Month: March 2019

150W Welding Repair Tool Titanium Plating Lead-Free Solder Pot Adjustable Temperature Tin Furnace with EU plug (WHL #48)

What’s worse than lead-free solder? Lead doped lead-free solder… :roll:

Today’s item is a “500g” solder pot that I bought during the Christmas/annual leave shopping spree mid-December for 12.06 USD including shipping on AliExpress. Prices have even dropped a bit since then.

I’ve always been collecting residue from desoldering stuff as I want to minimize contaminating ordinary trash with lead. Not on a crazy level like the EU tries forcing us to, but if I can avoid PCBs and electronic components getting mixed with domestic waste, I’ll keep them separate. […]


USB LiPo battery BBQ arc lighter – CCFL test device (WHL #47)

Fun with high voltages.
[NOT a sponsored post! They’ll probably do not want me to do that in the first place…]

This week (at work…), I repaired an old Siemens PLC unit with a failed display backlight. Good old CCFL crap that literally burns out over time. As this wasn’t time critical (unlike the last unit), I ordered some CCFL to LED conversion kit from China, modified that to fit the tiny display, threw away the crappy “converter” PCB and installed some homebrew.

While fiddling around, my mind wandered off. […]


APC Back-UPS external battery mod (#P11)

Good thing I’m a doofus. While tidying up cables after some keystone module action, I also moved the bulky power supply of my monitor. And then I noticed that the only thing that absolutely has to be on the battery backup outlets of my UPS unit was in fact…assigned to the surge-protected ones that fail when mains power is gone. D’oh. After some cable identification in that tight space, I moved the UPS around a bit and I discovered a drop of liquid. A very dubious drop at a place where liquid would have to seep through 4 centimeters of a wooden table, or somehow permeate 1.5mm of solid steel against gravity’s pull. […]


Revox Evolution front panel repair (#P10F1)

Soo…the Revox thing from #P10 wasn’t done at the time, and when the missing cable arrived from China (“DB9 Male to Female Gold-plated Extension Cable Pure Copper Line RS232 9 Pin Serial Connector Wire COM Core with Double Shield” for a whopping 4.53€), it didn’t really work as expected.

I wondered: Did they do fancy things with the shielding, in order to squeeze out one more connection from this otherwise 9 pin cable? The cable might have different characteristics compared to the metal-to-metal contact of the serial connectors directly sitting on top of each other. […]


Sony to the rescue! (#E9)

I’m back, with more pixel power than ever ;)

After a bit of research in addition to the thoughts back when I bought my very first dedicated camera, I decided to go the Sony route. Sony RX100, to be specific. There are three models that fall in my price bracket for “new camera without being able to sell the old one”, that is the original RX100, the RX100M2 and the reasonably different RX100M3. There’s a very handy feature comparison over at Reisezoom which also adds data to the newer RX100 models, so before regurgitating everything for the interested folks, please pay them a visit. […]