Sensor – VoltLog

Voltlog #288 – New BLTouch 3DTouch Plastic Pin Sensor Upgrade

Back in 2018 I installed a Bltouch sensor on my Creality CR10 3d printer and I showed the process in Voltlog #177, that video is one of the most popular videos on the channel and now after using the printer with the upgrade for a couple of years I can clearly say it’s probably one of the best upgrades you can do to your 3d printer and it’s pretty cheap. I won’t go into too much detail about what the sensor does and how to install it because that is discussed in Voltlog #177.

However I did experience a downside after this upgrade, some users are reporting the same problem while others don’t face this issue. It’s important to note I am using a BLtouch clone called 3D touch, purchased from Aliexpress. It’s the type that has a metal push rod through the middle. The issue I’m having is a vibration noise coming from that metal pin vibrating inside the sensor when the printer moves on the Y axis. This issue might or might not be present on a genuine sensor or just another unit which might have tighter tolerances.

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 #265 – FT232H USB to JTAG/I2C/SPI Interface With Python & PyFtdi

Welcome to a new voltlog, today we’re going to be talking about this little board which I designed and assembled myself, it’s a breakout module for the FTDI FT232H which is a usb to serial converter but with a nice twist. This particular chip from FTDI has the built-in Multi-Protocol Synchronous Serial Engine (MPSSE short) which allows you to run a variety of synchronous serial protocols like JTAG, I2C, SPI or simple bit-banging of IOs. You can imagine it can be really useful to be able to interface with a sensor over I2C or SPI straight from your computer over USB through this interface. You wouldn’t need an arduino or other controller in the middle if you plan to do some data acquisition for example.

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.

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.

Voltlog #230 – Guidelines For Board Level Temperature Sensor Layout & Placement

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m gonna show you some techniques that you can use when doing temperature measurements. Typically you will want to measure either the ambient temperature or the system or component temperature. Depending on one of these goals you are going to follow different design rules to achieve that. And to better illustrate the problems, I have these 3 pcbs which have exactly the same electrical circuit but with different layouts on the pcb.

The boards consist of an esp8266 and a digital temperature sensor and you might expect that since all 3 boards are placed so close together, they should all indicate the same temperature but that is not the case as we can see on this graph we are getting 3 different temperatures and only one of them is close to the actual ambient temperature measured with another thermometer, so why is that happening? Well the answer lies in the layout of the PCB and that includes component placement, copper planes and various other elements on the PCB.

Voltlog #226 – 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 gonna start with this set of tweezers from Vetus. A few months ago I was considering buying some more expensive electronics tweezers but the good ones are really expensive when you include shipping as well so in the end I decided to give these a try. I’ve had Vetus tweezers in the past and some were good some were bad. This time I asked multiple sellers on Aliexpress if the tweezers are original Vetus or not, some responded and promised their goods are original. Coincidentally or not those who said their products are original also had higher prices. In my experience with suppliers, they never lie about the origins of a product if you directly ask them so I tend to believe that what I have here are genuine Vetus tweezers

Voltlog #225 – Taking A Look Inside A Bosch/Audi ECU EDC15VM+

Welcome to a new voltlog, today we’re doing a teardown of an automotive ECU which stands for engine control unit. Every car has one of these, unless it’s very old and doesn’t have electronic control of the engine. This is a small computer that reads a bunch of sensors like air temperature, air pressure, fuel pressure, rpm, crank shaft position, pedal position and various others and then based on these inputs will calculate various parameters and control outputs like the fuel pump, injectors, spark plugs, etc.

I’ve never opened one of these up but we should find something interesting to see in here, at least from the point of view of construction methods because these things need to run smooth even in the hardest conditions like very hot weather or very cold weather as well as endure water pouring right onto them all while withstanding high levels of mechanical shock and vibrations. So it’s likely we will see a nice seal on the enclosure, as well as conformal coating on the inside.

What we find inside might differ a lot depending on the generation of the ECU, older ones having to use more discrete components, while newer ones are integrating a lot of components into a single chip. I’ve worked briefly for Freescale which was building such a newer chip in partnership with BOSCH and it was amazing the level of integration they had: everything from multiple mosfet drivers, differential amplifiers for current sensing with programmable gain, dc-dc boost converter as well as a multi core processor was all integrated on the same chip, as you can imagine this can save quite a bit of money on the final build so that’s the direction things are heading.

The one I have here is from an Audi A6 model C5 which was manufactured between 1997 and 2004, this one is likely made in 2001, judging by a date code I see on the label and it’s from a 2.5 liter TDI engine. I got it from one of these auto dismantling businesses from ebay, I don’t know if it’s ever been opened before, but we will find out soon.

Voltlog #216 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new voltlog, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time.

We’re gonna start with this multimeter thermocouple which I got from ebay, it’s brown, it looks familiar to those who have a fluke multimeter, and yes it’s branded Fluke. However I got this from ebay for just a few dollars delivered from China so it might as well be fake but honestly who cares, it’s just a thermocouple, it’s gonna work just fine even if it’s a fake one. The think is I got my fluke 87 used without original packaging so it was missing the thermocouple but now I can plug this in and measure temperature as well.

Voltlog #213 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new voltlog, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. We’re gonna start the video with a battery charger from Liitokala, model number is Engineer Lii-500. It works with an external 12V power supply which I opted not to get because we all have a bunch of 12V adapter from old equipment.