Tag: usb

Fried Meilhaus ME-8200 Digital I/O card (WHL #75)

I can’t stand throwing away allegedly damaged stuff without proper diagnosis (or even working surplus items) at work. For today, I took home a pretty nice I/O card for final testing before sadly putting it in the bin. It’s a ME-8200B PCIe card from Meilhaus, a German test equipment specialist. It’s red (which makes it faster), and it retails for 680€ plus VAT at the moment, so certainly not something you’d throw away without second thought. However, due to our overpriced fancy standard clients at work, testing PCIe cards is basically impossible – you can’t do that inside those tiny cases, and I’d hate to completely disassemble one of those things (short cables to fit the envelope!), […]

17th July 2022 18th July 2022 By Bzzz In No Comment

High Speed 4 Ports LED USB 3.0 HUB With On/Off Switch Power Adapter USB Hub For Desktop Laptop and the CAT S61 (WHL #58)

This post is filed under “old, forgotten crap that has issues with recently added hardware”.

Well, this might be the new record holder for ancient reviews – but only due to recent events. I bought this USB 3.0 hub for 3.59€ with free shipping back in July 2017 (pricing hasn’t changed all that much). It was a purchase following up the 3+1 Gigabit/LAN adapter described in WHL #34. I still run this thing to support four USB3 keystone modules that are roughly 2.5m away from the mainboard. That’s not only difficult for the USB signalling at the highest speed setting, but also a strain when running high power devices such as 2.5″ hard drives or a mobile phone that needs a bit of juice. […]

19th July 2020 18th July 2020 By Bzzz In 3 Comments

USB ISO multiboot script – Ventoy (#P26)

Speaking of the GitHubs on the Interwebs: I’ve been using a somewhat selfmade bash script to make bootable USB media for quite some time now. It’s capable of running ISO files directly from the USB drive and also the option for a separate partition for some Windows WIM extraction, in order to offer bootable Windows install media. As I’m the only user and there’s not that much demand for running different Linuxes at the moment, that script is badly maintained and only got an update when like a new Ubuntu LTS hit the market. […]

28th June 2020 28th June 2020 By Bzzz In 2 Comments

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

DIY USB and SATA panel mount connectors (#P13)

Next batch of connectors incoming! (yes, I’m onto something)

I bet most of you are familiar with USB panel mount connectors, which (I guess) are a by-product of the slot mounted USB ports of PC mainboards in the late 1990s, early 2000s. Back then, boards had none or few USB ports on their back I/O panel, but often one or two available via pin header. So people obviously needed some slot adapter for them, something like this:

If you slap on a different connector on the other end and omit the metal bracket, this is basically what you get these days when buying USB panel mount connectors. […]

10th June 2019 26th January 2020 By Bzzz In 4 Comments

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. […]

17th March 2019 17th March 2019 By Bzzz In No Comment

DC5V USB PORT 10X10CM El panel Electroluminescent BackLight panel el foil el paper el sheet Led Board Display with Inverter (WHL #35)

Here’s another random thing from a colleague: A small Electroluminescent panel!

I was asked for an area lighting thingy that is slightly flexible. So unless one wants to bend the stiff backing of a mobile phone backlight unit, EL foil seems to be the solution. I’m not sure if that fits his needs, but I’m confident he’ll tell me if it’s not ;) I bought this thing quite recently on AliExpress (mid-January 2018) for 5.22€ including shipping. Yes, shipping cost have increased by a bit, but shipping times have improved as well. […]

11th February 2018 4th February 2018 By Bzzz In 3 Comments

CY UC-022-0.9M USB 3.1 Type-C Female to USB 2.0 A Male Cable (90cm) (Rant #R1)

Oooh, look at that precious hellspawn!

“USB-C to USB 2.0 Data Cable for Macbook Tablet, Mobile Phone – Black” – capturing everything that is wrong with USB-C!

Sure, carrying over the perfectly fine USB 3.0 spec into USB 3.1 and calling it “Gen 1” (in contrast to “USB 3.1 Gen 2” that is double the speed) is a huge fuckup on its own. There’s no better way to screw up a customer by allowing manufacturers to call something USB 3.1 compliant (new! shiny!) when it’s just 3.0 with a new badge. […]

16th September 2017 11th September 2017 By Bzzz In No Comment

USB 2.0 4-Port Aluminum Hubs … and Chinese manual labour (WHL #20)

Hey :)

For today’s blog post I have something that I found at work yesterday. It’s a plain old USB 2.0 hub in an aluminium case, which is used inside of our measuring equipment. Just a jellybean part, it’s sold as Logilink here but I bet other brands just slap on a different logo on the front and they’re good to go. We chose this because it is relatively small, has all USB jacks flat in line (the smaller ones have 2×2 configuration or tend to stack them), and can make use of external power supplies, rather than sucking too much from the uplink port. […]

18th March 2017 27th June 2017 By Bzzz In No Comment

USB detector 3.0 High voltage 4 bit OLED QC 2.0 Digital detector voltmeter ammeter voltage current power capacity tester meter (WHL #17)

New at Wan Hung Lo:

…wait, what?

(I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to find my address if you want to, just making it a little harder for google to index it as an image…)

So, what is it actually? Sure, it’s the USB power meter from the blog title. Who would have thought!
Bloody kids with USB 3 toys! Back in my days, we had…umm, good old RS-232 :lol:

I bought this one month ago at AliExpress for 8,61€ including shipping. As you can see, they decided to use some tracked mailing instead of the “ah, no worries” cheapo variant. […]

26th February 2017 3rd October 2020 By Bzzz In 3 Comments