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Solar
Today in our household we are having 32x TongWei 415W solar panels installed on the roof.
Six sigma blister pack
When I signed up for distance education a decade or two ago they wouldn’t let me use my normal username ‘jj5’ (from memory at three characters it was too short) so I had to pick something else on the spot while I was signing up and in the heat of the moment I picked ‘sixsigma’, mostly as a bit of a joke.
In statistics sigma is the standard deviation, and six sigma with regard to a normal distribution is six standard deviations from the norm which is very very unlikely. It was just me being cute and not particularly humble but at the same time just tongue in cheek.
Anyway. The thing is that I think very very unlikely events/things are cool. Because when they happen they shake everything up. And today a very very unlikely thing happened to me, which in my whole life has never happened before, and will probably never happen ever again:
Today one of the blisters in the blister pack that my medicine comes in didn’t have a tablet in it!
I mean, wow, right? :)
Generate Gerber file from Kicad
Today I am going to follow the instructions to Generate Gerber file from Kicad for the first time. Wish me luck!
Update: I also needed to know how to do this: KiCad 6: Add Board Outline to Edge Cuts.
Electronics Project #2: Teardown of Homemade Continuity Tester | In The Lab With Jay Jay
This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video on this show’s homepage which is here.
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Silly Job Title: Grounding Genius
Old Book: Industrial Electronics Reference Book by Electronics Engineers of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation published 1948 with 680 pages.
Today we teardown a homemade continuity tester which I put together for use before I had a multimeter, so that was in the early days of my new lab, circa August 2021.
While I was preparing the links for this blog post I discovered that the plastic case I used for the continuity tester was the HB5610 Black Hand-held Electronic Enclosure from Jaycar. I purchased one of these for AU$9.95 back in August 2021, which was around the time that I made this continuity tester.
I subsequently purchased a ten pack of similar plastic cases from AliExpress for AU$64.55 (inc shipping) in March 2022. I went to find the AliExpress listing so I could link you to it, but it’s an old listing and has been taken down. I did search for an equivalent product but didn’t find what I was looking for. The dimensions are roughly 70mm x 135mm x 24mm and there is a facility for 2x AA batteries built in.
The multimeters I use/mention in this video are:
- OWON XDM1041 Bench Multimeter (notes, AU$188.51, February 2022)
- ANENG AN-999S Bench Multimeter (notes, AU$157.04, February 2022)
- DigiTech QM1323 Multimeter (notes, AU$64.95)
- DT830B Digital Multimeter (notes, 5x AU$5.45, July 2023)
The multimeter I mention I want to get is this one: EEVblog 121GW Multimeter.
What I say in the video about active vs passive piezoelectric buzzers is correct. The active buzzer will do the buzzing for you, all you need to do is supply some power. The passive buzzer will need an input signal in addition to power, so some sort of oscillator if you want to generate a tone.
I knocked up a schematic for this continuity tester, something like this:
I’m gonna try getting some PCBs made for this circuit from PCBWay, because I’m still trying to learn everything I can about that process!
Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe!
Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!
FNIRSI M328 Component Tester |
Let’s go shopping!
Timeline of human evolution
I found myself over here today: Timeline of human evolution. It’s striking how recent most of the things we take for normal are, and how different things used to be. I wonder what our future is?
Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire
I don’t believe I am autistic, but I have a few friends who are on the spectrum, and I am occasionally assumed to be based on the manner of my expression (it’s an occupational hazard I suppose). Anyway I did have some interest in reading Dave Plummer‘s book Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: Everything I know about Autism, ASD, and Asperger’s that I wish I’d known back then… This is just another one of those things on my very long list of things I would very much like to read but for which I just don’t have the time.
ATmega fuse bytes
A quick search for arduino fuses programming turned up a bunch of results:
Gameboy Rabbit Hole
This evening I fell into a gameboy rabbit hole:
AliExpress Shopping
Spent AU$50 picking up some bits and pieces during AliExpress’s latest sale.