Bastelkram

A few months ago I came into posession of a small safe. Okay, that sounds like I stole it. (Which I did not!). Let me phrase that differently.

A few months ago, someone sold me a safe without the combination. That sounds like I bought a stolen safe, so just marginally better.

A few months ago I bought a house, which happened to have a safe in it. The sellers inherited the house and didn’t know the combination.

Short story unnecessarily long, I had a safe and no combination to open it.

After a short break, here is the first part about the redesign of the Saike 858D rework station (Overview).

Let’s talk about a rough block diagram for the new design.

The next part in the series about reverse engineering the Saike 858D rework station (Overview) brings a few measurements, I did in my device. It presents me with the problem, that I am not sure anymore if I want to keep the transformer, currently used in the station.

Recently, I posted the teardown of my Saike 858D SMD rework station. Now it is time to really reverse engineer the main PCB. Some of the parts are similar to other “flavors” of the 858D, but some seem to be different.

Quite some time ago I bought an SMD Rework Station at AliExpress. The station I ordered was a Saike 858D, which is one of the numerous versions of the 858D line of rework stations. The “original” model is probably the Atten 858D+ which Dave Jones from the EEVBlog also did a tool review on. My station was really cheap and I am, in general, glad that I have it.

However, as usual with cheap equipment, there is also a bit room for improvement. That is what I am trying to do here.

At the time, there is quite some discussion regarding air quality and pollution going on in germany. Some cities, like Stuttgart, have to deal with high levels of fine particle emissions. That is why some people came up with a simple solution to build a sensor network for air quality. They provide detailed instruction on how to build your own air quality sensor for about 25 Euros. So, if you want to participate, just head over to luftdaten.info

If you are anything like me [1], you like to have dedicated Services which do stuff for you. One of the Services I like in particular is pyLoad [2]. This program you be used to automatically load files from OneClick Hosters. This is esspecially useful if you run this on a small computer like the Raspberry Pi [3] and dump the downloaded data to a central Storage like a NAS.

There are lots of blogposts out there which detail how to install pyLoad on a RaspberryPi [4, 5, 6]. For most parts I don’t really want to say anything against these, but there was one point in particular that I dislike about all of these. This is the reason why I am now writing my own guide. So let’s get started.

I just had a small surprise when I was assembling circuits for my master thesis project. When I was wondering why the Arduino wasn’t working as expected I discovered the following “bug”. This missing soldering point is the ground for one PWM pin. Its probably my own fault for buying cheap Arduino replacements from sainsmart instead of the original Arduino boards.

Heute sollte die Bastelecke eine Beleuchtung erhalten. Hierfür habe ich mir beim freundlichen schwedischen Möbelhaust von nebenan eine Lampe der Sorte GODMORGON besorgt. Keine 10 Minuten nachdem ich die LAmpe zu Hause hatte, war auch schon die Gewährleistung vernichtet, da die Lampe eigentlich als Badezimmerlampe konzipiert ist, also einen Stromanschluss aus der Wand heraus erwartet. Statt dessen habe ich eine Kerbe in den Kabelkanal der Lampe gesägt und ein Kaltgerätekabel auf die richtige Länge gekürzt und montiert.

Da gestern Sonntag war, wollte ich keine Löcher bohren. Somit konnte ich heute erst die Festigkeit der Wand testen. Die mit einem 8er-Bohrer gebohrten Löcher waren dann auch gut passend für 10er Dübel. Mit jeweils drei dicken Schrauben wurden dann die beiden Winkel schonmal montiert und kurz getestet ob die Tischplatte denn auch passt und gerade ist. Ich bin schon ein kleines bisschen Stolz auf mich, dass die Platte so schön gerade geworden ist.