Electronics
- Seedling A vintage photo booth: retro outside, digital inside A photo booth I built myself: wooden and retro on the outside, digital inside, with prints from 10×15 cm to A4 and an online album for guests. Build details still to come.
- Budding Controlling a Dimplex VFMi storage heater without its original controller Charging and discharging are two independent circuits: a contactor switches the heating elements, a thermostat runs the fan, and the ED signal only caps the charge.
- Seedling Pump noise causing false triggers on Raspberry Pi GPIO Just plugging the pump into the socket triggered an interrupt on an input with a long cable. The fix to try: an optocoupler at the Pi end.
- Budding Quieting a buzzing transformer in an APC Back-UPS CS 500 The charging transformer’s loose core was buzzing. A drop of cyanoacrylate in the gap, and now you can only hear it from a metre away.
- Budding A GPS module sent garbage instead of NMEA: it was RS-232, not TTL Repeatable garbage on the serial port and −5 V on a data line. An RS-232-to-TTL converter fixed it.
- Budding Fixing a tunable-white LED ceiling lamp by replacing its insides The driver in a Wofi tunable-white lamp died. Instead of hunting for the faulty transistor, I fitted a 24 V supply, a CCT controller with a remote and a COB strip – for about 120 PLN.
- Budding Powering a Raspberry Pi from a 24 V AC irrigation line Rectified 24 V AC gives about 35 V DC – too much for typical buck modules. And the under-voltage warning turned out to be the USB cable’s fault.