The TS80 TS80 by Miniware The TS80 is an interesting spinoff from the TS100. Origionally called the TS200, it was intended to fill the market gap for an even more portable solution for soldering in the field. The soldering iron is designed to be powered using QC power banks at either 9V or 12V. The markings on the unit state 9V 2A (~18W). Which is a really low wattage for a typical soldering iron....
RUIDENG TC64 The RUIDENG TC64 is a very low cost (<$15) USB-C inline power meter. It’s small with a very nice colour OLED screen. It tries to automatically detect if the USB lines are running in a few modes (QC, DCP etc). This unit is very handy for measuring the power consumption of USB-C devices, and it is moderately accurate (Good enough anyway for the price). It’s over on BangGood over here...
When you download the installer from microsoft from an office365 subscription, you are forced to install Onedrive alongside all of the rest of your applications in your bundle. I have found discussed online that you can use the ODT (Office Deployment Tool) to install these programs individually instead, as well as create an offline installer to let you save bandwidth on multiple installs. This is a quick walkthrough to help those of us who dont want to read forums :)....
All good projects will eventually need to be debugged. This is a walk through from starting in CubeMX through to setting up debugging using either a UART or the SWO trace cell in the cortex-M ARM core. This was setup and tested on the black STM32F407VET6 development boards that feature a full size JTAG connector. I’m using a Segger J-Link here, however this works the same using the ST STLinkV2 as far as I’m aware....
In the new release of firmware for the TS100, I have moved the system from using a software-driven bit-bang of the output to hardware-based timers. The issue here is that we cannot just use normal PWM! Why can’t we just use normal PWM? Soldering Iron drive Schematic The above image shows a small extract from the TS100 schematics, with the PWM signal from the STM32. The soldering iron tip is driven by the back to back MOSFETs(Q1A/B)....