This category will hold everything DIY related.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’ll have just a short video talking about label printers, I’m gonna show you this heat shrink type of label that you can get and it’s pretty useful to label wiring and how the manufacturers of these prevent you from using certain types of label cassettes in lower end printers.
In my case I am using a Brother PT-H107, this is a bottom of the range label printer, it was practically the cheapest I could find around here.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’re going to be talking about the possibility of designing a pcb business card. So if you’re an electronics engineer who offers consulting services or even just an enthusiast and you would like to create a nice original and suggestive business card, stick around.
The idea of making a pcb business card is not new and there are many previous examples of pcb business cards, some people build them passive, others like to integrate a small battery some LEDs, maybe a microcontroller with NFC or a USB interface and generate some interaction with the user.
Maybe 7-8 years ago I first wanted to try this idea but back then, it was quite expensive to get PCBs professionally manufactured in China, first they were charging a setup fee which was usually $150 and then you would have the cost of the PCB which for 10 pcs 10 by 10cm was usually about 2-3$ per piece and then you would have the shipping cost which starting from something like $50 for the first kg via DHL. And all of this was for the standard 1.6mm FR4 with green solder mask and tin finish. If you wanted matte black soldermask and gold finish, there was an additional cost.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’re going to be taking a look at this gadget the nitro OBD2 performance chip tuning box, notice this is specially designed for diesel cars and since it’s using the buzz word nitro, this sounds like it might just work. For sure some company has invested time & money into finding the secret sauce to put into this thing to make it work and boost performance. They claim it fits all cars built after 1996 and all you have to do is to plug this into the obd port, drive for 200km so the device can learn and adjust to your car and after that you will benefit from 35% more power and 25% more torque. It evens says here on the box that it will enable fuel saving. So this sound pretty much like the holy grail in car ECU tuning.
But ofcourse if you have any experience with electronics you can’t believe that this is going to save any fuel or boost any performance just by plugging into the OBD port. So that’s why I purchased this, so we can take a better look inside, and also because I needed an OBD2 connector + enclosure for a project of mine. I plan to do some can bus sniffing and do something with that data but I’ll talk abou that in a future video.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m gonna show you some techniques that you can use when doing temperature measurements. Typically you will want to measure either the ambient temperature or the system or component temperature. Depending on one of these goals you are going to follow different design rules to achieve that. And to better illustrate the problems, I have these 3 pcbs which have exactly the same electrical circuit but with different layouts on the pcb.
The boards consist of an esp8266 and a digital temperature sensor and you might expect that since all 3 boards are placed so close together, they should all indicate the same temperature but that is not the case as we can see on this graph we are getting 3 different temperatures and only one of them is close to the actual ambient temperature measured with another thermometer, so why is that happening? Well the answer lies in the layout of the PCB and that includes component placement, copper planes and various other elements on the PCB.
Welcome to a new voltlog, today we’re talking about RGB LEDs. Everyone knows and probably uses digital RGB LEDs these days because they’re convenient, you only need a single pin to control then, they can be chained one after the other creating long addressable RGB strings, you don’t have to worry about driving them with constant current, in fact they even have digitally controlled brightness settings so they’re pretty convenient.
Since these are digital, they have a built-in controller chip, and if we take a closer look at one of these LEDs which comes in a 5050 package, we can see the driver chip and the 3 LEDs red, green blue with their corresponding bonding wires. There are two popular drivers chips the WS2812 and the SK6812 and each of these might have different revisions as well. The WS2812 was the original one on the market and then the SK6812 appeared and is considered a clone of the WS2812 but brings some improvements. The SK6812 has doubled the pwm frequency at which it drives the LEDs which is always welcomed as it helps with reducing flicker and also the timing requirements are a bit tighter but existing WS2812 libraries should work fine with the SK6812.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, if you’re a frequent viewer of my videos you’ve no doubt seen me build this spot welding machine that I use occasionally for building battery packs for my RC planes. I use this machines to create nice welding spots between nickel strips and the battery contacts. My battery packs do not exceed 20A passing through and that’s only in short bursts but there are people building higher current battery packs and so it’s important for them to be using pure nickel strips instead of nickel plated steel strips for making the links.
If you are a frequent viewer of the channel you’ve probably heard me say that I need a crimping tool and people recommended I should get the good stuff, Engineer being a recommended brand, those being more expensive but having precision machined jaws that produce perfect crimping every time. Other people recommended some cheaper alternatives but I went with none of those options, I got this Paron branded crimping tool, from banggood which sent the product for free for this review.
This particular crimping tool is model number JX-D5 and has a total of 5 crimping dies in the kit, allowing you to crimp a good majority of the crimps you will encounter and this was the thing that really made me wanna order this tool because I don’t want to keep 5 different crimping tools, it’s more convenient to have one of these with interchangeable heads.
Today we’re going to discuss methods for protecting a circuit from the environment and this applies in general to printed circuit boards but you can take these tips and tricks and use them in other applications as well.
Welcome to a new voltlog, today we’re going to assemble some prototype PCBs for different constant current LED Drivers. I’ve designed and ordered these pcb’s a while ago, the goal is to test different constant current led drivers I have ones that are switch mode and ones that are linear and I wanted to see if I can get away with using the linear ones, because there is a significantly lower part count at the expense of burning energy away and generating more heat.
I haven’t ordered a steel stencil for these pcbs, I’m gonna hand assemble them, I’m gonna use some of this mechanic leaded solder paste which comes in a syringe and then I’m gonna reflow the boards over a hot plate. One hint here about the paste, if the syringe is very old, the paste might get dry which will make it unsuitable for the job and not to mention hard to push out of the syringe so try to keep the paste fresh by storing it in a fridge and replacing it when it starts to dry up or separate inside the syringe.
These two boards will be powered from 12V current through LEDs will be 25 mA and the total string voltage is 10 V calculated with a typical led forward voltage of 2V. That means the difference of voltage will be dissipated on our regulator and that can be calculated 12V-10V we have 2V dropping on the regulator times our current 25mA and is equal to 50 mW.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m making a nice flexible extension lead for my TS100 soldering iron. I know many of you might not be interested watching me build such a simple extension lead but I think you could at least get a good tip on this type of silicone cable and where to get it.
I was searching for silicone cable with two wires that came somewhat attached in a single wire and all I was finding was double insulated silicone wire on aliexpress which was not cheap and at the same time I was worried it wouldn’t be as flexible and thin.
Until someone recommended in the comments I should try this power supply wire for tattoo machines. You can buy this stuff from ebay or aliexpress for under $3 shipped.