Tag: electronics

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 #262 – Is This The Future of Our Hobby?

To be honest I didn’t think we were going to have services like these available so cheap so fast. I mean yes I know pcb prices have been so low in the past couple of years that it no longer makes sense to etch your own PCBs, unless you are in a big hurry. But having smt assembly service so cheap? Soon enough it would not make sense to hand assemble these boards because it would be equally cheap to have them assembled at JLCPCB

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 #260 – How do you test usb to serial converters? (CP2103 vs CH340E vs FT232RL)

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’re comparing a few different serial to usb adapters and the discussion started ever since I showed the CH340E breakout board I designed in voltlog #249. People wanted to know if this CH340E affordable chip would perform similar to the well known FTDI or Silicon labs chips, and I’m thinking at high throughput and reliability here, the kind of application where you are sending lots of data, fast and you need it to be transferred reliably.

So today I’m going to compare the CH340E with a CP2103, and the FT232RL. I wasn’t sure what measurements to take and how to test these but I devised 2 testing methods.

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 #258 – Cheaper Isopropyl Alcohol Wipes For PCB and Stencil Cleaning

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’ll have a little chat on IPA cleaning wipes. Professional PCB wipes soaked in IPA are pretty expensive and hard to get but can we substitute those with something cheaper that works just as nice for cleaning the flux residue from PCBs?

Voltlog #255 – Gophert NPS-1601 Review (possibly the best power supply in this price range)

Welcome to a new Voltlog, those who have been with me since the beginning of this channel, may know the first video I ever released, Voltlog #1 was a review of a switch mode bench power supply from Gopher Technology. It was the CPS-3205C and it was a great little unit, it has served me well over the years and I still have it.

At that time I complained about the fact that the unit has the output jacks on the back which is not really convenient for bench use. There were also other issues mentioned while measuring the performance of the power supply,  I will link that video on screen if you want to watch it but the video, audio and editing quality are lower than what you’re seeing today.

Gophert made some improvements to the original design and have now released a newer version of that power supply, it has a new model number it’s NPS-1601 but it’s the same range of 0-32V and 0-5A. There are other models with different ranges but this is what would correspond to the CPS3205 I reviewed years ago.

They have made a bunch of changes on the front panel, the most important one is they moved the output jacks to the front panel so now it’s easier to connect the output of this power supply but they are still not standard spacing so you can’t connect one of these adapters with banana jacks. They have also redesigned the front panel completely, they are still using 7 segment displays but now they also have a wattage display which can be switched on temporarily in place of the amps display, you press the watts button and it will show watts measurement for about 3 seconds before reverting to amps display.

The switch for A/V adjustment is now tactile instead of a sliding switch but the rest has stayed the same. I like this redesigned front panel I just wished they used a lighter color for the text, because for example there are some markings which are barely visible next to the LEDs.

Here is a set of pictures I captured during the teardown:

Voltlog #254 – Epaper Display Pixel vs Segment Type

Welcome to a new voltlog, today we’ll have a little chat on epaper displays. You probably saw this post I made to my youtube community page a few days ago, it was about my epaper thermometer which suddenly showed the low battery sign and stopped working. I’ve only had this running for 1 month, when I received it, the battery was not connected so I thought it must have been an old battery or a bad one.

Voltlog #252 – How to fix a solder bridge

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I want to talk about solder bridges and show you how to deal with them. A solder bridge can happen for many reasons, incorrect soldering temperature, incorrect amount of solder being used, too little or no flux, or just the incorrect technique for soldering but they all basically mean the same thing , a blob of solder shorting two or more conductive surfaces on your PCB.

Modern printed circuit boards which typically get soldermask coverage even between IC pins will help prevent this problem because molten solder normally doesn’t stick to the soldermask surface and so it’s harder to form a bridge across that surface.

But even with enough experience and the proper technique solder bridges can still happen if you do hand soldering on fine pitch ICs, it’s just part of the soldering job. It’s true that as you get better at soldering they will happen less often but don’t think they go away forever. So it’s good to know how to deal with them.

Voltlog #250 – Replacing Bad 4mm Banana Plugs With High Quality Hirschmann and Staubli

In this video I replace some of my old crappy 4mm banana connectors with some new Hirschmann and Staubli, high quality connectors. These should be more reliable and provide a low resistance connection between my test gear allowing me to pass high currents without any issue.