Recently an LED in the house went dark, and usually I'd just throw it out and replace it. This time I thought it was a bit rude as the bulb is nominally rated 30000 hours and it had only been in for around 100 hours.
Two possibilities:
1. The bulb was not up to spec
2. The variations in AC voltage at our place was too much for it
Either way I could see some clear marks from a possible short, and so I wanted to open it up and take a look.
The result is a little bit of a boring video, but nonetheless "illuminating". Also, breaking into the device was a bit of a laugh.
I saw a beautiful shiny bauble in the online shop that turned out to be unobtainium!
Recently Great Scott did an AliExpress based video where he was trawling through Chinese datasheets trying to gain access to a particular piece of hardware.
Oh, Great Scott - how much time I have wasted in this exact same situation!
Case in point, a lovely looking Air105 based module. Would I have bought it in hindsight? Yes! Who doesn't like unobtainium and unicorns??
For around $5 I received a very impressive module AND a camera to suit. Yummy!
And look at those specs!
Of course, unicorns may fly very fast, but first you have to catch one and communicate with it - not so easy!
The main issues for me revolved around having to:
1. learn a new programming language to talk to this thing (lua) as well as,
3. the majority of the support/software is Chinese based as well!
After much faffing about and grumbling I had to eventually concede defeat. I am going to check in from time to time to see if some geniuses have made this lovely piece of hardware accessible for dumbos like myself (e.g. via an Arduino IDE based library)
Recently I was basking in the noise and fragrance of World Superbikes when I noticed some flashing lights. Atop the safety cars were red repeater lights and I started to wonder if that could be reproduced using a breadboard and a 555 timer.
It turns out that two 555 timers are required and that is exactly what is in a 556 IC.
I modelled the circuit using two 555 chips because of the limitations of the software, but built it using a 556 as seen below.
Apart from a little hiccup involving some missing links between trigger and threshold, the circuit works really well, exactly as simulated.
In fact, I attached it to an actual car for that final dash of realism to compare it to the original safety car footage from Phillip Island!
