Voltlog #291 – Buying From Aliexpress Tips & Tricks

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m gonna share with you some tips and tricks about buying from Aliexpress and I might follow up with another video about Ebay and Banggood. I received requests for doing such a video several times as the subject was brought up and I think I can share a few useful things with you because as you may know, some of my most popular videos are my InTheMail videos where I show you the stuff I purchase from China and I get a lot of stuff which allowed me to learn a few tricks over the years. 

Voltlog #289 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. Before I get started I’m gonna take a second to remind you to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell notification icon because that’s the only way you will know for sure when I upload new videos. 

I must say I’m noticing delays in delivery of these packages from China, it started with orders placed mid January and I’m probably going to see some packages lost and never delivered so i recommend you keep an eye on your orders and request a refund when the protection time expires.

Voltlog #283 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. Before I get started I’m gonna take a second to remind you to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell notification icon because that’s the only way you will know for sure when I upload new videos. I’m gonna start with an item that’s actually disappointing, this is a mini portable vacuum cleaner but I only realized this after receiving the item, because the seller of this item was advertising this as a dust blower vacuum cleaner, it’s the usual keyword stuffing that aliexpress sellers do.

Voltlog #279 – InTheMail Stats For 2019

Welcome to a new Voltlog, as you may remember last year I did a summary of all the orders placed in 2018, related to electronics items, the stuff that I show in my InTheMail segment. I did that video because I was interested in knowing the numbers and how they evolve over time but the viewers responded as well, they provided feedback with their own approximate stats so this year I’m doing it again. Same as last year, please let me know in the comments if you have any stats on your own purchases.

Voltlog #278 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. Before I get started I’m gonna take a second to remind you to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell notification icon because that’s the only way you will know for sure when I upload new videos.

Voltlog #273 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. Before I get started I’m gonna take a second to reminding you to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell notification icon because that’s the only way you will know for sure when I upload new videos. Now let’s start with this small esp32 based development board, it has a built-in 1.14 inch color tft lcd and I think that’s a nice feature of this dev board because if you want to connect some sensors and see the readings in real time, you don’t need to wire a display externally it’s built-in.

Another cool feature is that we have built-in battery charging at 500mA and you can power this board through the provided two pin jst connector with a one cell lipo battery which will then charge when connected to power via the USB Type-C port. There is also a CP2104 for the usb to serial conversion and that makes it a pretty well balanced development board for the ESP32.

The board comes loaded with a test program from TTGO, it shows this image then cycles through red, green, blue on the LCD which is a good idea because you can verify the board is functioning ok after the long journey it takes from the market in shenzhen to your door and we all know how well these packages are protected during shipping.

Voltlog #271 – InTheMail (non-electronics)

Welcome to a new Voltlog, as the title says this will be a non-electronics mailbag, meaning I will show you what other stuff I am ordering and receiving by mail. A few days ago I created this poll on my youtube community page and asked where I should upload this kind of video, there were really two options, either upload to this channel or create a new one. I was kinda hoping for people to vote to upload them to the same channel because I don’t really want to manage a second channel and it’s also understandable if people vote for the same channel because they don’t need to perform other actions to subscribe to a second channel. And so it was decided to upload to the same channel but mark these videos as non-electronics mailbags.

Voltlog #270 – 11.11 Shopping Festival Discounts Real or Fake?

Welcome to a new Voltlog, this will be just a short video, I want to talk about the prices and the discounts that we get on shopping festivals, because most of us think and myself included here, we think the price cuts we get for these shopping festivals are not actually true, we tend to think prices are inflated some time ahead only to be discounted on that day which makes them go back to roughly the same price they normally sell for.

Even in my past video with shopping suggestions Voltlog #269, I got such comments and I don’t blame people for thinking this, because like I said, I tend to think the same but I also want to find out the truth so what I did some time ago, beginning of September to be more precise, I save some screenshots of various items that I was interested in from A

liexpress.

Today it’s the 11th, the sale started so we’ll compare prices before and after, to see if the sellers actually raised their prices before the sale and are we really getting any discounts today.

 

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.