Channel News #6: I Have a New Gig! Also I’m Planning Some Things | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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In this video I report in about what’s going on around here.

My big news is that recently I got a gig working for Hackaday. You can find my articles over here: https://hackaday.com/author/JohnElliot

I mention that I am reading AVR Programming: Get Under the Hood of the AVR Microcontroller Family which is written by Elliot Williams who is Editor in Chief over at Hackaday. The big thing I am hoping to learn from this book is how to generate tones, but I haven’t read that part of it yet!

The new book teardown which I am going to need to re-record is for Electricity and Magnetism 3ed.

The old book teardown which I have been working on is for Electric Circuits.

I have done the introduction for the Maxitronix 30in1: Introducing Maxitronix 30in1 | Maxitronix 30in1 | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay but I haven’t done the first project yet. The thing that is tripping me up is making a decision about whether I am going to start doing the LTSpice simulations in the 30in1 videos or if I’m going to put that off until we start our next Maxitronix kit… I will have to make a decision about that soon.

I am working on Jaycar and Silicon Chip Mini Project number JMP003. But I’m stuck debugging it. I hope to catch up with that soon. I have heaps of Mini Projects to do, I am embarrassingly far behind.

I have recorded the introduction for the Learning the Art of Electronics project that we’re just about to kick off: Introducing Learning the Art of Electronics | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay but I’m still waiting for the 2nd edition of the book to turn up. Fingers crossed it gets here in the next couple of days otherwise I will need to start on this project using the 1st edition of the book.

There’s a bunch of stuff here that has arrived in the mail so you can expect to see a mail call video covering that stuff soon as well.

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)


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Lava Lamp Display | Mini Project JMP002 | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

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In this video I do the Mini Project JMP002 developed and published by Silicon Chip magazine and sponsored by Jaycar Electronics.

The code for this project is here: XC3730_LAVA_LAMP_COLOURS.ino.

The parts for this project are these:

The links for this video are these:

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!

Yum Cha Macro Programmable 8-Key Mechanical KeyboardThis is an image of the product.

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Mail Call #9: Tools and Equipment from Jaycar, Amazon, and AliExpress | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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In this video I go through what arrived in the mail recently.

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!

Yum Cha Multifunction Hook ToolsThis is an image of the product.

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Symbol Keyboard | Mini Project JMP001 | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

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This is the inaugural Mini Project! I introduced the Mini Projects recently. They are developed and published by Silicon Chip magazine, and sponsored by Jaycar Electronics (which is an Austrlaian electronics store, similar to Radio Shack in the USA, hopefully it doesn’t end up suffering the same fate.)

In this project, codenamed JMP001, we develop a USB keyboard which can send interesting and unusual symbols (which aren’t usually available on a keyboard) to a Windows computer using the alt-codes that it supports in a typical codepage.

For this first Mini Project I felt it was important to actually buy my components from Jaycar which I did for roughly eighty Australian dollary doos. Approximately US$50. The parts I ordered were these:

Belatedly I did also search for rubber feet.

There was quite a lot that went into the production of this video, and we accumulated a lot of links. Those are here:

In the end this first project was relatively successful, and we did get it to work fairly well on one of my Windows computers. As for the rest you can find out for youself in the video!

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!

Yum Cha HSC8 6-4A Ferrule Crimper KitThis is an image of the product.notes

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Channel News #3: Announcing Mini Projects | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

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Silly Job Title: Amp Alchemist

In this video I announce the new Mini Projects. These are a new feature of Silicon Chip magazine sponsored by Jaycar. Each month two or three Mini Projects get published in Silicon Chip, and we will be building those projects together on the channel each month!

If you’re interested in Silicon Chip magazine (it’s really good!) then I would certainly encourage you to subscribe.

In this video I misspoke and said this was the “May 2004” issue of the magazine, but of course it is the “May 2024” issue of the magazine! Unfortunately I missed that errata during editing and didn’t include a title clip correction.

I don’t understand what happened that caused that video corruption we saw earlier in the video. I suspect the workstation I was using to record the video had some other processing task which interfered with its recording speed or something? Hopefully this is not an ongoing problem. It’s not a problem I have seen before.

Update: ElectroneX has now been and gone and my write up about the day is over here: My day at ElectroneX with my friend. I got my photo with Dave Jones!

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Kaisi Soldering Tools With Desoldering PumpThis is an image of the product.notes

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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.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

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:

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:

Continuity tester schematic

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 TesterThis is an image of the product.

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Jaycar kit: Audio Playback Adaptor for CD-ROM Drives

This Audio Playback Adaptor for CD-ROM Drives was released with a Silicon Chip article back in November 2007, approaching two decades ago.

I just purchased the last two available from Jaycar, they no longer have any stock.

I now own three of these babies, and it is my hope that I can use their components to build some electronics that implements enough of the ATA protocol to unlock OG Xbox hard drives. I reckon my chances of success are pretty slim, but it will be fun trying!

This is them:

They’ve been on the shelf in a warehouse for years, check out how dirty they were:

For the record here is a screenshot of this item on the Jaycar website after I purchased all their stock:

Jaycar Maker Hub

This isn’t super high quality content, and is basically just advertising, but what the hell. I’m not sure how regularly they get new content, but today on Maker Hub: