Thank you so much for this post! Iâve been wanting a bench supply for years but never liked the fact theyâre huge so I stuck with the same method as you.
Please give an update after a while, Iâm really interested hows it goes!
The small supplies are nice for size, but tend to have more noise than the big linear supplies. If youâre working with low-precision DC circuits, or even stuff up to audio frequencies (basically still DC) itâs not likely to be an issue. If youâre working with RF circuits itâs more likely to be an issue, though of course if theyâre not too close to the switching frequency itâs easy enough to filter the output.
The âisnât hugeâ is the issue. Linear supplies need a rather big transformer to work with 60Hz mains instead of chopping it up at 20kHz or more like switchers do. Iâve got a Siglent SPD 3033X-E (decent, reasonably cheap) and a BK Precision 9201 (better, more expensive).
All the dimensions matter, if you donât get the posts right, it wonât hold to the board well and youâll be back here, possibly with worse problems.
If the pins arenât right, you just wonât have anything. See if you can find a part number or manufacturer marking anywhere on the connector, as it would narrow your search down plenty.
This is the biggest flaw with usb c, though I seem to get downvoted and ridiculed whenever I point it out. The retaining pins are part of the port itself, not the cable plug as is the case with micro usb and lightning cables. So when the retaining system breaks, you canât just go buy a new cable, you have to replace the port.
The pinouts are standardized so you should just be able to count the number of solder joints and find a connector that mounts to the pcb the same way as the one youâre replacing. Just eyeballing it I found one that looks pretty closed linked below, but I would advise you to do some more research on your own and not just take my word for it.
Thereâs a first time for everything. Maybe itâs because my previous conversations on this topic happened on Reddit and anyone that doesnât join the USB C circlejerk there is immediately treated like a moron.
Could be, guess itâs my fault for thinking that a charging system should first and foremost be a robust connector and cable system capable of charging a phone, not a fragile âdo it allâ cable. The biggest drawback with any âdo it allâ system is that the âallâ that is done is inevitably done poorly. You want to defend a connector system that requires going to a repair shop and waiting for hours or days instead of a 10 minute trip to the nearest gas station or convenience store to remedy, be my guest.
Havenât had to have a repair shop deal with any of the 30+ usb-c devices Iâve had.
The funny thing here is youâre trying to say that lightning cables are just meant for charging and they werenât. They were meant to make money by creating a proprietary licensable technology that mimics usb-c in almost every way
We are literally having this discussion in a post where the usb c port is broken so your choice of sharing your anecdotal experience is deliciously ironic.
I donât care what it was designed to do, I care about what it does. And what it does is hold up better than usb c, not require a trip to a repair shop if the connection fails, and do a perfectly good job of charging a phone or any other device that it supplies sufficient current to charge.
I know this is just an anecdote, but Iâd like to add that this is the second time this has happened to me with this model of device, and both times were after minimal usage
TIL if you post a picture of your anecdote, it becomes universally objective truth. If you describe it in a comment, itâs useless and âdelicious ironyâ
Iâm not disagreeing with you, Iâm looking for better understanding of your opinion.
My understanding of the retention being part of the port is to make it less likely for the port to be damaged by use, requiring more difficult replacements compared to the added stress from on cable retention on older formats.
So far, thatâs matched my personal experience, where my usb-c devicesâ ports hold up better than my micro usb ports. The handful of micro usb devices I have left all have loose ports currently, and did after as little as a year of use. None of my usb-c do, with of of those approaching three years of use (iirc, might be a little less).
Isnât that a good thing for long term device life?
It all depends on the user and the use case, really. My usb port on my Nintendo switch failed within 2 years and I had to get it replaced, but I have other devices where the usb c seems to work fine. I think the one on the switch broke because I tended to rest it on my stomach while I was playing undocked. On the other hand I have an iPhone 11 that I still charge using the lightning cable that came with my iPhone 6, cuz it just sits there on my bedside table and never really sees any mechanical stress.
USB C is great donât get me wrong, but to me creating a situation where it is harder for the end user to deal with a failure does not seem like a good thing. Not everyone has the training or the tools to disassemble complex electronics and perform delicate soldering jobs, to say nothing of the e additional time required to make that kind of repair compared to just running to the nearest convenience store and grabbing a new cable or, more likely, just grabbing another one of the 6 you already have in your junk drawer.
I can see that being an issue for sure, what with repairability already being such a dismal thing in electronics. I kinda forget that not everyone is comfortable with opening things up as well. Just that barrier to entry is enough for plenty of people to just buy the next thing instead of repairing.
Eh? Youâve got your thoughts backwards on the pins.
The inside of a USB C socket is simply a central tang. The inside of a USB C plug has the flex pins that grip said tang and provide the electrical connection. The USB plug, on the cable, is designed to wear out before the socket and itâs easily replaced.
The issue however is that some manufacturers skimp on the mechanical mounting of the socket on their device and flexing of the connector + socket damages its connection to the board.
Funnily enough, lightning connectors are designed the other way around with the components that wear out inside the expensive device. How strangeâŠBut thatâs coming from a company that doesnât even want to make a robust covering for the wires in their cables.
People keep mentioning that lightings sockets are built to wear out, but I have iPhone 5S and 5C (the really old color) phones that are still working perfectly. Cleaning lint out occasionally is the only irritant Iâve had with these connectors.
I know itâs anecdotal, but between my family and our years of devices, and that my MacBook Pro with USB-C charging is the most finicky of all my devices, Iâm a disappointed by the switch from Lightning connectors. Time will tell though I suppose.
Just as a PCB designer, make sure that you spec out the 240V voltage neutral and live copper trace width to the current going through them. For example, at 10 amps, those traces look much too small. Is it going to be in a high humidity environment? The spacing between traces also should be bigger for creepage/clearance reasons.
Yes the traces are pretty light for those kinds of currents, and I did have some concerns on the track spacing around the SCR and the screw terminals. The fatter tracks use a spacing for 240v that I looked up online.
Humidity here isnât âtropicalâ as such, the board will probably get a coat of lacquer anyway.
The circulating pump is rated at 240v/20 watts (so not much current when itâs running steady state), and the SCR Iâm using is good for a few amps of continuous current draw with a fairly high surge current. The SCR has minimal heatsinking so it will go first in extended high current situations, thereâs going to be a panel mount fuse before all of this that Iâll probably set to 2 amps or so.
The zero-crossing SCR controller Iâm using âshouldâ prevent switching on the pump at the peaks of the mains cycle so max current should just be the initial stall current from the motor before it gets up to speed.
The pump is an induction motor so the only concern Iâve got is false triggering of the SCR and being unable to turn the pump off once triggered. I used an example snubber circuit from the data sheet of the zero crossing controller and of course they said âyour milage may varyâ.
OK this is interesting, but also differs. If I have read correctly, youâre circulating the water in the system as a whole.
Iâm also using a solar setup, but Iâm using a serpentine coil running a separate coolant liquid. The coolant is used since winter goes from -10 to minimim -20 degrees celsius.
At my latitude, never below 8 or 9 degrees C in winter. Maximum temperature is about 35 or 36 degrees C in summer.
Older systems here were simple thermosyphon designs on the roof with the holding tank closely coupled directly above the collectors and they were quite effective.
My system has a 330 litre mains pressure hot water tank, with the usual cold and hot fittings bottom and top. There is a third inlet about 1/3rd of the way up the tank, and a little bit above that is a heater element and a controlling thermostat. The lower third of the tank is circulated out via the cold inlet and up through the collector by the pump, which can do about 300 litres an hour. Hot water returns from the collector at the 1/3rd location, and rises to the top of the tank via stratification. The copper pipes to and from the collectors are 1/2" and are insulated, but their surface area to volume ratio is quite large and heat is easily lost over the 15 or so metres of pipework.
On sunny days I can see the inlet temperature at the bottom of the tank slowly rise from approx 20-25 degrees C to 30-35 degrees C as the bottom third circulates, the hotter water rises to the top to give the small temperature rise I can see at the top of the tank and the warm water layer slowly lowers towards the bottom of the tank.
Essentially I want a higher temperature returned to the tank, which I suspect can rather paradoxically be done by increasing the circulation rate when running the pump, peaking the collector temperature higher with the pump off then dumping that back to the tank rapidly, rather than the current controllers method of pulsing the pump and slowly circulating it to maintain a moderate collector temperature and losing the heat in the lines.
I have the service manual for the controller and it mentions frost protection, where it will circulate warmer water back to the collectors in low temperatures, but this would be insufficient for your colder climate.
At some stage I would also like to control the heater element, it runs on an off peak circuit which is switched by the electricity company when it suits them, so it is cheaper to run. It also means that it regularly âtops upâ the top 2/3rds of the tank temperature, which negates the solar contribution a fair bit. I would like to be able to disable that top up if the system can sense adequate heating from the collectors, but that requires switching control to a 3kW element, and something I will leave alone for now.
Hmm, the heater element being controller disregarding your will is a bit of a bummer.
Thanks for clarifying, so you are indeed circulating the water itself, itâs not a separate line used as a heater. In this case you really are at the mercy of either your pump, pipe length, ambient temperature, insulation and/or sun intensity.
Have you monitored the temperature at the panel on the roof itself? Also, what type of insulation are you running on those pipes?
Itâs generic foam pipe insulation, approximately 3/4" thick.Originally there was also a 3-4 meter section of pipework from the collector output to inside the roof that was completely uninsulated, Iâve gotten that sorted.
I bought the place a couple of years ago and after replacing the seized circulating pump early last year I was pretty disappointed with the systemâs performance.
At that point I put onewire sensors on the tank and lines on the ground level and measured it for a few months and didnât see much heating at all from the collector.
I couldnât get to the collectors for a long time, not having a three storey ladder, but I got suspicious after sunny + windy days resulted in very little heating. Finally got up there about three months ago to discover that bare section of pipe and insulated that.
Collector temperature I havenât measured using the original analog sensor yet, I just let the original controller do its thing to get a baseline. But currently in a âwarmâ Australian spring the maximum outlet temperature at ground level is a brief peak of about 65 degrees C at around 1pm. Going off the circulation rate of the pump itâs probably 40 litres of water at that temp before it starts dropping back down in the afternoon.
Insulating that bare section of pipe improved performance but itâs still not fantastic, so now itâs time to drive the pump with my own algorithm and see if I can improve things.
Yeah, that seems like a good way to go. 65 degrees at ground level is what Iâd also expect. My assumption up top would be close to 90/95 degrees. Driving the pump more often would be interesting.
Interesting comments all round. Letâs run with the discussion for a week to allow infrequent visitors a chance to comment and then see if thereâs a strong trend towards a specific opinion.
If thereâs more activity on Reddit then here, then Reddit repost bots make it feel like all the community action is happening on Reddit. They push people back to Reddit because thatâs where all the new posts are coming from, so why engage here if the active discussion is already in progress over there?
Communities with >50% repost content are unsubscribed by me. If I have communities spamming my timeline with reposts, I just block em. Having to open at least two link and read the content on both sites just to get the info and understand the discussion/context is generally a huge waste of my time.
No, they made an assertion, without statistics or raw data to back it up. How many replies do cross-posts get, compared to regular posts? Whatâs the mean? Whatâs the median? Does the distribution look Gaussian, and if so whatâs the standard deviation.
Rather than mirror reddit posts here, you can set up a dedicated community for that so people that want that kind of thing can get it. No need to kill an existing community further.
Thatâs exactly what I am doing for lots of communities that have no reddit equivalent, and what I did for !main when it was clear that !selfhosted was already somewhat active. Regarding these, go take a look at the usage numbers for both, tell me which is going up and which is going downâŠ
The point is not just to mirror posts, itâs also to create a clear migration path for people who are still using reddit because the niche communities have not achieved critical mass here.
Besides, those who are on lemmy.world have nothing to worry about because the LW admins have defederated from alien.top.
Cross-post bots are not the way to build a community.
Imagine signing up and finding that all the posts are just cross-posts from reddit with barely any engagement.
One of the main things I despise about this concept is that it provides an implication that lemmy is some kind of budget-reddit. As though, all the good content is on reddit but weâre all camped out here on lemmy.
The way to build a community is to simply post more.
To respond to your other comment here also:
Iâm working on two-way communication. Responses to a mirrored comment here will trigger a notification to the original reddit poster and a comment to the reddit thread linking to the lemmy conversation.
Would this even be allowed on reddit? Surely from the perspective of a reddit mod / admin this would just be spam?
the initial posts are enough to foster a discussion between people on Lemmy
Thatâs not my experience. Iâve only ever seen dozens of cross posts with no comments.
Cross-post bots are not the way to build a community.
The community already exists, itâs just that they are located in a place where we donât want to be. The goal is to get the majority to switch and re-center in a place that is determined by the intolerant minority.
As though, all the good content is on reddit but weâre all camped out here on lemmy.
Which is true, if we are being honest. And if we are being even more honest with ourselves, most of the people that came to Lemmy are going back to Reddit because there is no content for the niche communities here. I mean, look at this community: last post is from 27 days ago. Do you really think that it is doing well by itself?
We had over 100k MAU in July. We are down to 35k and it keeps going down.
Our problem should not be with the people on reddit, but reddit itself. Instead of pretending that we donât care about the people there, we should try to find ways to bring them here.
Would this even be allowed on reddit? Surely from the perspective of a reddit mod / admin this would just be spam?
The comment would not be coming from a bot account, it would come from the redditor who have used the âFediverser portalâ to connect the accounts (and given permission to send comments) so it would also be âorganicâ.
The community already exists, itâs just that they are located in a place where we donât want to be.
Both of us are just going to have to acknowledge that our thoughts around online communities are very different.
Back in June I was thinking along the same lines as your good self, as in âwhat can we do to move /r/whatever to whateverinstance.tld/c/whateverâ. I eventually realised that not only is that not possible, itâs antithetical to the idea of online communities.
An online community is not a set of users, itâs a combination of culture and momentum. Sure there might be a few key core personalities that everyone recognises from day to day, but if those users left the community would continue because it has an established culture and momentum - a collective recollection that this is the place to go for a certain flavor of content and engagement with that content.
The thing is, you canât force it. You canât create a culture because itâs a combined input from many people. All you can do is create the environment within which the right type of culture will coalesce. You canât herd the swarm of bees that is /r/electronics to /c/electronics. All you can do is make /c/electronics the most favorable place to build a hive and have confidence that /r/electronics is becoming less favorable over time.
I mean, look at this community: last post is from 27 days ago. Do you really think that it is doing well by itself?
The solution Iâm proposing is to post real actual content. Subscribe to some rss feeds, look at old magazines, ponder questions for discussion. Any single post like this has 100 times the value of something re-posted from reddit.
We had over 100k MAU in July. We are down to 35k and it keeps going down.
Thatâs one metric. It doesnât feel like content and engagement has really reduced much in the last several months. Honestly I suspect that the orchestrators of the influx of bots in July have realised that other platforms are more fertile for scams and manipulation et cetera.
Besides which, even if valued users are leaving, thatâs kind of disappointing but a re-post bot isnât going to change that. The kinds of community builders youâre looking for are critical thinkers like your good self putting effort into building good communities.
The comment would not be coming from a bot account
Foregive me, Iâm not familiar with alien.top - Iâll have to take a look.
Technically, such a bridge is going to be interesting I guess and I have to concede that in some cases it might facilitate discussion.
That said, itâs still based on the (IMO flawed) premise that mirroring content from reddit is the right move. From my impractical purist / idealist perspective. Lemmy should not seek to be new-reddit. Just let lemmy be lemmy - allow itâs culture and communities to emerge and coalesce in their own time.
An online community is not a set of users, itâs a combination of culture and momentum.
Agree, 100%.
The thing is, you canât force it.
Agree, 100%.
The solution Iâm proposing is to post real actual content. Subscribe to some rss feeds. Any single post like this has 100 times the value of something re-posted from reddit.
Thatâs where we disagree. Not because I donât think there is value in what you are saying. There absolute is value and it is very important that we have real people doing. But I donât think this is enough.
The problem is that we can not do that for all of the interests that we have. Do you know the rule of â1/9/90â of social media? I had about 40 subreddits I was subscribed to, and I would post to 1 or 2 (rarely), comment on about 5 (more frequently) and just lurk around the rest. /r/electronics is in the latter category.
I mean, go look at my profile history. I think I posted more than 300 posts with content from many different communities. My past time this summer was to find different content to post in the different communities I was subscribed to or even that I created myself. I would sometimes even go out of my way to make a post about something where I knew I wouldnât get the answer, but I thought it would be better to write it down as a way to show some signs of life. And you still think that I should âgo read some books so I can ask questionsâ?
No, Iâm sorry. That is just too much. It is a lot easier (and effective) to just write a tool that can bring the content in the format that I want, and hope that it can be useful for others.
The thing is, this tool is definitely built for the 90%, and the reason that it is working it precisely because of that. I am closer to leave reddit altogether because this tool lets me read things here. The more people are able to do this, the more the network effects will kick in and the easier it will be for the communities to move. It wonât be âforcedâ, but we will get to the point where the majority will be able to say âitâs fine either way by me, so I might as well do it from lemmyâ.
I think mirroring questions and requests for help is a terrible idea, no one is going to want to answer a question here if most of them are mirrored and the original asker is not here to get the answer.
Itâs frustrating to put out a well thought out answer then realize that the person who asked will never see it.
Your points are valid, but turns out that the practice is showing different results:
the original asker is not here to get the answer.
Iâm working on two-way communication. Responses to a mirrored comment here will trigger a notification to the original reddit poster and a comment to the reddit thread linking to the lemmy conversation.
Itâs frustrating to put out a well thought out answer then realize that the person who asked will never see it.
This is not what is happening at the selfhosted communities. Turns out that a lot of the initial posts are enough to foster a discussion between people on Lemmy already.
Personally, Iâve blocked most repost bots (as I see them), because of the above stated reasons. I know Iâm just one data point in a statistic, but Iâm one that comments, as opposed to one that just lurks.
completely drop reddit without losing access to its content and the communities that are there.
create a migration path for the people who are on reddit and donât want to give it away because there is no real alternative.
Iâm also one that comments, I just donât want to do that on reddit anymore. I want to be able to do that on Lemmy, and have the two-way bridge until the community here is self-sustainable. This is how I think this tool can be helpful.
This makes sense only if youâre rolling your own silicon, and it depends on the application. I could see this as an alternative to a scalar DSP core or to provide more flexible high speed interfaces. The unspoken cost is going to be adding another proprietary set of tooling in the BSP for your chip.
An MPPT solar charge controller using Arduino as well as a homemade Li-Ion battery. Also an 18650 battery tester. So 3 projects simultaneously because theyâre closely related.
Iâm using a CC CV boost converter to convert solar energy to the voltage for a 7s Li-Ion battery. The arduino reads voltage and current and will try to adjust the CC value to obtain an optimal wattage. I have removed the CC potentiometer and replaced that with an Arduino PWM pin with voltage divider that sets the corresponding current limit. This way a relation between CC pwm duty cycle and solar output can be set.
DIY Li-Ion battery goes hand in hand with the solar project. Iâm making a home battery out of salvaged laptop batteries. That requires a battery tester as well which Iâm also making myself. The battery tester works by charging a battery with a TP4056 module and discharging as soon as itâs fully charged over a resistor while monitoring voltage/current over time. This happens 16x in parallel using multiplexers so 16 batteries can be tested simultaneously.
Iâm also taking safety very seriously so all batteries are equipped with both thermal fuses and current fuses. That involves 3D modelling battery holders, printing them, spot welding/soldering etc. As well as an additional monitoring system on top of a commercial BMS so that the battery status can be monitored remotely. I intend to have a smoke detector, thermostats and an emergency cutoff switch controlled by that second BMS.
Once everything works to a somewhat satisfying degree I intend to post the projects in more detail.
Every project tends to explode in scope in terms of what it all requires so Iâm not making as much progress as I want but it has been very educational.
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