Welcome to a new Voltlog, this will be a rather short video cause I will only be addressing one short subject regarding the Riden RD6006 ripple noise. In my review of this power supply in Voltlog #284 I did measure the output ripple but that was measured while using a transformer to power the unit.
That transformer has very little output noise so the results we obtain can be considered best case scenarios but this may vary in practice, especially if you are using the recommended switch mode power supply. The output of that power supply may not be as clean as the one from the transformer so in this video I’m going to measure the output noise with the switch mode power supply installed.
I’m using the recommended NVVV 400W 60V 6.6A rated power supply, this is what RuiDeng officially recommends to use with their power supply kit. In Voltlog 284 part 3 I took a look inside this power supply so I will link that video on screen if you want to check it out.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, if you’ve been watching the channel for a while you might know I’m a fan of the gopher power supply units, I think they are great value for money, they’re simple and they have good specs, in fact I reviewed their latest revision in Voltlog #255 and it had very low noise at the output, even though it is a switch mode power supply. They’re pretty compact, they don’t take up much space on the bench so what’s there not to like about these?
But in recent years there’s been another company which has slowly built-up a name among hobbyists due to their really low priced power supply modules, the name of the company is RuiDeng and they’ve been selling these compact switch mode power supply modules for $20 to $30 for years. They were not great specs, the quality was not great, you needed an external power supply unit but they had a bunch of functionality built into that color TFT display and they were cheap so everyone gave them a try
Now RuiDeng has developed and released a new model RD6006 which resembles a real bench power supply. It has a bigger front panel and it comes with a separate enclosure and power supply unit which are optional.
A while back in Voltlog #231 I took a look at a device called nitro obd2, it was this $2 OBD2 port dongle, which supposedly when plugged into your cars OBD2 port will enhance the performance by tuning the ECU. This was of-course a scam as I proved in the video by doing a teardown, the dongle did nothing but flash some LEDs. But there were still people who left some comments saying they we’re seeing performance improvements after using the $2 tuning gadget. Those are ofcourse false claims, maybe those people just don’t have a clue what’s going on, or maybe they’re the actual sellers offering these on ebay and aliexpress.
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.
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:
Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’re going to be taking a look at this gadget the nitro OBD2 performance chip tuning box, notice this is specially designed for diesel cars and since it’s using the buzz word nitro, this sounds like it might just work. For sure some company has invested time & money into finding the secret sauce to put into this thing to make it work and boost performance. They claim it fits all cars built after 1996 and all you have to do is to plug this into the obd port, drive for 200km so the device can learn and adjust to your car and after that you will benefit from 35% more power and 25% more torque. It evens says here on the box that it will enable fuel saving. So this sound pretty much like the holy grail in car ECU tuning.
But ofcourse if you have any experience with electronics you can’t believe that this is going to save any fuel or boost any performance just by plugging into the OBD port. So that’s why I purchased this, so we can take a better look inside, and also because I needed an OBD2 connector + enclosure for a project of mine. I plan to do some can bus sniffing and do something with that data but I’ll talk abou that in a future video.
