Category: DIY

This category will hold everything DIY related.

Voltlog #230 – Guidelines For Board Level Temperature Sensor Layout & Placement

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.

Voltlog #229 – What’s The Smallest Digital RGB LED?

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.

Voltlog #227 – Identifying Pure Nickel Strip vs Nickel Plated Steel

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.

Voltlog #223 – Is The Paron JX-D5 Crimping Tool Any Good?

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.

Voltlog #220 – How To Waterproof Your Electronics or PCBs

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.

Voltlog #217 – Constant Current LED Driver Boards Assembly & Testing

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.

Voltlog #212 – DIY Silicone Lead

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.

Voltlog #207 – Making a DIY Spot Welder From A Microwave Transformer

Welcome to a new voltlog, today I’m gonna talk about a DIY spot welder that I built, the advantages of suck a build as well as the disadvantages or the the problems I encountered. So the idea for this project started many months ago, I was actually at a local recycling center to deposit some old electronics, when I saw this microwave oven transformer sitting right there on a table, like the guy in charge of the place literally took the transformer out of a microwave oven a few hours prior to me arriving there.

So that sparked the idea in my head, I asked the guy if I can have the transformer, he said yes and that was the start.

Voltlog #201 – How To Generate Gerber Files and Order Your PCBs

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m gonna show you how to order your pcbs from start to finish. We’re gonna start with generating the gerber files and walk you through the process up to placing your order on a pcb manufacturing service website.But before we get started I’ll take a moment to remind you that I now have a Patreon account so you can support me through Patreon to continue making more videos like this one.

The actual start might depend on the cad software that you use for designing pcb’s, in my case that’s Eagle Cad. After finishing up the design of a PCB, you will have to generate the gerber files needed to place your order. Think at these as an universal set of files, stored in a format that every pcb manufacturing facility can read and use to manufacture your pcb exactly as you designed it.

In Eagle CAD we have the CAM processor that takes care of these things, and luckily you can just load a pre-made CAM job file, that will instruct eagle how to output a complete set of gerber files. I have a custom made, voltlog CAM job file for 2 layer pcbs, I will place a link to it in the description below so you can download it. This cam job file will generate all the required gerber files for ordering your pcb, including files for the cream layer which can be used to order a steel stencil that will make assembly of surface mount components much easier.