @sad_electronics how should this work? I am imagining something like those Ethernet testers with an LED per pin but I suspect you mean something more complex

@eloy @sad_electronics Yeah, more complex.
Basically a device that can generate a Eye-Diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_pattern

That can be used to judge the quality of a connection.

I feel that HDMI it is often flaky, and we don't know why. Debugging steps include trying another cable, wiggling the cable or changing the notebook. Instead I want to measure the link quality and make a informed decision on what to change.

@sad_electronics FOSS driven vacuum cleaner 🤗

@eloy @cccpresser @sad_electronics TI makes some HDMI reclocking chips that also generate a low resolution eye diagram you can read out over i2c. Would be a neat little product

@werdahias @cccpresser @sad_electronics @eloy No idea, but I wonder if it just works if you use the HDMI one :D

@martijnbraam @werdahias @sad_electronics @eloy Yeah, I assume so.
TI also has a lot of other generic redrivers that should be suitable.

@sad_electronics USB 5V power unfuckenator. Takes in whatever garbage voltage the upstream device spews out and passes it through a buck-boost regulator to get stable 5.0V out the other end. Data just passes through.