Tag: voltlog

Voltlog #218 – Shower thermometer teardown after 10 months of usage

Welcome to a new voltlog, today we’re going to be doing a bit of a destructive teardown on this shower thermometer. You might remember this from 10 months ago in voltlog #172, I got it 10 months ago and ever since it’s been running in my shower and I’m interested in seeing how this looks on the inside after 10 months of usage.

After about 2-3 months of usage I’ve noticed I was getting different temperature readings for the water that I was previously considering warm enough but at that time I figured it was because of the change from summer to winter and I blamed it on the ambient temperature. However I now checked with a thermocouple and the result was pretty bad, the shower thermometer is way out.

Voltlog #212 – DIY Silicone Lead

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today I’m making a nice flexible extension lead for my TS100 soldering iron. I know many of you might not be interested watching me build such a simple extension lead but I think you could at least get a good tip on this type of silicone cable and where to get it.

I was searching for silicone cable with two wires that came somewhat attached in a single wire and all I was finding was double insulated silicone wire on aliexpress which was not cheap and at the same time I was worried it wouldn’t be as flexible and thin.

Until someone recommended in the comments I should try this power supply wire for tattoo machines. You can buy this stuff from ebay or aliexpress for under $3 shipped.

Voltlog #209 – Cheap Electric Desoldering Pump Teardown

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’re doing a teardown of this electric desoldering pump, which I showed in a previous mailbag video. This had a major when I powered it one, in fact I’m not gonna try to power it on again because I don’t want all that smoke to fill-up my lab again.

Voltlog #207 – Making a DIY Spot Welder From A Microwave Transformer

Welcome to a new voltlog, today I’m gonna talk about a DIY spot welder that I built, the advantages of suck a build as well as the disadvantages or the the problems I encountered. So the idea for this project started many months ago, I was actually at a local recycling center to deposit some old electronics, when I saw this microwave oven transformer sitting right there on a table, like the guy in charge of the place literally took the transformer out of a microwave oven a few hours prior to me arriving there.

So that sparked the idea in my head, I asked the guy if I can have the transformer, he said yes and that was the start.

Voltlog #199 – New Editing PC With AMD Ryzen 7 2700

Welcome to a new Voltlog, this one is probably the last one on 2018. I would like to start by thanking you for being here with me, accepting the mistakes I often make in my videos but let’s face it, having a completely correct story is no fun, there would be nothing to discuss at the end.

I finally managed to upgrade the Voltlog editing machine. I previously used a dell laptop which had an Intel i5-3340M, it had plenty of ram, an SSD but editing was quite slow, roughly 3 times the length of the output video.

So at the end of this year I decided to build a new editing machine, I immediately found out the best price/performance ratio is with the AMD Ryzen processors.

I had a budget of $700 and I am quite happy with what I got in the end for the money. I started with a Ryzen 2 2700 processor, this is an 8 core processor, 3.2GHz, pretty fast. Not as fast as the 2700x but I had a budget restriction so I settled for the 2700. For the motherboard I went with the MSI B450 Tomahawk, for ram memory I got a Micron 16GB DDR4 PC2400 stick, for storage I went with Samsung Evo 860 1TB SATA SSD and for power supply and case nothing fancy, just something that was available on my local distributor.

 

Voltlog #197 – Wiring LEDs Correctly Series vs Parallel

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’re talking about LEDs, light emitting diodes and how we can connect them if we have multiple units. This is one lesson I wish I knew from the start because back when I started tinkering with electronic circuits I built a few projects with LEDs which let’s say could have been made better if I knew the stuff I’m gonna present in this video.

So let’s start by giving you a short story about this project I built back in 2010 so, 10 years ago I saw this project made by Ladyada, I believe back then Adafruit was just starting, they were selling just a few kits. The project was called tv-b-gone and it was a small microcontroller with an IR emitting diode, and it contained power off codes for most available tvs. The purpose was to point it at a TV, upon activation it will cycle all the codes and eventually the TV would turn off. Obviously a fun project that could potentially torment those around us.

So I decided to use a bunch of IR LEDs to increase the power of this circuit. And this is where I made the mistake of having all LEDs in parallel each with its own current limiting resistor. This meant I had to drill and install a bunch of different resistors and due to variations in the resistor value, the leds were running at slightly different currents, outputting slightly different power levels.

If I were to redo the circuit today I would probably connect them in series and use a boost circuit to drive the series string with constant current.

Voltlog #191 – First Order From China

About 10 years ago I placed my first order in China. How about you? When did you first order something from China and when was that? I would be happy to hear your story so put it in the comments below.

So it was straight to the big league for me, I went on Alibaba and found a pcb supplier which was willing to make these boards for me, I think I needed about 20 boards and ended up paying something like $500 USD for those.

 

Voltlog #185 – First Q&A Video

Welcome to a new Voltlog, something new today, this is the first Q&A video I’ve done and I hope you will enjoy it. It should be a great way of finding out new stuff about me. I did a post on my channel a couple of weeks back, announcing this but there weren’t that many questions posted there and I get a feeling the post didn’t get shown to all of the subscribers of the channel maybe just a few. So if you would like to ask me something else, please leave a comment below and I’ll answer the question in a future Q&A video. Also remember to interact with the video, maybe hit that like button because that should help expose the video to a wider audience.