100W Aluminum Power Metal Shell Case Wirewound Resistor ±5% 0.1R 0.5R 1R 2R 6R 8R 10R 20R 100R 1K ohm Aluminium Shell Resistor – Dummy load project (WHL #56)

Something very basic for today: Resistors. Yaay. :lol:

I was tasked with troubleshooting a Blu-Ray player that cut the sound a few minutes into movies repeatedly. Sounds like a thermal issue to me, and after the local electronics shop grabbed 35 bucks for an “inspection”, yielding a “motherboard issue” which makes this Samsung heap of sh.. a total loss, it was given to me for a last look into it, before it was tossed. Of course the owner would never buy a Samsung player again, as this high-end model played Blu-Rays just fine, but does refuse to do so with double-layer DVDs, which his previous Samsung DVD player was absolutely capable of. […]

9th February 2020 9th February 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

3D models now available on thingiverse (#E12)

Quick note mixed with a bit of a “this is stupid” rant – as there’s quite a bit of 3D models coming in the near future (say…1.5 meters of them), I decided to put that stuff on thingiverse as well. It’s still hosted and linked here on this blog, but having it duplicated on an easy-to-search platform like thingiverse might be helpful for people with limited Google-fu. It’s also a nice source of somewhat standardized renderings from those parts, which I exploited in the previous post already.

Now to the “stupid! […]

26th January 2020 26th January 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

DIY USB Micro panel mount connector (#P13F1)

Oh yeah, that has been sitting around for a while…

Back in June there was a post about two connectors (#P13), and there was one more similar item that just happened to be printed a few days after that post. As far as I can tell, I never made a separate blog post about it.

Well, as there’s another short post coming later today, here’s that little item as a double whammy for today. The USB Micro-B panel mount bracket thingy.

Unsurprisingly it’s closely related to the regular USB-A panel mount case, just a little bit smaller to fit the female end of a USB Micro-to-Micro extension cord. […]

26th January 2020 26th January 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

E27 to E14 Base LED Light Bulb Lamp Converter Screw Socket Adapter Holder Lamp Holder Converter (WHL #55)

I had an oopsie yesterday. Last December I got a bunch of E14 LED lights for free, but there’s no E14 lamp left in my home, only E27s. So as there are E27 (light) to E14 (socket) adapters (which I have in stock), I bought matching E14 to E27 adapters on our favourite Wan Hung Lo shopping website for 0.44€ a piece (x4, shipping included). Those came in some day this week.

While cleaning up a table I ran across these, and following the five minute rule, I decided to not just put them away to test stuff later, but to just pop in a light and verify they’re working. […]

12th January 2020 12th January 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Spam that made it through my filter (#R8)

Sven from yeah.net made it through my Thunderbird spam filter. Which is notable because all that 163.com crap (which hosts yeah.net as well) is basically dead to me because there is a 1-ε chance that it is spam.

Well, nice that this one came through. A jewel of advertising!

Dear ,

HooHa company is customize wire harness factory in China.

Factory : 17 years experience ,
Staff : 120 people ,
Engineer : 8 people ,
Certificates : IATF16949 , UL , ISO9001 ,
MOQ : 500 pcs ,
Delivery time : 3~4 weeks ,
Working customer : BYD , FIT , CalAmp , Blueview , etc.

If you have any project need customize wire harness, please feel free to let me know.

[…]
5th January 2020 6th January 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

A pleasant Jetpack support surprise (#E11)

Now something wholesome from grumpy me – around two weeks ago, one of the many WordPress updates caused the subsequent Jetpack update to fail. Jetpack, for those who do not know, is to me mainly a stats extension to the whole WordPress shebang, but they do offer quite a bit more than that, especially in the paid plans (which I do not have). Login security, backups, SEO, you name it. When hosting on wordpress.com, that stuff is included by default, and for self-hosted WordPress installations, it’s basically the first plugin to activate. […]

23rd December 2019 23rd December 2019 By Bzzz In No Comment

12V Portable Auto Car Jump Starter Power Bank Booster Battery Charger 50800mAh (WHL #54)

Some random power bank, we haven’t had those for quite some time now, have we…

This heap of trash actually came from eBay, which nowadays rarely has the best offers for China-shopping. I bought this back in December 2018 for 22.99€ including shipping, and as far as I can recall, I arrived so quickly that it must have been sent from an European warehouse.

The reason for buying a “jump starter” type of power bank was that at the time I had some project running that needed a ~12V supply. In the end, we decided for a different solution, but a 3S lithium cell configuration would have done the job. […]

22nd December 2019 22nd December 2019 By Bzzz In No Comment

Brennenstuhl PM 231E power meter zero reading fix (#P19)

Quick fix today – a colleague recently complained to me about his Brennenstuhl Schuko power meter only reading a static “0.0W” regardless of the load that was connected to it. Display was fine, the outgoing Schuko was fine (we checked with a 2kW space heater), but the unit would display no power usage at all.

As there’s no long tri-wing bits (bastards!) at work, I took the unit home only to discover that my bits are also too short to reach the damn screws. He said he didn’t care and was ready to buy another unit (I kindly recommended the ELV Energy Master Basic 2, which will serve as comparison unit later), so I drilled into the case to widen access a little. […]

15th December 2019 15th December 2019 By Bzzz In No Comment

CAT S60 boot loop fix (#P17F1)

Good fucking Lord, that was a ride.
Last Sunday, my phone went out of juice and failed to come back to life. I had some issues with VERY high standby power consumption the entire week before, which caused the 3.8Ah battery to go flat within a work day. And so it did on Sunday when nobody was using it and nobody cared.

Long story short: A friggen weather app created an invalid (cron?) job, which caused the OS to reset indefinitely.

Long version: Boys and girls, root your phones. Even if some idiot banks (1822direkt, *cough*) will block you from running their apps “for security reasons”, having the option to fully backup and restore your phone outweighs that by far. […]

1st December 2019 1st December 2019 By Bzzz In No Comment

99 LEDs E27 Flame Lamps 9W 85-265V 4 Modes Ampoule LED Flame Effect Light Bulb Flickering Emulation Fire Light Yellow/Blue Flame (WHL #53)

For a quick feasibility check for a work project I somewhat recently (end of September) ordered a pair of E27 “flame” lamps. 4.35€ each including shipping, one of each available color – yellow-ish (very warm white) and blue (being a company color).

Big Clive demonstrated these a while back and I had hoped for a bit more oomph. Hence I bought the 9W version. Which turned out to be 9 China-Watts. Well, not even that, which is disappointing and kicked these out of consideration. Too bad, my colleagues liked the effect quite a bit, but it’s clearly too dim for any ambient lighting in larger spaces. […]

10th November 2019 18th December 2019 By Bzzz In No Comment