A silly looking box showed up in the mail a few days ago. It was attached to a spam mailer from a local car stealership proclaiming that I have already won a car, and just need to confirm the number this thing spits matches theirs. Naturally I took it apart:
This unit was used for a few years with a very limited success until I finally got fed up and decided to peek inside. The always warm case and constant 7W power draw did not help its cause either. As one of the 2 star reviews on Amazon concluded- don’t bother buying one of these.
Today’s rant is about a Glentronics Basement Watchdog backup sump pump system I’ve installed a while ago. The system overall is relatively simple- a 12V DC pump lives in the pit and is turned on by the controller when the water level rises above a level set by magnetic float sensors. The pump is fed by a big 12V Lead Acid battery that’s always charging. So when power goes out or the main pump fails, I’d have at least some pumping going on for a bit instead of me having to bail out manually. At least that was the idea. Continue reading
It appears there is no end to things breaking and ending up in Kuzyatech lab. Today’s patient is a Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ media streaming box that decided to stop noticing USB drives. The box is a nice little device that can play audio and video content from the network or from one of the three local USB ports: front, rear or a dock-like middle one that’s used to connect Seagate’s own portable hard drive. Both front and back ports were dead. Well, time to take it apart! Continue reading
Today’s teardown target is a DLO Power Bug model MH-01DU. This was a relatively expensive portable charger, that lasted a few years before getting into Kuzyatech lab. The complaint was that it made arching sounds, smelled hot and was not charging. Continue reading
Yet another dead monitor made its way into the Kuzyatech lab. A 2007 vintage Viewsonic VA1930WM monitor that stopped turning on.The symptoms were classic- power on light cycles on and off, but the screen stays dark,while a faint repeating squeal can be heard from the unit. Sounds very much like that Samsung LN32A330 I fixed recently. Time to take it apart! Continue reading
Bought this thing on Amazon for $25, figuring it’s not a calibrated decade box, but it’s also 1/10 of the price of more professional pieces of gear. Overall look and fit is reasonable until one looks inside the unit.
As promised, some 3D rendering pictures of the Sharp Memory LCD breakout board I just designed in DipTrace. The learning curve is definitely very short. It’s not always obvious were a certain option or menu item is hiding, but nothing some Googling can’t fix. Overall feel of the tool is that they started with basic functionality and added just enough higher end features to cover the majority of typical design needs. I like it so far.The 3D models are not exact, since I am using what I could find for the parts. Not all vendors are nice enough to provide their models just yet.
The components side
Here is the BMS that came with my Headway LiFePO4 cells. After a few pictures it’ll be very clear why I felt really leery about entrusting my cells to its care.
Looks like this was a 13 channel design, with only 8 populated
Well, if we remember the EEVblog episode 247 about parts arriving in pink bags, this beats it by a mile. The chip arrived in cling wrap! Continue reading