Tag: Debugger

Voltlog #259 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. We’re going to start with this small white box, which looks very uninteresting from the outside but contains something really nice, it’s a machined aluminium heatsink, designed specifically for the raspberry pi 4 and inside the box you get the two halves of the heatsink plus some mounting screws and silicone thermal pads.

There is a decent amount of aluminium in this heatsink, and we can see it has these rectangular raised islands for contact with the main chips on the board, so this is where the silicone pads will go. This is a completely passive heatsink and that’s what I was looking for but if you want more cooling power these are also actively cooled heatsink. feel like I should test this in a separate video to see how efficient it is when compared to a no heatsink solution which we already know doesn’t work well with the raspberry pi as it gets pretty hot. So we’ll leave this for a future video.

Voltlog #247 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. We’re going to start with this small module, at first when I ordered it I didn’t fully understood what it does but now after doing a bit of research for this mailbag it seems this is an immobiliser emulator for the VAG group. So am immobiliser is a security component of your car that will not let the ECU start the engine unless a certain key or token is present. And there might be valid reasons why you might need this emulator, for example if the immobiliser is broken, you can supposably cancel it and start the engine with this emulator or if you exchange the motor/ecu combo once again it might not be possible to use the old immobiliser and so an emulator will help.

It talks over a K-line interface which is something specific to the automotive domain but it’s basically a form of serial interface. At first I thought this was going to emulate some kind of can bus and I was planning to play with it by scanning the bus but now I realize this is useless for me.