Voltlog #248 – Atorch Q7 USB Meter/Load With QI Wireless Charging

So this load is built with 3 active pcb’s as well as a fourth passive one as a front panel. They are joined with these brass standoffs and I think the standoffs act as circuit paths as well because I see no wires between the different levels. In order to get the alignment right during assembly the designer of these pcbs, made these corners rounded while these ones are diagonally cut and you can see these features along an entire side. This is a neat solution overall because it saves cost and as long as the screws are tight these should provide adequate connection.

Voltlog #120 – Mini DC Power Supply Review

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:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Checkout this power supply from the links below:

60W Electronic Dummy Load Battery Tester:

Voltlog #103 – InTheMail

Today we are taking a look at my electronics related mail, I’ve got a bunch of random stuff and links for all of them are provided below the video.

Voltlog #86 – Limiting Iphone USB Charging To 500mA

It all started a few days ago when I was talking with a friend and he suggested, since we do most of our phone charging at night, why not charge them at a lower rate for increase battery life. As you may know, when you increase the charging current, charging happens faster at the expense of losing battery life over time, you get fewer battery cycles before it starts losing its capacity.

So I decided to build this small gadget, that goes between the usb output of my charger and the usb plug from my charging cable. In my case I have an Iphone and the charging current can be limited to 500mA by having a set of resistors on the USB data lines.

Links for the parts used to build the project:

Voltlog #33 – Ublox 7 GPS USB to UART Conversion Hack

In this video I am hacking this vk-172 cheap usb gps module to use UART instead of USB. The module contains the ublox 7 chipset which is quite nice and it makes it much more useful having an UART interface.

PIO10 > pin 33 controls the hardware pin remapping feature
PIO10 low = UART remapped to PIO15 > pin 36 and PIO16 > pin 37
PIO10 high = UART on standard TX on PIO6 > pin 19 and RX on PIO7 > pin 18