As many will already know, we lost a guiding light in the Rock World last week, Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. I am reposting the message from the other bandmembers here, being one of the first bands I ever listened to of this genre. As someone with mental illness, seeing
As quickly as it came round again, the festival is over. The yearly photos are over here, along with some extra content in the form of Demolition Download videos – brought to us by Battle Heritage UK! Enjoy. Normal service will resume shortly 😉 00
Here’s something different – below is a standard domestic carbon monoxide alarm, (I did a teardown of the same detector here), but in this case it’s not detecting any carbon monoxide, but another gas in the surrounding atmosphere. We recently had an issue with these detectors on board the boat,
Continue readingCarbon Monoxide Alarm Cross Sensitivity – Hydrogen
It has come to my attention via Google’s Webmaster Tools, that they’re reporting that malware has been found on my blog here, and are apparently going to issue site malware warnings to people about this when they click on links to this site. However it seems even Google can’t tell
Over the past few weeks, the host I’ve been with for over 3 years, OVH, announced a rather large price increase of 20% because of Brexit – the current universal excuse to squeeze the customer for more cash. This change has sent the price of my dedicated server solution with
As I mentioned in the previous post, these heaters have a standard interface that’s used for control & diagnostics, the W-Bus. This is transmitted over the K-Line of the vehicle bus, and all heaters, regardless of firmware modifications done by the various car manufacturers respond to this interface. Official Webasto
Continue readingJaguar S-Type Aux Heater / Webasto Thermo Top V Part 2 – W-Bus Diagnostics
Here’s another Diesel-fired heater related project – these Webasto heaters are fitted to Jaguar S-Type cars as auxiliary heaters, since (according to the Jag manual), the modern fuel-efficient diesels produce so little waste heat that extra help is required to run the car’s climate control system. (Although this seems to
Continue readingJaguar S-Type Aux Heater / Webasto Thermo Top V Part 1 – Teardown & Cleaning
I wrote a few weeks ago about replacing the hot water circulating pump on the boat with a new one, and mentioned that we’d been through several pumps over the years. After every replacement, autopsy of the pump has revealed the failure mode: the first pump failed due to old
Continue readingnb Tanya Louise Heating System – Oxide Sludge
Here’s a chap eBay USB-To-Ethernet dongle I obtained for use with the Raspberry Pi Zero. This one is getting torn down permanently, as it’s rather unreliable. It seems to like having random fits where it’ll not enumerate on the USB bus. The silicon in the ICs will eventually make it
This is a cheap little eBay reader to replace my ~10 year old multi-reader that very recently died. My original was an 8-in-1 version, but as I never read anything else other than SD cards these days, a little USB dongle version was more convenient. The layout is very minimal,
Having been a user of ownCloud for a long while, I decided to jump ship to the fork NextCloud for a few reasons, but the main one is that I never managed to get ownCloud to update itself (with the built-in updater app in the Admin panel) without completely shitting
After having a couple of the cheap Chinese PSUs fail on me in a rather spectacular fashion, I decided to splash on a more expensive name-brand PSU, since constantly replacing PSUs at £15 a piece is going to get old pretty fast. This is the 30A model from Mercury, which
In a word, no they aren’t any good. As usual, cheap doesn’t equal good, and in this case the cheapo clones are a total waste of money. Read on for the details! I’ve been looking into using a cheap Chinese clone Honda GX35 engine to drive an automotive alternator as
The other day I was given a random pile of car electronic parts from the scrap bin at the local garage, so I decided to do a few teardowns. This first one is a Temic Central Locking / Immobiliser module from a Mercedes van. Judging by the 125kHz stamped on
Continue readingMercedes Benz Temic Central Locking / Immobilizer Module Teardown
My new DMM I posted about a while back came with PC software & drivers for the RS-232 interface, on a CD. I haven’t used CDs for some time, so I had to dig out my USB drive. The Tenma website doesn’t list the software for all their models, so
Here’s another random gadget for teardown, this time an IR remote control repeater module. These would be used where you need to operate a DVD player, set top box, etc in another room from the TV that you happen to be watching. An IR receiver sends it’s signal down to
For some time now I’ve been running a large disk array to store all the essential data for my network. The current setup has 10x 4TB disks in a RAID6 array under Linux MD. Up until now the disks have been running in external Orico 9558U3 USB3 drive bays, through
Here’s a useful tool for testing both power supplies & batteries, a dummy load. This unit is rated up to 60W, at voltages from 1v to 25v, current from 200mA to 9.99A. This device requires a 12v DC power source separate from the load itself, to power the logic circuitry.
To do some upgrades to my NAS, I needed some SATA power adaptors, to split the PSU out to the planned 16 disk drives. eBay has these for very little money, however there’s a good reason for them being cheap. The marking on the wire tells me it’s 18AWG, which
Well it’s time for a new DMM. After the last pair of eBay El-Cheapo Chinese meters just didn’t last very well, I decided a proper meter was required. This one is a Tenma 72-10405, stocked by Farnell for under £60. Not quite as many festures as the cheapo Chinese meters,
As one of my current projects involves a small petrol engine – a Honda GX35 clone, I figured an hour counter would be very handy to keep an eye on service intervals. (More to come on the engine itself later on). I found a device that would suit my needs
Continue readingInductive Hour Counter / Tachometer – Petrol Engines
Overview Time foe some more retro tech! This is a 1980’s vintage CCD-based VHS camcorder from Panasonic, the NV-M5. There are a lot of parts to one of these (unlike modern cameras), so I’ll split this post into several sections to make things easier to read (and easier to keep
Here’s a small flyback / Line Output Transformer from a portable colour TV set. Usually these transformers are vacuum potted in hard epoxy resin & are impossible to disassemble without anything short of explosives. (There are chemical means of digesting cured epoxies, but none of them are pleasant). This one
Continue readingCRT Flyback / Line Output Transformer Destructive Teardown
Here’s a useful buck-boost DC-DC converter from eBay, this one will do 36v DC at 6A maximum output current. Voltage & current are selected on the push buttons, when the output is enabled either the output voltage or the output current can be displayed in real time. Here’s the display
These solar flowers were being sold off at my local Tesco, a pair of them appeared thanks to my child 😉 They have a small solar panel on top, when they’re exposed to bright light, the flower & leaves move as if they’re being blown in a breeze. Since one