Monthly Archives: July 2010

7% Solution

This is an interesting read. I, too, just assumed the ±10% included the whole range and it would be of some random distribution.

“Design your circuit to use values that lie 7% away from the nominal standard values, either higher or lower, and you’ll find plenty of those in the bins when you do your hand selection.”

Reading BIOS EEPROM chips

I had these chips extracted from the old motherboards I threw away some time ago, and I thought I’d have some use for them some day.


These are Electrically Erasable and Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) chips which are used to hold the BIOS code. I was curious to find out what’s in these chips and if I could re-use them for storage in my projects, so I decided to interface with them. Continue reading →