In this post, I will document the build process for my mini portable server made from an old Bitcoin miner case and an Orange Pi Zero Plus. One day I was looking through my SBCs parts bin and saw the Orange Pi Zero Plus board(still in its packaging) I had bought many years ago but never used. I got the idea to make a small portable server that could maybe run an MQTT broker, act as an AP, run a web server, etc.
In this post, I will show you the contactless clamp power meter I made. I used a readily available SCT-013 current transformer clamp. The great thing about this is that you can measure the current flowing through a wire without having to put an amp meter in series with the load and source. This means you also don’t have to expose yourself to a potentially dangerous voltage.
In this post, I will show the spot welder I made. A spot welder is a very useful tool that can weld two pieces of metal by simply pressing them together and passing a high current through that small point. This causes that particular spot where the metals are pressed together to heat up sufficiently to melt and fuse them together.
In this post, I’ll show you how to program the ESP32 Camera board to live stream the video feed to your browser.
In this post, I’ll show the portable 100W LED torch floodlight I made. I originally bought the 100W LED and lens kit many years ago but have just recently decided I would finally make an LED flashlight out of it. A lot of the flashlights online usually don’t have a very large battery capacity and need to be recharged quite often if you use them for an extended period. The problem is a lot of those flashlights also use 16850 batteries that have to be taken out of the flashlight to be recharged with a charger. This prompted me to create my own flashlight with a large battery capacity that is also easily rechargeable without having to take out the batteries every time.
In this post, I’ll show you a Raspberry Pi microscope I made for soldering and inspecting PCBs. The great thing about it is that it has a long working distance. This enables the microscope to be mounted on the shelf above my workbench so it doesn’t get in the way. An additional benefit is that the image doesn’t shake if you bump the table when working.
In this post I will document some of my smaller projects that don’t deserve a whole blog post of their own.
In this post, I’ll show you how to make a cheap portable spectrum analyzer from a TV receiver dongle. The dongle gets sold as a TV (DVB-T) however its an SDR(software defined radio) which means that it can be used to receive pretty much any RF signal(depending on the chip used up to 1-2 GHz) and turn it into a digital one to be later processed by software.
In this post, I’ll show you my DIY FPV goggles. These obviously aren’t as good as proper FPV goggles but they are cheap, they work and I was able to make them out of things I already had at home.
In this post, I’ll show you a handheld induction heater I made. I bought the ZVS driver circuit board and coil quite some time ago but I just recently saw someone made a very neat 3d printed case for it on thingiverse and decided to make a handheld induction heater out of it. This one is smaller and much less bulky than the other one I made wrote about in this post.