Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. We have a selection of different items received in this mailbag, I’m gonna start with these quick connectors, these are a 2 input to 4 output type and they can be useful if you want to split a two wire pair, into multiple pairs and have those connected without having to solder wires or twist them together. They are rated for 600V 32A and can take a wire with a diameter between 0.08 and 4mm but as always take these specs with a grain of salt and don’t push them to their limit if you want to stay on the safe side. What I like is that they also have a couple of mounting holes so you could attach these to a panel.
Tag: voltlog
Fix Microscope Ring Light Reflections With These Projector Lamps | Voltlog #327
You’ve no doubt seen this before on the channel, it’s the trinocular microscope that I have reviewed in Voltlog #282 and I’ve also done a bunch of follow-up videos since then on how to improve the camera system. This comes equipped with an LED ring lamp to illuminate the working surface if you’ve used a setup like this for soldering you’ve no doubt experienced the reflections you get from shiny surface likes the PCB material, especially when you start adding flux into the mix. I’ll overlay some images so you can get a sense of what I’m talking about but basically, since the ring light is shining light right from where the barlow lens is, there are these annoying reflections.
Today I want to show you an alternative lighting system that will help go around that problem. This is a system with individual gooseneck LED lamps. Having this flexible gooseneck tube allows you to position the lamps at an angle that would avoid those nasty reflections.
Making Kelvin Test Leads For My LCR Meter | Voltlog #326
A common mistake when building kelvin 4 wire test leads is to use standard alligator clips because in a standard clip the top and bottom jaw are electrically connected at the hinge point. This kinda defeats the purpose of having separate sense lines if they are getting shorted at some point with the current carrying trace. For a true kelvin connection you would need a special type of alligator clip, like the ones shown in this video, these have a plastic hinge and the top and bottom jaws are not electrically connected. These can be quite expensive if they are made by a good manufacturer but I got mine from aliexpress for cheap, they do not excel in quality but good enough for the type of instruments I am going to be using them with and with the amount of work volume they are going to see on my bench they will last a while.
Unexpected InTheMail | Voltlog #325
Welcome to this impromptu video, as you can tell I am not in the lab, I’m actually taking a hike in the beautiful Carpathian mountains in a remote area which is actually bear territory so I need to be careful but here is what I found in my path this looks like an esd bag which two lcd panels inside.
As you may know, due to travel restrictions this spring I was not able to do the electronics components harvest in the outdoors which is a bummer, but finding stuff like this certainly makes me happy, this could make our friend Marco Reps jealous as he usually finds just capacitors in the German fields.
So these look like a couple of 2.0 inch panels let’s see what we got here, they are based on the ST7789V driver, 240*320 resolution, IPS panel with a 12 pin, solderable type FPC connection. I mentioned this before, I am working on a replacement open source control panel for the Gophert NPS1601 and this is one of the options I was considering a few months ago when I ordered these.
InTheMail | Voltlog #324
Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. We have a selection of different items received in this mailbag, I’m gonna start with this set of replacement cassette tapes for my label printer. You’ve seen me order these before but now I got some different variations which I thought would be interesting to try: I have Black on clear which would be nice for sticking on a white surface and have only the black text visible. I have some standard black on white cause I use that everywhere, this is white on clear tape which would be good for sticking on a black surface to have just the white text visible, white on black which could be general purpose or for sticking on dark surfaces and one that seemed very interesting security tape black on white so I’m guessing this could be used like a seal?
InTheMail | Voltlog #323
Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. This one will be focused on 3D Printing because as you know I recently got a new 3d printer, the creality ender 3 PRO and that means new upgrades because why would you get a 3d printer other than constantly work on it and upgrade it. That 3d printing that everyone is talking about is like secondary stuff, you will primarily work on the printer itself once you get it.
Let’s start with the most important upgrade, this is the SKR Mini E3 V2.0 which is the latest version of this 32 bit motherboard that is a plug & play upgrade for the Ender 3. It comes loaded with features like Trinamic silent stepper drivers, it supports dual Z axis and enough memory and processing power to support every feature you would want to enable from Marlin. As far as I know this even comes loaded with the right firmware, it’s a relatively new release of marlin so it’s truly a plug & play solution.
Gopher NPS1601 Open Source Control Panel | Voltlog #322
A while ago I decided to start this project of re-designing the front panel for this power supply to give it more functionality, make it an awesome power supply cause as it is, it’s a good power supply but I think we can make it an awesome power supply. I made an announcement on the channel a while ago so several people joined the project, this is a team effort and right now it’s time to show you the first hardware prototypes and to discuss the choices we’ve made in terms of hardware.
InTheMail | Voltlog #321
Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. We have a selection of different items received in this mailbag, I’m gonna start with this GPS module, the model number for this is ZX612 and it’s part of the Chinese gps trackers family, I think it uses a similar protocol to the relay gps tracker that I showed in a previous video and possibly connect to the same Chinese web server for data collection which poses the usual privacy risks but as I’ve shown in Voltlog #274, using a raspberry pi you can setup your own gps tracking server.
3D Printer Monitoring With An ESP32 Smartwatch And Octoprint API | Voltlog #320
Welcome to a new Voltlog, in this video I’m gonna show you how I built this project where an ESP32 based smart wristband allows me to track the progress of my 3D printer in real time. So I thought about how I could solve this problem and I came up with a project where I’m using a LILYGO T-Wristband which is basically an ESP32 development platform built into this smart bracelet form factor. The bracelet connects via Wifi to the local network where Octoprint runs and manages the 3d printer.
Designing A T10 LED Bulb With Constant Current Driver | Voltlog #319
Welcome to a new Voltlog, in this video I’m gonna walk you through the design process of this small but important piece of circuit which is a T10 LED based lamp. We’ll go through why I need a T10 LED lamp, why I made the various design choices and in the end we will test the resulting PCB to see if it functions according to our specs.
So I started thinking about designing my own T10 LED bulb. First I picked some high quality Cree LEDs that would fit the purpose. These have a forward voltage of 3V, they have a high CRI of over 95 and I can pick from a variety of output colors, after a bit of experimenting, I ended up going with 4000K which is this nice neutral white.
Next I had to figure out how to drive these at constant current and really here I needed to decide between a switch mode drive and a linear driver. A switch mode driver would be more efficient, generating less heat but it will need more parts, which would increase the cost and complexity so in the end I went with a linear driver, which is the AL5809, this is a nice two terminal device, it comes in a variety of current presets and you just place it in series with your LEDs.
There is one constraint though, it needs 2.5V over the LED string voltage to operate correctly. That means that with our 3V rated LEDs, we can place two of those in series, plus the driver, which raises the min voltage to 8.5V. It might be possible to add a third led on board to bring it up to 11.5V and it would still work in the car but installing that 3rd led would be difficult so I decided to stick to just 2 LEDs.