Oral-B toothbrush stand generation upgrade (#P22)

After just eleven years of excellent service, my Oral-B 25.526.3/”9500 Triumph” electric toothbrush died from mechanical failure – the gears went a bit toothless (oh the irony), so while vibration was still on, it wouldn’t rotate the brush. I did exchange the NiCd battery some years ago, but the drive cannot be disassembled, so that was a total loss. Meh.
At the time I spent 70€ and this model was on the higher end of the Oral-B product line. 11 years later even the cheapest models are lithium battery based and I would expect essential technology has trickled down to the base models. […]

22nd March 2020 31st March 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

CR2025/CR2032 battery dummy for power consumption tests and a hungry Supermicro board (#P21)

This bugged me for quite some time now: Ever since a very nice dumpster revealed a stripped Supermicro server chassis including a Supermicro X8DTL board (Dual-1366) to me, the BIOS battery of that system seemed to be empty all the time. You see, I use this machine as an offline backup, so once every couple of months I fire it up, transfer my data, and unplug it from power and ethernet. And almost always it doesn’t start right up because the CMOS data is gone. Ideally it should be a headless unit, so that’s highly inconvenient.

I finally got around to test this – the fix will be another project for some day in the future. […]

8th March 2020 15th February 2020 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

3D printed custom tool holders for my workbench (#P21)

Printing time, folks.

I recently had the urge to declutter my work bench. I usually prefer buying tools with proper holders, cases, mounting hooks, you name it. Some however are not offered with one (KS Tools 5.5mm/M3 ratchet wrench! Everything larger is part of the holder), some are only part of my collection (a set of Torx screw drivers T7-T20, so not including T5/T6/T25/T30), and some are one piece only, e.g. calipers. That stuff amassed over the last couple of years and it was time to get that sorted. The table was blocked for no good reason.

So I did. […]

23rd February 2020 23rd February 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

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 23rd February 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 1 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