It’s a fun engineering challenge. Weird energy harvesting tech mostly has applications for sensor networks. Some of the new generation of bluetooth chips have ridiculously low power consumption – so being able to deploy them without a battery somewhere without maintenance is occasionally useful.
Some currently used technology are piezo energy harvesting from mechanical vibration, low-light solar, and thermocouples.
My approach is usually to think around the TPL5110 and a pseudocapacitor. The TPL5110 is a timer that has a current consumption of 35 nA and can operate down to 1.8V. Every 2 hours, it would activate an ATtiny10 that can operate in the microampere range. That chip (very quickly) measures the voltage on the capacitor relative to a reference and decides whether it has enough power to “do the thing”. If it does not, it signals to the TPL5110 to turn itself off for another 2 hours to let more charge build up.
If it does have enough power, the ATTiny10 either “does the thing” itself or switches a MOSFET to activate another system or whatever. The “thing” can be to use the power stored in the pseudocapacitor to charge a battery for a short time (e.g. around a second), if you want. Afterward, the system goes back to sleep until it has a relevant amount of power again. However it’s often a battle to outpace the self-discharge of a lithium cell, so having the system “do a thing” without a battery present is often better.
This does result in practical stuff sometimes, especially when using low-light solar. Besides sensor networks, you can for example manufacture replacements for tritium indicator lights this way that only activate on at night. In my experience, an SMT indicator LED is quite visible at night with under 10 uA of current. I have a series of ridiculously overengineered indicator lights that stick to the top of doorframes so I don’t hit my head on them at night (I am quite tall, and live in a traditional home in Asia).
Incidentally, I tried building a resonant circuit at 60Hz and was able to pick up a few mV from nearby fluorescent lights – not enough to use. I used a ridiculously large coil of wire that I happen to have lying around. A more fun trick is to use LEDs as their own power source – during the day they work as tiny solar cells, and that lets them flash occasionally at night :D
Maybe take a look at BEAM robotics. Specially Pummer circuits.
The idea of Pummer circuits is to store energy from a small solar panel during the day and flash an LED at night. Energy is normally stored in super capacitors or NiCd batteries.
Might not be exactly what you are looking for, but it can give you some ideas to experiment with.
Those wet solder sponges cause a thermal shock every time you wipe the tip. I recommend using brass windings instead. They also won’t completely wipe the solder off the tip either.
You always want a small layer of solder on your tip at all times to prevent it from oxidising. Oxidation means bad heat transfer causing soldering to be much more difficult. Also store it with a small blob of solder on it.
You should avoid scraping or sanding the oxidation of the tip. There is a small layer of silver that won’t oxidise so quickly but below that is normal iron. Not sure if that applied to cheaper Chinese irons but it’s better not to learn bad habits. Once you remove the silver layer you’ll get oxidation much more quickly and you’ll have to keep scraping until the tip is gone.
You can remove oxidation with the brass windings much more easily than with a sponge. When you apply solder with flux the rest of the oxidation should come off fairly quickly.
Buying a cheap model to practice is a great idea, when you are used to that you can look into a better iron. I’ve been very happy with the TS100 but the Pinecil is the newer model apparently.
Why yes it’s a SAS drive. You can find that in some NAS models for home use too. Otherwise this is usually server land.
The thing with HBAs is that you usually only get virtual disks on the system side because the controller masks the real disks. This is not really needed any more since modern filesystems can do RAID functionality too - and even better and faster - but that does require direct access to the drive.
Many controllers can be patched though or come with a pass through (JBOD) mode out of the box, which allows you to use that kind of drive directly again. Such drives can be obtained used for cheap too so this may be a feasible option to extend the possible amount of drives for a desktop computer at home too a lot. Most controllers support 4-8 devices.
Growing up I usually had a little 50 in one or 100 in one electronics project kit.
Keeps all the stuff on one kit, and you connect wires under little springs. Still adult supervision required for sure, but on the upper range of what’s possible.
Maybe give the tool and helmet a white outline too: easier identifiable
and another idea would be to mix into the question mark an electrical spark but that are only some random tired ideas.
That are like the only things i found to edit, not sure if it is improvement
With some finagling, I believe ATMegas with the Arduino bootloader can be programmed using straight serial - you just have to time the reset pulse carefully.
I don’t think you can use it as an actual AVR programmer for new bootloaders, fuses etc. though. You need a full MCU for that. If you have a spare Arduino or ATMega that is happy, you can use ‘Arduino as ISP’ to do it.
Another tool worth exploring is EasyEDA. The fun part is you can even run it as a webapp.
It's tightly linked with the JLCPCB/LCSC ecosystem, so there's a lot of libraries of parts and it scans for their design rules, if you want to use their services.
There's also a somewhat basic auto-router baked in, which is harder to integrate in KiCAD.
I do agree that KiCAD is the consensus "full fat" tool these days, but I've put together decent projects in both.
askelectronics
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.