Category: Soldering

Voltlog #86 – Limiting Iphone USB Charging To 500mA

It all started a few days ago when I was talking with a friend and he suggested, since we do most of our phone charging at night, why not charge them at a lower rate for increase battery life. As you may know, when you increase the charging current, charging happens faster at the expense of losing battery life over time, you get fewer battery cycles before it starts losing its capacity.

So I decided to build this small gadget, that goes between the usb output of my charger and the usb plug from my charging cable. In my case I have an Iphone and the charging current can be limited to 500mA by having a set of resistors on the USB data lines.

Links for the parts used to build the project:

Voltlog #85 – STM32 OLED T12 Soldering Station

Today we are taking a look at this soldering station which I got from Taobao (Chinese Ebay). This unit is fully contained, power supply is built-in, it works with T12 Hakko tips and it has a nice 1.3 inch OLED display. It’s powered by the STM32 microcontroller which should make it easy to hack if anyone is interested.

Here are links to the items shown in the video:

Voltlog #82 – DIY Adjustable Analog DC Electronic Load

In this episode I am building an analog adjustable dc load with parts easily obtainable from ebay and banggood. The advantage of such a dc load is that you can understand how it works, modify or repair it if necessary far easier than you would with a digital one. I was able to push mine up to 60W dissipation, but it is recommend to stay under 50W to protect the mosfet.

Here is a list with links to the parts used in this project:

Voltlog #78 – 2x25W Bluetooth 4.1 Stereo Amplifier TDA7492P

In this episode we are going to build a bluetooth speaker amplifier based on the TDA7492P class D audio amplifier coupled with a Bluetooth 4 module. We are not actually going to build the amplifier module because we can get that from China, very affordable, it only costs around $12 shipped which is way less that it would cost us to buy the bluetooth module and the TDA7492P individually not to mention the cost of fabricating a PCB of this size.

So we are actually going to use this module and build the final product with a nice enclosure and a suitable external power supply

Here are some links for the parts used to build this project:

Wiring diagram below:

Voltlog #72 – DIY AC-DC Off-Line Converter With TNY276/TNY277

This is the first AC-DC power supply that I’m designing and building. Everything seems to work up to a point where the chip (TNY 276 from Power Integration) gets too hot and enters thermal protection. This is where I’m asking my viewers help to jump in with suggestions on what might be wrong.

This is part 2 where I get the circuit working by switching from the TNY276 to the TNY277 which has a higher power rating and is probably the proper IC to use with this transformer (EE1616 ER2741)

And this is part 3 of the video where I finally find the real fault in the circuit. It turns out I was right, this circuit should have worked with the TNY276 as well and it wasn’t the higher power rating of the TNY277 that fixed the issue.

Voltlog #71 – Electronic Touch Musical Keyboard Kit

A while ago I saw this touch musical keyboard kit on banggood and it seemed interesting enough to order one. It turns out the kit is using a single atmega8 to do all the touch sensing (8 ch) and play the tunes accordingly. Although not very useful for me it sure was fun to assemble and play with.

Voltlog #69 – LM317 Kit Assembly Fail

Sometimes, when I have some spare time I like assembling these cheap kits coming from China. Today I am assembling an LM317 adjustable power supply kit complete with voltmeter. Unfortunately they sent me a wrong resistor value so the kit didn’t work as expected but I was able to fix it in the end.

Voltlog #67 – Precision Current Reference Using REF200

A while ago I watched a video from Scullcom Hobby Electronics channel where he build a precision current source, a very simple but accurate one. If you don’t know this channel I encourage you to subscribe to it, it has allot of nice videos on lab equipment either building DIY versions or reviewing existing ones. Each video has nice drawings and the guy clearly knows what he is talking about so a great resource for learning.

I don’t have any current source in my lab, and these are useful for testing multimeters for example. I was looking on ebay for a current source but I wasn’t able to find an affordable one so I’ve decided to build one using the project information from that video and I will link the video in the description below, it’s nice to watch it has lots of interesting explanations so I won’t repeat them in this video, I will mostly focus on showing you how I build and improved my current source.

Voltlog #47 – ICL8038 Frequency Generator Kit Assembly

Today we’re going to be assembling this frequency generator kit based on the ICL8038 which I got in an earlier InTheMail episode. The ICL8038 waveform generator is a monolithic integrated circuit capable of producing high accuracy sine, square, triangular, sawtooth and pulse waveforms with a minimum of external components.

Voltlog #45 – Multiple Rail Power Supply Kit Assembly

In this video I am assembling a multiple fixed rail power supply kit. This power supply works with a 5-24V input either through a USB mini socket or a dc barrel jack (2.5mm center positive) and at the output you get +12V, -12V, +5V, -5V and +3.3V. My kit was missing 1 small heatsink and one of the electrolytics was a different value than specified on the PCB.