Articles

USB-C connectors, along with the QC/PD higher voltage negotiation standard, have made their way into our homes for good - but should they also make their way into soldering irons? I invite you to test the Yato YT-82490, a soldering iron compatible with the popular T12 soldering tips,... [Read more]

The cloud for vehicles? Today we're taking a look inside the Bosch IVS SLIM, the tiny module responsible for detecting bumps, aggressive driving style and smoke in fleet vehicles from Car Sharing, short term car rental systems where the lack of direct (human) supervision of the vehicle... [Read more]

Time for a break from the ubiquitous microcontrollers and 'smart' devices. Today we're taking a look inside another retro piece of equipment, this time made by German company E. Dold & Söhne KG. This will be a timer relay that delays the switching on/off of a receiver for an adjustable... [Read more]

This time we take a look inside the Cyfrowy Polsat LT-6408n router. This is actually a model manufactured by Edimax and sold to the operator as the Edimax LT-6408n with its branding. The router was primarily developed to share internet from LTE or HSPA+ modems connected via USB. The... [Read more]

I have previously shown how a simple keyboard simple keyboard , and shown the simplest emulation of a flash drive with a single file and writing to non-volatile EERAM memory. I will now go one step further and do a practical project based on the experience of the two previous experiments.... [Read more]

The CrowPanel DIS08070H is a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen HMI with a resolution of 800×480 pixels, designed as a ready-to-use platform for building user interfaces in embedded systems. The device is based on the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N4R8 module, which offers a dual-core Xtensa LX7 processor... [Read more]

Can a PLN 27 manifold bought from a Polish importer through one of Poland's best known mail order shops be dangerous? Today I present a product distinguished by the word SAFETY in its name, which translated from English means SAFETY. Will the Safety Power Socket from Lucky Hawk really... [Read more]

Today we take a look inside an old power supply made by a Polish company from Gliwice. I recovered the whole thing from scrap metal, so I'm going to check how this power supply has coped with years of use in an industrial device, examine whether it's still in working order at all,... [Read more]

How is the 'smart' remote-controlled Tuya lamp built? What Wi-Fi module is inside? To what extent does it heat up the interior when lit at full brightness, and can this heating be reduced somehow? Can this type of product be connected to the Home Assistant and used without the cloud?... [Read more]

What kind of soldering kit for a beginner? The HU-017A kit shown here costs just under a dozen zloty, and you can get it even cheaper in a promotion. It allows you to build a simple FM radio based on a ready-made RDA5807S module, a microcontroller with a 7-segment display for tuning... [Read more]

In the city where I live we have "Re-Use" shops alongside standard recycling centres (aka tips, dumps, household waste disposal facilities). These re-use centres are packed with donations and finds that would otherwise have gone into the general waste or recycled. Of course there's... [Read more]

Ever wondered what sits in the Flash memory from a modern TV? I invite you to a short presentation of the inside of the Samsung UE55MU6452U 55" 4K UHD Smart TV combined with reverse engineering and emulation of the T-Con controller firmware. Here I will show how such a TV is built,... [Read more]

Not everyone likes the distinctive loud click of relays accompanying the switching on of lights in most home automation products available. Nor does everyone have a neutral wire available in the box - in old installations it may have been unnecessary, and its absence makes it difficult... [Read more]

Today I am testing two small devices capable of temporarily backing up the power supply of a 5 or 12 V receiver in the face of an unexpected power outage. The first is a distinctive black box plugged into a USB cable, necessarily operating on 5 V only. The second is slightly larger,... [Read more]

Are modern LLM models run locally, on an old gaming laptop, able to meaningfully tag photos? Are modern models suitable for OCR and correctly recognise electronic circuits? I invite you to the Electrode test of artificial intelligence, this time enriched by the locally run model Gemma... [Read more]

The smart building market is maturing. Private investors, developers and installers are asking less and less for individual 'smart' devices and more and more for a coherent system that can be logically designed, commissioned, developed and serviced. This is where F&Home comes... [Read more]

I am going to start this thread as a WIP for decoding (another unknown) UART based protocol. I am going to present the findings so far but in a rough state as I am still working on figuring out what is in the packets. Assumption that I started with was that the packet is similar to... [Read more]

In engineering practice, there is often a need to control a relay or other receiver connected to a higher voltage (12V or 24V) using a signal from a microcontroller operating with 5V logic. The standard solution is to use an additional NPN transistor or optoisolator, which increases... [Read more]

I recently presented the running of the PIC16LF1659 as an HID keyboard or mouse controller . A gamepad or joystick can also be realised in a similar way, it just remains to determine how to handle the buttons and axes. This is a great opportunity to take a look inside two products... [Read more]

Today we are building a tiny clock with time keeping, we will realise it based on an 8-bit PIC12F683 microcontroller with only 128 bytes of RAM, a 7-segment display module with FD650 controller recovered from electro-junk and a DS1307 RTC clock. I will also show full waveforms from... [Read more]

I invite you to a practical test of the new image generator from OpenAI. In this topic I will test the performance of GPT-Image 2 on various electronics related tasks, there will be drawing schematics, describing devices and also editing photos and graphics. In addition, I will compare... [Read more]

I invite you to a demonstration of a Wi-Fi enabled electric kettle. Here I'll show how it pairs, what its mobile app offers, how it's built inside, and see if it can be altered with firmware to free it from the manufacturer's servers and connect it locally to Home Assistant. This... [Read more]

Today a little tidbit I came across while developing one of my projects. I was looking for a simple way to mechanically disconnect microcontroller/ESP controlled lines, with a minimum of additional components. This is how I came across the very small V23100-V4 dual signal relays.... [Read more]

What does it look like to implement a storage device driver in C? Can the tiny PIC16LF1459 microcontroller, with a modest 14 KB Flash memory and an even smaller 1 KB RAM, simulate a pendrive? Will it manage to write a text file to an EERAM 47L16 connected to it via I2C? Today is the... [Read more]

I bought a pack of 3 Feit OM60/RGBW/CA/AG(N) smart light bulbs The (N) in the model name seems to denote a newer revision from the already posted non-N version , as these use a Tuya T1-U-HL (Beken BK7238), not the BK7231N They still use the BP5758D LED driver IC. Since they have the... [Read more]

Two soldering irons in one kit and for only PLN 300 - is that a good deal? Here I'll introduce the Yihua 852D+ station and see how comfortable it actually is to work on a motherboard with it. I will test both a hot air and a flask soldering iron. I will take measurements at the 100°C,... [Read more]

I invite you to a little adventure with the PIC16LF1459, an 8-bit microcontroller made by Microchip, distinguished by its hardware USB support with a minimum of external components. You don't even need an external oscillator - the built-in one has enough precision. Here I will run... [Read more]

Transfer Multisort Elektronik (TME), a global distributor of electronic and electromechanical components, announced the expansion of its U.S. operations with the appointment of three experienced industry leaders: Mark Burr-Lonnon as CEO TME US, Krister Haggstrom as strategic advisor,... [Read more]

Here I will introduce the DigiTOP VP-16Аf voltage relay designed to protect electrical equipment from excessive electrical voltage. It offers a simple LED display and a programmable setting for the upper cut-off limit, hysteresis and turn-on response time. The device is available... [Read more]

Here is an account of building a two-channel dimmer based on an 8-bit PIC12F683 microcontroller and parts from electrical junk. The project will be written in C using the SDCC compiler. A single encoder will be used to control the brightness levels, and pressing the encoder will toggle... [Read more]