Welcome to a new Voltlog, to save you from waiting, the short answer is yes, I did get a microscope for the lab but before I show you the microscope let’s talk about why I got a microscope and why you might want one. If you are occasionally soldering boards, electronic kits, mostly through hole components or even surface mount down to 0603 and you have good eyesight, then chances are, you don’t need such a microscope, I’ve been doing that for years.
On the other hand, if you want to be able to solder surface mount components smaller than 0603 comfortably or you want to do board level repairs on modern gadgets like smartphones and laptops, then you most definitely need a microscope as it will massively improve the quality of your soldering and the general repair process at your bench.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, in this video we are taking a look at the TPS62840 ultra low power step down converter from Texas Instruments. It’s basically a buck converter with an input voltage of 1.8-6.5V, 750mA output current, with a quiescent current of just 60nA and active current of just 120nA. It also features very good efficiency at light loads of just 1uA it can offer 80 percent efficiency.
Other features include 16 selectable output voltages through an external resistor and a stop pin which when activated will completely stop any switching to eliminate any switching noise for a short moment, allowing you to take for example an ultra low noise measurement during that time. During that take power will be sourced from the output capacitors. So it looks like this is a pretty interesting dc-dc converter, with really nice features and it’s optimized for ultra low power devices.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, as you may remember last year I did a summary of all the orders placed in 2018, related to electronics items, the stuff that I show in my InTheMail segment. I did that video because I was interested in knowing the numbers and how they evolve over time but the viewers responded as well, they provided feedback with their own approximate stats so this year I’m doing it again. Same as last year, please let me know in the comments if you have any stats on your own purchases.
Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. Before I get started I’m gonna take a second to remind you to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell notification icon because that’s the only way you will know for sure when I upload new videos.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, it’s product review time again, this time we’re taking a closer look at a 10 inch monitor with hdmi input. This is the box it comes in, the monitor has a resolution of 2560×1600, that’s about 2K resolution in the scheme of things, 300 pixels per inch density, 16:10 aspect ratio which I’m a fan of. My desktop monitor is also 16:10 and it works so much better for everyday activities but especially if you are doing any CAD design work. It’s an IPS panel so we should have good brightness, contrast and colors, it’s rated at 400 candela per sq meter. We also get built-in speakers and the HDMI supports video & audio so you should be able to get video and sound through the HDMI cable and that’s useful because we have built-in speakers on the monitor itself.