If you are an electrical or electronics engineer then you probably noticed how non-technical people around you are struggling when it comes to choosing a gift for you and if you are a non-technical person and you need to buy a gift for an engineer, then this video is for you so stick around.
Unlike other similar videos which will generally recommend gift ideas without actually testing them, I’m going to recommend stuff that I personally own and have used for enough time to know if it’s any good or not. For all of the stuff shown in this video there will be links in the description to Banggood, Amazon or Aliexpress which are the usual places where I do my shopping and I decided to release this video a little early because there is the 11.11 shopping festival on Aliexpress and Banggood and you might get some nice discounts on these orders.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, in the previous video I showed how I built this monitoring system for CO2, it’s based on an ESP32 development board and it uses two sensors the MH-Z19B and the CCS811. In that video I explained the differences between these two sensors so please watch that to better understand the current video and the conclusions presented here.
I’ve let the system run and collect data for the past few days and now we can take a look at the data and draw some conclusions which might help you decide what sensor to use in your future projects or it might determine you to build a similar data logger to check the CO2 levels in your home because I assure you if you do not have a ventilation system, chances are you are sleeping in some high CO2 concentration levels.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, you might remember these two sensors from a previous mailbag, this is the MH-Z19B and this is the CCS811 both of these report CO2 levels but they measure this differently and I’ll explain this in a moment. I got these two sensors in order to monitor CO2 levels in my home, to determine if the levels rise too much at night, especially during the winter time when we tend to keep the windows closed most of the time. I live in an old apartment building where there isn’t much provision for ventilation and so I suspect the air I breath during sleep is high in CO2 levels as it builds up over night.
In this video I’m gonna show you how I built the monitoring system using an ESP32 board that reads the sensor data and then sends it over the network to an MQTT server running on my raspberry pi. I then use node-red to insert the data into InfluxDB and then finally Grafana to monitor all of this data in a nice graphical user interface. The beauty of this setup is that all of this software is free to use and open-source.
Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m gonna show you how to setup your own GPS tracking server on a raspberry pi. It doesn’t have to be a Raspberry pi, because the software that we’re going to be using for the tracking server is available for Windows and Linux as well, so you could host this on your windows machine or in a virtual machine on a cloud service, it’s up to you, but in this video I’m going to do it on a Raspberry pi 4.
The idea started a couple of videos back, in Voltlog #272 when I got this GPS tracker disguised into a general purpose automotive relay. In theory this should come with free online tracking service on some Chinese hosted server but I wasn’t able to connect to that server and so I thought why not setup my own server and try to pair it with this tracker. So if you want to learn more about this tracker, checkout Voltlog #272 linked on screen right now and then come back to watch this video.
First step is to setup a fresh install of Raspbian, latest version from the source. Next step is to setup the tracking server, the name of the software is Traccar and here is their website. We’re going to be using the Linux arm release, because the raspberry pi runs on an arm processor. Next, your raspberry pi is likely sitting behind a router or firewall so you will need to forward a port so an external device like a GPS tracker can connect to our newly created server.
Next we can add our GPS tracker in the web interface of Traccar, on the left side I click add, choose a name for your device and fill in the 10 digit identifier which is this label on the side of your trackers case.The newly created device will be shown as offline until the server starts receiving data.
The final step is to configure the GPS tracker and these particular commands apply to the tracker that I am using, you might have to use different commands for a different tracker but the idea is to reset the tracker, set your admin number, configure the APN settings for your network operator, set the external ip address we saved earlier, the port is 5013. Set the upload frequency in seconds and enable the GPRS connection. Going back to the Traccar web interface, status should switch to online and we should start seeing data about our device.
Welcome to a new voltlog, so december is coming up and some of you might be thinking what gifts you could offer to your loved ones. I thought I’d share my ideas and what I would like to receive as a maker or hobbyist. The criteria for choosing these items were mainly to be decent quality products, at affordable prices and be things that a maker would later use in his projects. As usual you will find links in the description on the video on youtube to places where you can order these online.
So these are my recommendations for you, I would for example be happy to receive any of the above and that’s how I made this list, thinking about what I would be happy to receive or what would be really useful and fund at the same time for a maker. Let me know in the comments below if the list helped you in any way to choose the right gift for someone. Thank you for watching!
In this video we’re taking a look at the new Raspberry CryptoPI, a single board computer designed specifically for mining Ethereum. It features 8GB of GDDR6 and a new Nvidia VOLTA GPU. Release date Q3 2018 at a cost of around $400 USD. Let’s hope there will be some units left for us because I am expecting whales to buy these in thousands qty.
Here is a link to the current Raspberry PI: Amazon, Banggood.
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So I guess a gadget like this is worth 10$ because you could replace that linear breadboard power supply with a more efficient one, which will give you voltage and current display as well as adjustable output.
Here are some images I took during the teardown of the mini power supply:
Hello, and welcome to a new InTheMail. It’s been awhile since we’ve had one but don’t worry small packages from China continued to arrive, even through the holiday season and as a result I have plenty of new stuff to show on video.
Links to all the items shown in the video are below:
