Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m gonna share with you some tips and tricks about buying from Aliexpress and I might follow up with another video about Ebay and Banggood. I received requests for doing such a video several times as the subject was brought up and I think I can share a few useful things with you because as you may know, some of my most popular videos are my InTheMail videos where I show you the stuff I purchase from China and I get a lot of stuff which allowed me to learn a few tricks over the years.
Category: DIY
This category will hold everything DIY related.
Voltlog #288 – New BLTouch 3DTouch Plastic Pin Sensor Upgrade
Back in 2018 I installed a Bltouch sensor on my Creality CR10 3d printer and I showed the process in Voltlog #177, that video is one of the most popular videos on the channel and now after using the printer with the upgrade for a couple of years I can clearly say it’s probably one of the best upgrades you can do to your 3d printer and it’s pretty cheap. I won’t go into too much detail about what the sensor does and how to install it because that is discussed in Voltlog #177.
However I did experience a downside after this upgrade, some users are reporting the same problem while others don’t face this issue. It’s important to note I am using a BLtouch clone called 3D touch, purchased from Aliexpress. It’s the type that has a metal push rod through the middle. The issue I’m having is a vibration noise coming from that metal pin vibrating inside the sensor when the printer moves on the Y axis. This issue might or might not be present on a genuine sensor or just another unit which might have tighter tolerances.
Voltlog #287 – Switching From Eagle To Kicad
Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m gonna talk a bit about my process of switching from EagleCad to Kicad. So i’ve been an EagleCAD user for years, I’ve practically learned how to do pcb layout in eagle cad so there is that emotional attachment to a piece of software because it’s what I used while developing this skill. And to be honest there wasn’t any better alternative years ago, Eagle was the first decent piece of cad software to offer a freeware license and it quickly became popular for hobbyists. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles of the expensive software like Altium or Candece but it did the job while being user friendly.
Since it quickly became popular for makers and hobbyists it also meant there was an abundance of support on the forums as well as many user generated scripts and libraries freely available. It was similar to the popularity Arduino got but it was never open source and if you needed some extra features like 4 layer layout or pcb sizes larger than 8x10cm you needed to pay for a license.
Voltlog #285 – Is a Cheap Cordless Power Drill Any Good?
Is a cheap cordless power drill any good? That is a question I’ve been asking myself for a while now because I was in the market for a cordless power drill. I can get a well known brand like Makita which sells a kit with two 18V 3Ah batteries, the drill and a charger for about $200. The thing is I’m using a tool like this maybe once every 3-4 months for a couple of drills, generally soft materials or maybe to assemble some new piece of furniture and I don’t feel like spending $200 for a tool that’s not going to be used and worked for that money.
So I started looking at alternatives, there are the clones of Makitas and Dewalts available for probably less than half the price of the genuine stuff but why go that route? I don’t care about what’s written on the label and the color of the drill. One thing I care about is the shipping of the item, preferably I would like something that can be ordered and shipped from the EU for fast delivery and no additional taxes being paid for customs.
So I started looking at Chinese brands, this particular model got my attention on banggood.com, they call this a 36V cordless drill, it comes with two batteries and it’s available from a warehouse in the EU.
Voltlog #281 – SuperOBD2 ChipTuning Box Yet Another Scam
A while back in Voltlog #231 I took a look at a device called nitro obd2, it was this $2 OBD2 port dongle, which supposedly when plugged into your cars OBD2 port will enhance the performance by tuning the ECU. This was of-course a scam as I proved in the video by doing a teardown, the dongle did nothing but flash some LEDs. But there were still people who left some comments saying they we’re seeing performance improvements after using the $2 tuning gadget. Those are ofcourse false claims, maybe those people just don’t have a clue what’s going on, or maybe they’re the actual sellers offering these on ebay and aliexpress.
Voltlog #276 – What Is The CO2 Concentration In Your Home?
Welcome to a new Voltlog, in the previous video I showed how I built this monitoring system for CO2, it’s based on an ESP32 development board and it uses two sensors the MH-Z19B and the CCS811. In that video I explained the differences between these two sensors so please watch that to better understand the current video and the conclusions presented here.
I’ve let the system run and collect data for the past few days and now we can take a look at the data and draw some conclusions which might help you decide what sensor to use in your future projects or it might determine you to build a similar data logger to check the CO2 levels in your home because I assure you if you do not have a ventilation system, chances are you are sleeping in some high CO2 concentration levels.
Voltlog #275 – CO2 Concentration Measurement System With MH-Z19B & CCS811
Welcome to a new Voltlog, you might remember these two sensors from a previous mailbag, this is the MH-Z19B and this is the CCS811 both of these report CO2 levels but they measure this differently and I’ll explain this in a moment. I got these two sensors in order to monitor CO2 levels in my home, to determine if the levels rise too much at night, especially during the winter time when we tend to keep the windows closed most of the time. I live in an old apartment building where there isn’t much provision for ventilation and so I suspect the air I breath during sleep is high in CO2 levels as it builds up over night.
In this video I’m gonna show you how I built the monitoring system using an ESP32 board that reads the sensor data and then sends it over the network to an MQTT server running on my raspberry pi. I then use node-red to insert the data into InfluxDB and then finally Grafana to monitor all of this data in a nice graphical user interface. The beauty of this setup is that all of this software is free to use and open-source.
Voltlog #274 – Installing Traccar GPS Tracking Server On A Raspberry Pi
Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m gonna show you how to setup your own GPS tracking server on a raspberry pi. It doesn’t have to be a Raspberry pi, because the software that we’re going to be using for the tracking server is available for Windows and Linux as well, so you could host this on your windows machine or in a virtual machine on a cloud service, it’s up to you, but in this video I’m going to do it on a Raspberry pi 4.
The idea started a couple of videos back, in Voltlog #272 when I got this GPS tracker disguised into a general purpose automotive relay. In theory this should come with free online tracking service on some Chinese hosted server but I wasn’t able to connect to that server and so I thought why not setup my own server and try to pair it with this tracker. So if you want to learn more about this tracker, checkout Voltlog #272 linked on screen right now and then come back to watch this video.
First step is to setup a fresh install of Raspbian, latest version from the source. Next step is to setup the tracking server, the name of the software is Traccar and here is their website. We’re going to be using the Linux arm release, because the raspberry pi runs on an arm processor. Next, your raspberry pi is likely sitting behind a router or firewall so you will need to forward a port so an external device like a GPS tracker can connect to our newly created server.
Next we can add our GPS tracker in the web interface of Traccar, on the left side I click add, choose a name for your device and fill in the 10 digit identifier which is this label on the side of your trackers case.The newly created device will be shown as offline until the server starts receiving data.
The final step is to configure the GPS tracker and these particular commands apply to the tracker that I am using, you might have to use different commands for a different tracker but the idea is to reset the tracker, set your admin number, configure the APN settings for your network operator, set the external ip address we saved earlier, the port is 5013. Set the upload frequency in seconds and enable the GPRS connection. Going back to the Traccar web interface, status should switch to online and we should start seeing data about our device.
Voltlog #270 – 11.11 Shopping Festival Discounts Real or Fake?
Welcome to a new Voltlog, this will be just a short video, I want to talk about the prices and the discounts that we get on shopping festivals, because most of us think and myself included here, we think the price cuts we get for these shopping festivals are not actually true, we tend to think prices are inflated some time ahead only to be discounted on that day which makes them go back to roughly the same price they normally sell for.
Even in my past video with shopping suggestions Voltlog #269, I got such comments and I don’t blame people for thinking this, because like I said, I tend to think the same but I also want to find out the truth so what I did some time ago, beginning of September to be more precise, I save some screenshots of various items that I was interested in from A
liexpress.
Today it’s the 11th, the sale started so we’ll compare prices before and after, to see if the sellers actually raised their prices before the sale and are we really getting any discounts today.
Voltlog #269 – 11.11 Shopping Suggestions For Makers
Welcome to a new Voltlog, it’s November and that means the biggest shopping event happening in Asia is coming up, I’m talking about the 11th of november. There are some numbers published for last years event and it seems they registered more than 30 billion in 24 hours in sales, yes you heard right, billions. So it’s a very big event with nice discounts and opportunities for makers like us to get some new gear. That’s why I prepared this video which will be published 1-2 days before the event so you can get some ideas of stuff that you could purchase. I assembled a list, these are products that I’ve tested and used myself which I think are good value for money and a nice addition to any hobbyist lab.