TS100 Review

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)....

June 11, 2017 · 5 min · Ben V. Brown

AFE for BMS Design 2

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....

March 10, 2017 · 2 min · Ben V. Brown

AFE for BMS Design 1

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....

March 8, 2017 · 7 min · Ben V. Brown

LiPro Micro

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....

January 11, 2017 · 7 min · Ben V. Brown

Adding a secondary sd card on Raspberry PI

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....

December 10, 2016 · 8 min · Ben V. Brown