Category: InTheMail

This category will hold InTheMail articles.

Voltlog #263 – InTheMail

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 going to start with this big jar of flux paste. This is commonly referred to as “yellow paste”, the branding I believe is NT but if you search for yellow paste you will find it in various sizes. Banggood sells it in 150 gram jar and it has a good price of $4 with free shipping. I’ve seen other people use this stuff with good results so I decided to give it a try. I’m not sure if there are any fakes to this particular brand, but the ones from banggood seem to be the genuine stuff.

The consistency is that of a paste so I don’t think it would be easy to put this inside a syringe and use it that way. This works better if you pick it up with a toothpick or some tweezers. This is not rosin based or so they advertise, and it’s supposed to be a neutral PH,with low corrosion to your pcb and components. You will probably see me use this in a future video, until then, there will be a link in the description so you can order one.

Voltlog #261 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time.

Voltlog #259 – InTheMail

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 going to start with this small white box, which looks very uninteresting from the outside but contains something really nice, it’s a machined aluminium heatsink, designed specifically for the raspberry pi 4 and inside the box you get the two halves of the heatsink plus some mounting screws and silicone thermal pads.

There is a decent amount of aluminium in this heatsink, and we can see it has these rectangular raised islands for contact with the main chips on the board, so this is where the silicone pads will go. This is a completely passive heatsink and that’s what I was looking for but if you want more cooling power these are also actively cooled heatsink. feel like I should test this in a separate video to see how efficient it is when compared to a no heatsink solution which we already know doesn’t work well with the raspberry pi as it gets pretty hot. So we’ll leave this for a future video.

Voltlog #251 – InTheMail

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 going to start with this pocket multimeter, it’s the MUSTOOL MT77, let’s get it out of the box. As you can see quite a small form factor, the multimeter is very thin and has this large screen to body ratio, let’s see if they included the batteries and yes the meter turns on, it runs on two CR2032 batteries but it seems they are included. 

Voltlog #247 – InTheMail

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 going to start with this small module, at first when I ordered it I didn’t fully understood what it does but now after doing a bit of research for this mailbag it seems this is an immobiliser emulator for the VAG group. So am immobiliser is a security component of your car that will not let the ECU start the engine unless a certain key or token is present. And there might be valid reasons why you might need this emulator, for example if the immobiliser is broken, you can supposably cancel it and start the engine with this emulator or if you exchange the motor/ecu combo once again it might not be possible to use the old immobiliser and so an emulator will help.

It talks over a K-line interface which is something specific to the automotive domain but it’s basically a form of serial interface. At first I thought this was going to emulate some kind of can bus and I was planning to play with it by scanning the bus but now I realize this is useless for me.

Voltlog #244 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time.

Voltlog #242 – InTheMail

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 with this kit of silicone hook-up wire, I was running out of thin silicone wire so I thought it would be a good idea to try one of these kits. The one I got is 26AWG, 6 different colors, each about 9m in length.

Voltlog #236 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time.

Voltlog #233 – InTheMail

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 with this double insulated silicone wire. I’m not even sure if it’s the right name to use but both the outer black insulation and the inner insulation are silicone they can take the soldering iron at 300 degrees Celsius without any issues, no melting. The one I got is 26AWG and it has 7 strands inside each wire. It seems to be tin plated copper because I did the flame test and the individual wires just glowed red. I also measured the resistance and it is 0.132 ohm/meter. I would recommend getting the 24AWG for a bit more strands inside each wire.

 

Voltlog #226 – InTheMail

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 with this set of tweezers from Vetus. A few months ago I was considering buying some more expensive electronics tweezers but the good ones are really expensive when you include shipping as well so in the end I decided to give these a try. I’ve had Vetus tweezers in the past and some were good some were bad. This time I asked multiple sellers on Aliexpress if the tweezers are original Vetus or not, some responded and promised their goods are original. Coincidentally or not those who said their products are original also had higher prices. In my experience with suppliers, they never lie about the origins of a product if you directly ask them so I tend to believe that what I have here are genuine Vetus tweezers