Voltlog #191 – First Order From China

About 10 years ago I placed my first order in China. How about you? When did you first order something from China and when was that? I would be happy to hear your story so put it in the comments below.

So it was straight to the big league for me, I went on Alibaba and found a pcb supplier which was willing to make these boards for me, I think I needed about 20 boards and ended up paying something like $500 USD for those.

 

Voltlog #190 – Bad Product Design

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m gonna talk about bad product design but not in general, I’m not gonna cover all of the things that could go wrong in product design, I am gonna focus on a particular case that I encountered recently which is related to standby power usage.

So if you’re gonna design a product that’s gonna be spending most of the time in standby, I’m talking about a product that has a soft power switch, so the product will spend most of the time in standby waiting for you to press the power up button, maybe once a day, or even multiple times, but then it will go back to sleep until next case. You would of course want to optimize the power usage in standby because that could potentially drain the battery and when you wanna turn it on, there is no more juice left.

But it seems like this simple concept is not really used, even now in 2018, you would think, every product designer would master this simple concept but that’s not the case.

Voltlog #189 – InTheMail

Hello everyone and 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 interesting looking controller type module. So we got what looks like a big switching device here that probably needs a heatsink. Well this is a beefy triac, it can do 100A and can also withstand 1000A non repetitive peaks. We’ve kinda started from the wrong side, from the output but that’s what stands out from this module. We have an opto-isolator which has a triac output driver, separating the two sides of the board. Let’s check the clearance on the back, they have something like 3mm clearance in this area. If I were to design this, I would have done it with at least 5mm, I don’t see the point of extending this ground poor so close to this track which is on the hot side.

Links for all of the items can be found in the video description on the youtube page.

Voltlog #188 – LIDL Silvercrest Thermostat Teardown

Hello and welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’re going to be doing a teardown and analysis of this SilverCrest Radiator Thermostat. Silvercrest is a LIDL brand, you will find these product in LIDL shops and I paid about $15 for this thermostat. It’s compatible only with radiators that have special thermostat type valves, installed, the ones that have a push-pin which controls the flow and since I don’t have those installed on my radiators I have also purchased one of those valves to see the thermostat in action.

Now this thermostat doesn’t have any kind of wireless connection, you have to set it up manually using these buttons. However I’ve noticed that in other countries LIDL sells a similar model, looks the same but also has bluetooth connection and then you can use a smartphone app to configure it with ease. I’m gonna go ahead and speculate that LIDL decided to sell these budget thermostats without bluetooth in east europe, while they sell the better equipped model in central and west europe.

Voltlog #187 – InTheMail

In this video I am showing: Shoe Insoles Heaters, DC-DC Converter Module MP1584 3A 28V Input, Matek Power Distribution Board 5V 12V, Digital Tachometer Non-Contact, Pedal switch, 10W Qi Wireless Charging Pad, Baseus Wireless Charging Car mount, Air Mouse Wireless Remote, Air Mouse Wireless Remote, Amtech NC-559 Flux (fake).

Thank you for watching, that was all for today, let me know in the comments section if you found something interesting, send me some feedback by clicking the thumbs up or thumbs down button on the video and i will see you next week.

Voltlog #186 – TS100 VS Generic T12 Station

Welcome to a new voltlog, today we’re talking about the TS100 portable soldering iron, but this won’t be a review because there is no point in making a review video for this mode. There are only a few things you can test with a soldering iron and there are already some very good reviews on youtube from known channels.

I am however interested in how will this iron compare with the stm32 soldering station that I’ve been using for a couple of years. So if you haven’t seen this before, I’ve shown it in detail in voltlog #85, this is a station which I got about 2 years ago, directly from taobao with the help of a friend who lives in China. At that time it wasn’t widely available so it was a bit of a gamble but it payed out because it uses hakko T12 tips and I have a bunch of different models of those and it payed out because the station works great. Nowadays you can find similar models on aliexpress so I will place a link in the description below if you would like to take a look.

I am curious though to see how this would compare with the newly acquired TS100 soldering iron. The TS100 uses a similar type of tip which has the heating element and the thermocouple built in, that type of construction ensures great thermal coupling so the tip can really transfer the heat to the joint and at the same type the sensing element get’s a very accurate reading of the tip temperature and can compensate for that.

Voltlog #185 – First Q&A Video

Welcome to a new Voltlog, something new today, this is the first Q&A video I’ve done and I hope you will enjoy it. It should be a great way of finding out new stuff about me. I did a post on my channel a couple of weeks back, announcing this but there weren’t that many questions posted there and I get a feeling the post didn’t get shown to all of the subscribers of the channel maybe just a few. So if you would like to ask me something else, please leave a comment below and I’ll answer the question in a future Q&A video. Also remember to interact with the video, maybe hit that like button because that should help expose the video to a wider audience.

Voltlog #184 – InTheMail

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

In this episode you will see some 18650 batteries (INR18650-30Q), 26650 batteries(INR26650-50A), TS100 Soldering Iron, Blitzwolf Night Light BW-LT9, Iphone 8 Plus or X Dual Lens Mpow, Swiss D Clips, 50mm Ear Foam Pads Replacement and a 4 position switch. Links for all of these items can be found in the video description on youtube.

Voltlog #183 – Building A Resistance Standard With Vishay VHP100 Resistors

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m going to be building a precision reference box, using these precision Vishay resistors, they were sent to me for free by Vishay, these are from the VHP100 series and they are the ducks guts when it comes to resistors. They have incredible stability, across the entire range of -55 up to +125 degrees Celsius they will vary less than 60ppm. So as you can see they had to define the number over the entire temperature range because if they would have done it traditionally per degree C the number would have been essentially 0.

These are built using a special technology called bulk metal foil, wrapped on a ceramic substrate. Then the assembly is suspended in oil and hermetically sealed in this metal can, thus it’s immune to humidity changes. Every one of these resistors is basically custom made so you can order them in any value, but as expected they don’t come cheap. Purchasing these in some standard values carried at the big distributor will cost you around $70 a piece.