Experimenting With 20 Meters Of Outlet Adapters

You may have seen some of the EEVblog dumpster dive videos, where [Dave Jones] occasionally finds perfectly good equipment that’s been tossed out. But this time, rather than a large screen monitor, desktop computer, or a photocopier, he features a stash of 283 electrical outlet double adapters that he found last year. He decided to perform a test in the parking lot, connecting all 283 adapters in series.

Using a pair of power meters and a 2 kW electric heater as a test load, [Dave] and his son [Sagan] measure the loss through this wild setup. It works out to about about 300 W, or roughly 1 W per adapter. He did a follow-up experiment using a FLIR thermal camera, and confirmed that the power loss is reasonably uniform, and that no single rogue adapter consuming all the lost power. After a back of the envelope calculation, we estimate this chain of adapters is about 20 meters long, making this whole thing entirely pointless but interesting nonetheless. Stick around until the end of the video for a teardown — they’re not as cheaply made as you might think.

[Dave]’s crazy experiment aside, we do wonder why someone had so many adapters to throw away in the first place. What would you have done with 283 adapters — left them in the dumpster or rescued them?

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Stun Gun Vs 220v Mains Electricity

Those fearless Ukrainians are at it again! This time around they’re giving wall outlets some high voltage stun gun shocks and observing the results, as [Kreosan] decided to see what would happen when you use a stun gun on mains electrical sockets. Surprisingly, they are still alive and well, and creating more videos. .

Shocking a light switch blew up some light bulbs, while shocking an extension cord with a TV plugged in blew the TV up. It seems these guys never run out of appliances to fry, or totally insane experiments to try out that no one else would really have the stomach for.

Although their experiments are on the extreme side of things they do know what they are doing, as they are electrical professionals, So maybe sit this one out unless you too really know what you are doing and understand the risks. The video is below the break for your enjoyment.

We have featured some of their equally scary hacks in the past, like mains voltage EL wire and wirelessly charging your phone from high voltage overhead power lines.

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Make Munich Was Awesome

It was a good weekend to be geeky in Bavaria. In addition to our own Hackaday Prize Bring-a-Hack party, there was the reason that we scheduled it in the first place, Munich’s independent DIY expo, Make Munich.

If you’re a loyal Hackaday reader, many of the projects would seem uncannily familiar. I walked in and was greeted by some beautiful word clocks in both German and English, for instance. Still, seeing the Open Theremin being sold with an “as seen on Hackaday” sticker made us smile. And then we had a great conversation about [Urs Gaudenz]’s other project: DIY biological apparatus, also seen on Hackaday.

There were robots galore. Someone (from Gmünd?) was driving around a graffiti-bot and spraying the floor with water instead of paint or chalk to very nice effect. The full evolution of the Zoobotics robot family was on display. Even the Calliope (a German version of the micro:bit) booth had this cute Bluetooth vibrobot. Join me after the break as I dive into all of the great stuff on display over the weekend.

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