InTheMail – Page 4

InTheMail | Voltlog #373

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. And I have some news regarding the import of our packages from aliexpress into the EU. As you may have noticed Aliexpress started collecting VAT according to the new IOSS system and you would expect that an EU member country would have the system in place to process these packages because you know they asked for this system, they created it so you would expect the would have the system ready.

But it’s a complete shit show over here, there is a double taxation happening, the Postal company here slaps a 1.6 EUR fee for processing packages and also collects VAT according to the value declared by the sender on the package, even though you already paid VAT and you can prove you paid it with the invoice that Aliexpress provides.

When asked why we have to pay the VAT twice, the Postal service said, they have the system in place to process packages coming through the IOSS system automatically and avoid double taxation but the customs authority doesn’t have it’s system ready, hence the issue of double taxation. And you can guess what the customs authority said when I asked them why we are being taxed twice, they said, it’s all good, we shouldn’t be taxed because tax has been collected already and yet the postal service is not releasing the packages until the fees are paid.

It seems that right now, the only way to avoid double taxation is if you do the import papers yourself or if you use a 3rd party company that offers those services but their fees start at about 50EUR per import and the forms aren’t exactly easy to do so yeah, cheapest option right now is to just pay the postal service fees and get the packages. I’ll share some more info once I have it but right now, at least here in Romania, it’s as bad as it can be and the authorities don’t seem to have a solution. But enough ranting, let’s get on with the items I received.

InTheMail | Voltlog #369

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time and I must say that I’m worried about the future of mailbag videos given the new EU regulations on imports from China which are going into effect starting 1st of July here in Romania, I’ll have to do a separate rant video on the subject but there might not be any mailbag videos going forward.

I’m gonna start with this mailbag with a brand that you are already familiar with here on the channel, it’s difficult for me to pronounce this, I don’t know how it should be pronounced but these guys make affordable adhesives and related products. I haven’t had this one before, it’s the first time I’m getting the Kafuter K-5203 which is a thermal adhesive and to be more specific, their description is reinforced thermally conductive silicone elastomer with great adhesion, insulation and dissipation. And to give you some numbers they claim it can withstand variations of temperature between -60°c and +280°c and it has a shear strength of 30kg/cm3. The thermal conductivity is 1.2 watts per meter kelvin. I don’t need to tell you how to use this, it’s good for attaching stuff to a heatsink, in general stuff that also needs some form of bonding to the heatsink.

InTheMail | Voltlog #366

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. I’m gonna start with this EVA hard carry case, it has a rather strange shape but, this will fit one of these budget label printers perfectly. And if you are like me, using the label printer in the lab, where everything is clean, it might be perfectly fine to just keep it in a drawer but at some point a friend asked for my help to figure out the networking wires in a building, basically to identify every wire, crimp it and install some networking gear. Well when you start doing stuff like that you need a carry case for your label printer because it’s gonna get dirty, there will be dust and grime and the LCD might get scratched, you might want to toss this into your tools bag so that’s when I decided to order one of these hard carry cases, they’re fairly inexpensive so well worth getting one.A higher price printer might get one by default from the manufacturer but for these discount $30 printers you can’t really expect to get one from the manufacturer so you need to order it separately.

InTheMail | Voltlog #363

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. I’m gonna start with this little board which is an ethernet shield type of module which can bring TCP/IP connectivity to your project via a SPI bus. So this could mean any microcontroller that is able to talk over SPI to this chip can become internet connected. Now ofcourse these days the ESP32 is pretty popular, everyone is using wifi but for the highest reliability in network, wired connections are still preferred and there are also other microcontrollers that do not have a built-in ethernet interface so you need to add it externally with something like this. It’s fairly inexpensive so I think it’s worth keeping one of these around however interfacing to it might not be as trivial so it’s best to stick to the platforms that already have libraries written for this chip, like Arduino. Same as always, you will find a link to this in the description below the video.

InTheMail | Voltlog #360

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. For this video we have a wide selection of items and we’re gonna start with this jewelers magnifying glass, I’ve had one of these for years and it’s been great for reading small numbers of chips but recently I found myself needing more than one between the home lab and the office so I got a second one. Here is an example of how I would use this to read some very small numbers. Of Course I have the microscope but I usually keep that unplugged and covered to protect from dust so for reading a chip number it’s just easier to use one of these. Same as always if you are interested in getting one, you will find links in the description below the video.

InTheMail | Voltlog #354

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 gonna start this video with an item I do not recommend buying, this is a power meter that has been sitting in my mailbag basket for over a year now if not more and these past few days I powered it on for the first time, I realized it’s not very useful, because the accuracy is pretty bad. It does claim to measure up to 140A which would probably make it okay for some high current measurements and that was the original reason I got this to measure to brushless motor power consumption at various loads but if we’re talking about currents below 5A the accuracy is pretty crappy so I wouldn’t recommend you get something like this.

InTheMail | Voltlog #350

I discovered this guy a while ago when i saw some images on twitter of this particular tracker being implemented inside an iPhone X, it was mostly a hobby type job because of how it looked and also because if any serious agency would want to spy on you they wouldn’t need to implant something like this into your phone, they will just do it through other methods like a man in the middle attack or tap your calls straight from the operator network but nonetheless this looked interesting and as far as I have seen so far this seems to be the smallest tracker that you can easily buy online.

Same as other trackers shown on this channel this is designed to connect to a Chinese cloud service for tracking, it uses the same website as the other ones which is 365gps.net and it probably comes with the same set of problems or limitations as I have shown in previous videos. So this module can do GPS based tracking and report back via 2G network connectivity, the short wire is a GPS antenna while the long wire is the GSM antenna.

InTheMail | Voltlog #348

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. This will be a great year hopefully, I’ll make sure to do my part and provide you with the best mailbag videos on youtube. We’re going to start with this utility knife, it’s the xiaomi type knife that I showed in a previous mailbag but I liked it so much that I got another one, I’ll keep one in my laptop backpack for general stuff like opening packages and one at the workbench for general purpose stuff. The body is aluminum, the build quality is great, they feel perfect in the hand, you can get them with a set of super sharp replacement blades and they’re pretty cheap with everything considered so if you haven’t already got one, I highly recommend these, you can find the links in the description below the video.

InTheMail Stats For 2020 – Voltlog #346

Welcome to a new voltlog, this is the annual review to present some stats on the number of orders and spending with regards to my activity. The InTheMail videos are my most popular videos so as you can imagine there is quite a bit of spending and orders placed behind the scenes. Same as last year, please let me know in the comments if you have any stats on your own purchases, I would love to get a feel for how everyone else is doing.

This year I’m not going to show any stats for ebay, I’ve stopped using ebay, I do most of my orders on aliexpress.com starting with 2020 and I also place a few orders on banggood.com. In fact I’ve also stopped placing links to ebay items in my mailbag videos because I don’t really use the platform anymore.

InTheMail | Voltlog #345

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, some of them will probably go out as Christmas gifts to friends, some I’ll keep for myself. Let’s start with this ESP32-S2 development board.

This is the official Espressif dev board and is called ESP32-S2-Saola. It comes in two variants With UFL connector installed so you can use an external antenna or without the UFL connector installed to use with built-in antenna. So the reason for getting this development board was to play with the USB host functionality of the ESP32-S2, I’m working on a project where I have this usb device that creates a virtual serial port over USB. I would love to have that device connected into something like this and create a bridge for that serial port on the local network.