The little gray wires should be all nice and straight. Even though your chip may be a good boi, touching it will wreak havoc on the wire bonding. Repairing the damage shown on the picture takes a skilled worker and very expensive equipment. Even then the repair is not fully guaranteed to be successful.
3 years ago the obvious answer was Atmel AVR chips but they are still in short supply today. I think ESP32 is the answer today. They are shockingly powerful for the price. And they have built in wifi, bluetooth, and USB.
Nowadays there's a plethora of options available for beginners. Heck, even PICs have dev boards available with built-in programmers, so you connect it to your computer using regular old USB cable and you can build away using Microchip toolchains. Depending on your comfort level of low-level C, I'd probably still stay away from PICs as a beginner.
There's Arduinos and all the numerous clones (cheaper, different features). The main benefit of Arduino ecosystem would be that it's really easy to find libraries and/or content on the internet that gets you real close to solving your problems without having to write too much code yourself.
And of course very cost effective ESP32 based offerings that excel at wireless usecases (WiFi, bluetooth).
Recently there's even more beginner friendly boards appearing using MicroPython where you don't even need a toolchain. You connect the board to your computer, it appears as a mass storage device, you drop your Python code on it... and that's it, the board runs the code when you disconnect from the computer.
Have a browse through Adafruit and Sparkfun stores to get an idea of all the possible (beginner friendly) boards out there.
Thanks for the detailed answer, I was familiar with ASM and C. And soldered some of the boards myself. But probably cant do the soldering parts too much now.
Yeah I have such a small, cheap Chinese one (T962) that I modified and flashed a nicer firmware on.
I basically populated the bottom side (with more components) first after applying solder past with a stencil, then reflowed the board. After cooling down I applied the solder paste to the upper side (with the LED) by using a small needle on a syringe (because using a stencil was too weird since the board wasn’t laying flat) but since the pads are relatively large and not that many that worked fine. Then I placed the components on that side and simply run the reflow cycle again.
I started with the bottom side because there are no heavy components. I expected heavy parts to just fall off on the second reflow cycle so I tried to avoid that.
At the end I manually assembled the USB connector using a regular soldering iron and tons of flux gel.
Nice! Thanks for explanation! I don't have much experience with soldering larger circuits. Usually I'm stuck with a soldering iron and tweezers. Just recently got a used stereo microscope. That already helps a lot. But certain packages like BGA are out of reach this way.
I was kind of afraid of SMD things in general a long time but I discovered they are (up to a certain size, 0603 is still okay for hand assembly if you’re patient) comfortable to work with. Even QFN packages are okay if you have access to a hot-air station. I did actually order an BGA sensor out of curiosity along with other things, looked at it and was like “hahaha, thanks, I probably better don’t design that thing into my circuit” (I think it’s a 5-WLCSP package).
I used a Chinese oven that looked just like that, maybe the same model. I found it uneven in its heating, so much so that paste near the door sometimes didn't flow. It was possibly a step up from my Black and Decker toaster oven.
I don’t have it for that long but I didn’t have problems so far, I’m usually only making rather small PCBs tho. I did make some recommended modifications like replacing the paper insulation tape with a kapton tape, proper grounding and flashed another firmware.
I did only use a small hotplate and/or a hotair station, so it seems to be definitely a stepup here 😌.
AnswerInside a common humidity sensor
Lovely guess but no. This one has more pins, the integrated circuit is more complicated and many people don’t have one at home.
Thanks for using the spoiler tag. It’s working now.
And yes, I took into account that electronic nerds’ houses are different from most others.
The storyMy Genius optical mouse was tracking poorly, even on patterned surfaces and mouse mats. I cleaned the lens and that didn’t help. So I used a knife to open the chip, which is a pinhole camera with a die that integrates the sensor, a basic image processing system, button, wheel and LED controller and a USB (or maybe also PS/2) interface. I cleaned the chip with alcohol (mainly to remove the dust that had landed on it while it was open) and reassembled the mouse to find that it made no effect on ots functionality. I ultimately found out that the focus distance was off and I fixed it by removing the rubber pads at the bottom. The chip appears to have no alphanumerical marking. Full picture of the PCB with this chip – it is slightly damaged because I needed to scrape off parts of it to allow the cover to come off; I also did this because I thought of readjusting the focus by slightly lowering the chip (by bending its legs).
If there’s 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 that’s 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? What’s the mean? What’s the median? Does the distribution look Gaussian, and if so what’s the standard deviation.
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 they’re closely related.
I’m 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. I’m making a home battery out of salvaged laptop batteries. That requires a battery tester as well which I’m also making myself. The battery tester works by charging a battery with a TP4056 module and discharging as soon as it’s 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.
I’m 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 I’m not making as much progress as I want but it has been very educational.
None of us can tell you if it’s worth it for you. That’s super subjective based on your cash on hand and what you’re trying to do. How often do you use three separate DC voltages? Should you just do a dual output and keep a cheap single output on the side for the rare occasion you need 3? We can’t answer that.
Those two you selected look like great quality products from respected brands.
Could you find similar functionality cheaper? Almost certainly, for probably lower quality.
Can you find better quality between those two pricepoints with the same functionality? I don’t know, but I think this is the question to ask.
Sorry for the inconvenience, I’m just trying to help people find hints in comments without someone ruining their experience by accidentally revealing the answer without a spoiler tag. This will keep the game fun even after someone guesses correctly.
Okay, I’ll drop the rule but I hope the correct guessser will retroactively do it anyway.
It’s not a bank card for the same reason it’s not a SIM (form factor)
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