Electronics

Review The TS100 is possibly the best soldering iron I have used for under $200. It is very lightweight and portable, runs off a wide range of power sources and has full PID temperature control built in. The built in accelerometer provides a protective sleep mode to prolong the length of your tip. With the 65W power rating, it heats to 360 Celsius in under 8 Seconds. Main Features 65W rated output (24V Input). Interchangeable Tips (<$10 Each). Accelerometer puts the unit to sleep automatically Runs excellently off LiPo Batteries in the field (Drill or Quadcopter or Car Battery). Also runs off most Laptop power supplies that you have around. Solid construction, fairly tolerant of being thrown in a field bag. Open Source Firmware allows feature additions. TS100 by Miniware firmware Over seven months ago I wrote about the new to me TS100 soldering iron, which I started a fork of the firmware for. Over this period both the firmware, I initially wrote to provide a menu system for configuration has evolved to provide more and more features at the request of users. Miniware have now released the 2017 update to their offical firmware which adds a nice menu system to the iron as well! So both are worth checking out. ...

AFE for BMS Design 2 - Schematic Capture In part one of this series I looked at the inital concept of what an AFE is and a basic outline. In the previous post I presented the follow ideas for the design of the system : 9-15S LiPo battery (BQ76940) 100mA balance current 40A continuous duty current shunt, 50A peak PCB area less than 10x10cm panel LED SOC indication Ability to communicate to an external display to show detailed information Temperature sensing inside the battery pack Track the health of the pack Looking at this design, I selected to use a companion controller to work with the AFE for the inital design of this BMS. This is not technically required, and if you wish to impliment your own the schematic is almost identical except swapping the companion controller out for your selected device. ...

Getting Started with AFE’s for BMS design. Analog Front End IC’s are becoming more popular from major IC manufacturers. These chips are designed to wrap all the analogue circuitry required for the design and operation of a BMS system up into a small package. Reducing design and programming time for the designer(s). This forfill a useful segment of the market where the application may want different design parameters to a normal BMS design, or even just for learning the operation modes of a BMS. Texas Instruments makes a series of chips in the BQ769x0 line. These 3 forms of the chip cover usage cases for 3 to 15 series cells in the battery pack. However other manufacturers have created similar devices. Some, like TI, integrate the ADC and voltage reference on the same IC. For other brands a separate external ADC is required, this allows for higher accuracy at the cost of increased circuit complexity. ...

LiPro PCB LiPro Micro The LiPro Micro provides state of charge monitoring, passive balancing and safety discharge for lithium batteries. The key benefit to utilising the LiPro Micro on your battery pack is the high accuracy balancing of the internal cells, prolonging the life of the battery. The key features of the LiPro Micro: State of Charge display (Based on cell voltage curve) Cell balancing (to within 5mV total error) Safety discharge after 7 days idle If pack sits at a high voltage for a long period of time the unit will discharge the pack down to a safer voltage level to prevent cell damage Very low power usage. (<100uA) Designed for LiPo and LiFePo4 (LiPo 4.1/4.2/4.3/4.35/4.4V & LiFePo4 3.6v) – Default profile supports most LiPo packs – Different curves can be selected to suit the connected pack – 3-5 Series cells supported (solder bridges on the back to select cell count) Operation Connect the small PCB to your battery’s balance plug. The board comes with a JST connector populated, this is normally a 3S but 3,4 or 5 is available on request. This is also very easy to change if you are used to soldering. ...

WARNING If you are planning to use the SPI method on a raspberry pi 1, compute module 1 or a pi zero, please read the extra instructions at the end of the page. These devices require a driver patch & kernel rebuild. (Its not hard, just slow). Secondary SD For one of my upcoming projects featuring a raspberry pi zero, extra internal storage is required and I wanted to keep the USB port free for connecting as a OTG connection. ...

Most of my current projects are using the very, very nice stm32f103 series of chips, as these provide excellent performance per dollar cost. The embedded DMA in these chips is a massive help in getting a project up and running without any struggle for cpu power. I find the DMA documentation to be lacking at best with getting this system up and running using the new HAL drivers from STM. While this is actually quite an easy system to get up and running, I could not find any nice notes on how the system should be setup and things to be aware of. ...

TS100 The ts100 is a portable DC powered soldering iron released by minidso. The unit offers between 25-70W of output power at the tip depending on the input voltage, and has removable tips (Not compatible with other irons as far as I know). Sadly the unit is crippled with their system for changing settings, while the unit supports nice options such as a customizable cutoff voltage; wake on motion, and automatic sleep times. They decided to make these options only available to be changed using the USB connection to the computer. ...

#Talking to a I2C EEPROM using the STM32 HAL libraries This mostly a note to my future self. This code is based on the excellent answers provided at the ST forums, but combined here as a complete class. This was used to talk to a standard I2C EEPROM, 24LC256. The following header file definitions are required for the class : #define EEPROM_ADDRESS 0xA0 #define EEPROM_MAXPKT 32 //(page size) #define EEPROM_WRITE 10 //time to wait in ms #define EEPROM_TIMEOUT 5*EEPROM_WRITE //timeout while writing #define EEPROM_SECTIONSIZE 64 These setup the I2C address, the maximum page size of the EEPROM (32 used here for compadability). along with the timeouts. Section size is used internally similar to a ‘bucket’ that each object stored, is stored in. ...

Converting the Reaver Pro to run stock OpenWRT I bought one of the Reaver Pro units a fair while ago back when they were more useful.. Now that most routers have protection against the WPS exploit it has become mostly useless. However the unit itself is actually a really nice Alfa Networks HornetUB2 with upgraded Flash to 16MB and Ram to 64MB. Problem The U-Boot used on the router does not support the setenv command, and the unit comes with the memory boot location hard coded to 0x9f050000 which is NOT what all the documentation online appears to refer to. ...

Project Zero : The RAM In continuation of the development of Project Zeta, the small compact Z80 based microcomputer that I am slowly learning on, comes the next installment.. The RAM board! Now this is actually performing double duty as the ROM as well, as the inital plan is to program the RAM at boot with the program that the system is to be executed. Design The RAM board is designed to provide a nice simple breakout for two 32k SRAM IC’s onto the memory bus for the Z80, nothing fancy here, no bank switching or real logic. We utilize two logic gates (7432 OR gates) to decode the output gating and the write enable on the two chips. Along with an inverter on the A16 line of a single transistor. ...