Sensirion SGP30 and Bosch BME280 air sensors (WHL #64)

Small air sensor modules for today!

The Bosch BME280 has been in use on my ESP modules across the apartment since I discarded the unreliable DHT sensors, DHT22 in my case. It’s a combined temperature-pressure-humidity sensor, contrary to the much cheaper BMP280 or the predecessor BMP180, which lack the humidity part (pretty much vital indoors, while pressure is just a gimmick). They are sold in many similar versions, I’ve always picked the GY-BME280 module in 3.3V flavour (“GYBMEP”), as the sensor can be operated from 1.71V to 3.6V which is handy for different MCUs. […]

4th April 2021 4th April 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Convenient IBM x3650 server PSU power distribution board (#P35)

On the occasion of selling the second PSU from the long dismantled IBM x3650M1 machine (part of the stack shown in #P23), a direct result of eBay getting greedy and increasing their commission from 10% of the item price to 11% including postage (WTF?) plus 35 cents per item, I need to publish this real quick. I still do have access to powerful 12V supplies that can operate my lightbox setup to take photos of the things are usually operating the lightbox, but it would be pretty inconvenient to do so ;)

So here’s another piece of Open Hardware – a custom PSU board for said IBM power supply. […]

21st March 2021 22nd March 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Random thoughts on Supermicro Risers, LSI LBAs, power supplies, ZFS and other fun server things (#P34)

With the failed 450W SFX power supply separated into a regular post last week, now’s the time to waffle on about what happened besides that.

Well, Solaris 11.4 (evil developer/home use licensing, so no current service packs) still uses minimal ashift as default instead of a fixed value of 12. ashift is the exponent of the power of 2 that is used as smallest assignable portion of data, so basically sector size. “Old” default is 9, as 2^9 is the well known 512 byte sector size that most old hard disks had as both logical and physical size, and which they reported as such. […]

14th March 2021 15th March 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Fractal Design Integra series 450W SFX power supply oopsie (WHL #63)

Someone missed posting two weeks ago and didn’t make up for it yet. That guy was me and here’s a two-part random collection on why that happened, what fun things I spent time with instead, and why hacking hardware sometimes sucks (a little). I’ll classify this one as regular post due to the power supply teardown, and the other one as a project, should be up by next Sunday.

Well, when I started gathering photos a fortnight ago to make a new post, my ZFS upgrade project (more on that in a minute) was finally going smoothly after a rocky start when creating the new zpool. […]

7th March 2021 14th March 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Supermicro X9SRW-F Ivy Bridge EP compatibility comparison (#P33)

Some canned content for today – back when making the Supermicro 2011 board fit my needs (#P23,#P24), I stumbled upon the Ivy Bridge thing. Technically, the two rack servers that I got should both be compatible with the E5-2600 series (Sandy Bridge EP), as well as E5-2600v2 series (Ivy Bridge EP). The product website states that “BIOS version 3.0 or above is required” for this to work, and both boards run the most recent version (not that there’s so many versions to choose from). Both had a E5-2630L installed, so SB-EP. […]

7th February 2021 8th February 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

3 Speeds Electric Rotating Display Stand Mirror 360 Degree Turntable Jewelry Holder Battery for Photography Video Shooting Props (WHL #62)

We haven’t had a stock product presentation for a while, so why not start 2021 with something new from China… [bitter 2020 stares from the crowd]

Well, for the PCB Tree I figured a 360° view would be nice. I know it does have some ugly holes, but every naturally grown tree has these. Why not get something that not only offers a spinning platter for stop-motion tricks, but instead rotates something on display on its own?

Bought on AliExpress on 12th of December, 8.73€ including shipping, delivered on January 8th – that was a quick one! […]

24th January 2021 1st February 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

The PCB (Christmas) Tree (#P32)

Epiphany has already passed and St. Knut’s day is next Wednesday, it’s about time to stop being lazy and get the Christmas tree out of the living room.
Well, yes, but not the usual way. As shown previously, it’s not an ordinary tree. It’s green and it has fancy little lights all around, but it’s also containing significant amounts of lead and it needs a PoE port to operate.

Meet the PCB Tree.

Made from scrap circuit boards, random bits of wire, leaded solder and a couple of Chinese ingredients, it’s a wonderful Christmas abomination that sat the entire last year in my office and received a significant addition in early December 2020. […]

10th January 2021 11th January 2021 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

3D printed switch repair parts (#P31F1)

Some more details on the Bosch oven repair. These are the replacement parts that I ordered from Sculpteo, which, according to its own website, is the market leader in online ordered printed parts. Sculpteo also happened to be bought by BASF this spring, and they’re mainly printing in France but offer support in German (with offices in Germany, I think). They offer laser cutting as well but charge additional shipping cost for those, which made me skip parts of my order…

The part in question was already featured in WHL #61 (crappy automated model generation) after which I recreated it by hand. […]

13th December 2020 13th December 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

First Sunday in Advent & the PCB Tree (#E16)

Well, looks like it’s the first Sunday in Advent already and I’m too lazy preparing a new post. I’ve been working a bit more than usual lately due to our products likely playing a role in the whole temperature controlled Covid vaccine logistics thing. On the remaining Sundays I’ve been extending my old PCB Christmas tree. It’s been using diffused slow RGB (self) fading LEDs ever since (“100pcs LED Diod 5mm RGB Blink Slow Flash Diffused Light Emitting Diode Rainbow 2Pins Lamp Red Green Blue RGB Flashing 5mm LED”, around 2€ per pack of 100) and quite a few of old PCBs now, some bare and scrapped before assembly, some from tests or failed revisions, and some from defective commercial products like routers, access points, projectors, SAS backplanes, RAM, IoT gateways, hard disks, you name it. […]

29th November 2020 29th November 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Bosch Gourmet 8400 oven mode selector switch repair (Dreefs 4-DPS/260) (#P31)

A long, tedious blog post for today. This has been in the making for about 9 weeks and I’ve been looking for parts for another year or two. Pictures have been taken on multiple occasions in multiple locations, so it’s a hotchpotch that somewhat reflects the process. This is the use case for the 3D model generation of the WHL #61 post.

Our Bosch Gourmet 8400 microwave and baking oven has been there for as long as I can remember. It’s a huge and darn heavy thing for a microwave oven (27l volume!), and rather small for a baking oven with grill (broiler) functionality. […]

15th November 2020 13th December 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment