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.
Tag: inthemail
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.
InTheMail | Voltlog #341
Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. Checkout the items I received in this mailbag which include: Some Sonoff S20 & S26 smart plugs, Mechanic syringe aluminium plunger, Vetus eye candy tweezers, Xiaomi Fizz aluminium utility knife, a couple of short and flexible HDMI cables, some Kafuter adhesives, 18650 battery spacers, EVA hard carry cases, plastic organizers, Scotch Brite wheels for the dremel tool, diamond sharpening stones, and some o-ring assortment kits.
InTheMail | Voltlog #337
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, I’m gonna start with this USB to RS232 serial adapter cable, inside this uses the famous Prolific PL2303 chipset and there is nothing wrong with that chipset but many people have had problems with that, including myself. Those problems are mostly related to fake chips, because going on Aliexpress and purchasing the cheapest usb to serial port cable adapter you can find will most certainly ensure you get a fake chip. Better cables that use genuine chips from prolific like this Ugreen branded one are more expensive but it should pay for itself in the long run by providing reliable connections when you need them.
I like this particular model also because it comes in a 2m length because sometimes you would use a cable like this to connect some large piece of gear and it might be helpful to have this 2m length of cable up to your computer.
InTheMail | Voltlog #336
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, I’m gonna start with this little guy, it’s a pulse oximeter. The model number, at least on the packaging, is YK-82C with a pretty recent date code as well, September 2020. So I got this pulse oximeter to keep around cause during these times, I think it’s a good idea to have such a device to monitor the level of oxygen in your blood, you know just in case you have an unfortunate event with well you know what, let’s not name it. I think this particular model is pretty nice, they also include an EVA carry case. It doesn’t come loaded with batteries but it uses 2 x AAA batteries which is nice. Single press to turn it on, it will auto power-off if there is no finger present for taking measurements, that’s pretty nice. Short press of the switch will cycle through a few different display modes in a couple of orientations, as we can see it uses one of those popular two color OLED displays.
InTheMail | Voltlog #334
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, I’m gonna start with this rather big development board based on an STM32F407 microcontroller. This particular microcontroller has 512K of flash memory and 192K of ram which should be enough to cover most needs. What I liked about this development board is that it comes loaded with peripheral interfaces like CAN bus, RS232, RS485, Ethernet, USB, SD Card and a bunch of IO so you can pretty much build any project you can think of. I’m particularly interested in the CAN interfaces so I’m planning to have a play with those.
While the product might be available from different sellers at different prices, there might even be different variations of this board I will place a link in the description to the seller where I got mine because it was the only one that offered a support pack for the board which contains schematics, documentation, example code, it even contains like a bundle of keil compiler with a keygen which ofcourse I’m not going to use, that would be illegal but you get the point, the seller will offer you a download link for this pack which is like 1.7Gb worth of documentation so I highly recommend it. It also ships the boards in these cheap plastic carry cases which are great for protection during transport as well as storage afterwards.
InTheMail | Voltlog #329
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, I’m gonna start with these quick connectors, these are a 2 input to 4 output type and they can be useful if you want to split a two wire pair, into multiple pairs and have those connected without having to solder wires or twist them together. They are rated for 600V 32A and can take a wire with a diameter between 0.08 and 4mm but as always take these specs with a grain of salt and don’t push them to their limit if you want to stay on the safe side. What I like is that they also have a couple of mounting holes so you could attach these to a panel.
Unexpected InTheMail | Voltlog #325
Welcome to this impromptu video, as you can tell I am not in the lab, I’m actually taking a hike in the beautiful Carpathian mountains in a remote area which is actually bear territory so I need to be careful but here is what I found in my path this looks like an esd bag which two lcd panels inside.
As you may know, due to travel restrictions this spring I was not able to do the electronics components harvest in the outdoors which is a bummer, but finding stuff like this certainly makes me happy, this could make our friend Marco Reps jealous as he usually finds just capacitors in the German fields.
So these look like a couple of 2.0 inch panels let’s see what we got here, they are based on the ST7789V driver, 240*320 resolution, IPS panel with a 12 pin, solderable type FPC connection. I mentioned this before, I am working on a replacement open source control panel for the Gophert NPS1601 and this is one of the options I was considering a few months ago when I ordered these.
InTheMail | Voltlog #324
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, I’m gonna start with this set of replacement cassette tapes for my label printer. You’ve seen me order these before but now I got some different variations which I thought would be interesting to try: I have Black on clear which would be nice for sticking on a white surface and have only the black text visible. I have some standard black on white cause I use that everywhere, this is white on clear tape which would be good for sticking on a black surface to have just the white text visible, white on black which could be general purpose or for sticking on dark surfaces and one that seemed very interesting security tape black on white so I’m guessing this could be used like a seal?