Power Consumption

Laser Fume Extractor Used As Solder Fume Extractor? | Voltlog #454

As an electronics enthusiast or professional, maintaining a safe and clean work environment is crucial, especially when dealing with soldering fumes. While DIY fume extractors can be a cost-effective solution, commercial systems offer convenience and enhanced performance. In this blog post, we’ll explore the pros and cons of a commercial fume extractor from VEVOR, originally designed for laser engraving but repurposed for soldering fume extraction.

The VEVOR fume extractor, priced at around €220 shipped to the EU, boasts impressive specs with an 80W power rating, 180m³/h airflow, and a claimed 99.97% filtration level for PM2.5 particles. Upon unboxing, the unit’s sturdy metal construction and substantial weight (15kg) are immediately noticeable, hinting at its industrial-grade build quality.

One of the standout features of the VEVOR unit is its multi-stage filtration system, consisting of a pre-filter, activated charcoal filter, coarse filter, fine filter, and a HEPA filter. This comprehensive setup ensures thorough removal of soldering fumes and particulates, providing a clean working environment.

In comparison to a DIY fume extractor costing around €322, the VEVOR unit offers superior suction power and filtration capabilities. However, it comes with a few trade-offs, such as higher noise levels (65dB compared to 55dB for the DIY system) and increased power consumption (145W vs. 22W for the DIY system).

While the VEVOR unit excels in performance, it lacks some user-friendly features tailored for soldering applications. The lack of readily available replacement filters and the potential messiness of handling loose activated charcoal during filter changes are notable drawbacks. Fortunately, VEVOR also offers a specialized soldering fume extractor that addresses these concerns, featuring a flexible desktop duct system, multiple speed levels, and a more user-friendly design specifically tailored for soldering applications.

Voltlog #266 – How To Check If Your Raspberry Pi 4 Is Throttling CPU

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today my raspberry pi 4 is again in the spotlight because I want to show you the different scenarios where the board could be throttling down the CPU frequency and how you can identify those. Because it might be a case where your raspberry pi is running slow on a particular task and you don’t know why because there is no built-in mechanism to let you know when the board is throttling down. There are logs which you can check but let’s be honest, few people actually check the logs for something like this.

Throttling of the cpu frequency occurs for good reasons, to protect the board or the cpu from overheating or to prevent any errors from occurring in the case of an under-voltage scenario which may lead to data loss or corruption. Luckily there is a way to check if your system is under one of these conditions, you can run this command on your raspberry pi.

Voltlog #264 – Passive Heatsink Cooling For The Raspberry Pi 4

Welcome to a new Voltlog, here is my raspberry pi 4 which I got a few months ago when they released it and if you have one you might have noticed it gets quite hot especially when it has to do some processing. This newer processor, will get hot quick and the board alone cannot cope with all of this heat so what does it do? Well when the CPU temperature reaches 80 degrees Celsius it will start throttling down the CPU as a way of protecting itself from overheating and this will result in a loss of performance.

The Raspberry Pi 4 has a 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72 CPU, that’s roughly three times the performance of the raspberry pi 3 cpu. That inevitably generates more heat. In the original plastic case just sitting idle, connected to a network, doing pretty much nothing, the raspberry pi4 when compared to a raspberry pi3 runs about 12 degrees hotter.