AA Battery Performances Tested, So Get The Most For Your Money

January 10, 2025 by Donald Papp 38 Comments

[Project Farm] has a video in which a wide variety of AA cells are analyzed and compared in terms of capacity, internal resistance, ability to deliver voltage under load, and ability to perform in sub-freezing temperatures. Alkaline, lithium, and even some mature rechargeable cells with a couple thousand cycles under their belt were all compared. There are a few interesting results that will can help you get the most from your money the next time you’re battery shopping.

The video embedded below demonstrates a set of tests that we recommend you check out, but the short version is that more expensive (non-rechargeable) lithium cells outperform their alkaline peers, especially when it comes to overall longevity, ability to perform under high-drain conditions, and low temperatures. Lithium cells also cost more, but they’re the right choice for some applications.

Some brands performed better and others worse, but outside of a couple stinkers most were more or less comparable. Price however, was not.

As for how different brands stack up against one another, many of them are more or less in the same ballpark when it comes to performance. Certainly there are better and worse performers, but outside of a couple of stinkers the rest measure up reasonably well. Another interesting finding was that among rechargeable cells that were all several years (and roughly 2,200 charge-discharge cycles) old, a good number of them still performed like new.

Probably the single most striking difference among the different cells is cost — and we’re not just talking about whether lithium versus alkaline AAs are more cost-effective in the long run. Some brands simply cost twice as much (or more!) than others with comparable performance. If you’re in a hurry, jump to [Project Farm] presenting the final ranked results at 19:45 in.

Relying on brand recognition may save you from buying complete junk, but it’s clearly not the most cost-effective way to go about buying batteries. These findings are similar to an earlier effort at wide-scale battery testing which also determined that factoring in price-per-cell was too significant to ignore.

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[Kerry Wong] Talks (and Talks) About A 300 MHz Oscilloscope

December 29, 2024 by Al Williams 10 Comments

There aren’t many people who could do an hour-long video reviewing an oscilloscope, but [Kerry Wong] is definitely one of them. This time, he’s looking at a UNI-T MSO2304X 300 MHz scope. The review might be a little long, but the scope — like many modern scopes — has a lot of features for measuring power, accommodating digital signals with an add-on pod, and protocol decoding.

The scope has a touchscreen and four normal inputs, plus two frequency generator outputs. You can also use a mouse or an external display. But, of course, what you really want to know is how the scope performs when reading signals.

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A Review That Asks: Do You Need A Thermal Camera?

December 29, 2024 by Al Williams 45 Comments

[Maker’s Fun Duck] has a recent video review of a cheap thermal camera from a company called Kaiweets, which you can see below. It checked all of his boxes: It was standalone, handheld, cheap, and not too cheap. The question is: does it work well for the kinds of things we would do with such a camera?

That’s a tricky question, of course, because everyone’s uses are different. Considering a soldering iron. A tiny one is great for working on PCBs, but lousy for soldering large coax connectors. A soldering gun works well for that purpose, but is too much for the PCB. The same goes for thermal cameras. Some are great for, for example, finding leaky parts of houses, but might not be so great at locating defective components on a PCB.

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Tweezers Probe Reviewed

December 25, 2024 by Al Williams 6 Comments

Over the last few decades, electronic devices have drastically changed. Radios that once had point-to-point wiring gave way to printed circuit boards with through-hole parts, and now microscopic surface mount devices are the norm. But most of us still use probes that would have been just fine for a 1940s receiver. There are other options, of course. Among other things, you can now buy meters that have built-in tweezer probes. While not the first, the FNIRSI LCR-ST1 are affordable, and [TheHWcave] puts them to the test in the video below.

The tweezers come with two different pointy ends. It is more or less one of those testers that can identify and measure various components. Instead of the customary socket, this one has tweezer ends and, perhaps, a few extra functions.

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Finally Putting The RK1 Through Its Paces

December 9, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 15 Comments

The good folks at Turing Pi sent me a trio of RK1 modules to put through their paces, to go along with the single unit I bought myself. And the TLDR, if you need some real ARM processing power, and don’t want to spend an enterprise budget, a Turing Pi 2 filled with RK1s is a pretty compelling solution. And the catch? It’s sporting the Rockchip RK3588 processor, which means there are challenges with kernel support.

For those in the audience that haven’t been following the Turing Pi project, let’s recap. The Turing Pi 1 was a mini ITX carrier board for the original Raspberry Pi compute module, boasting 7 nodes connected with onboard Gigabit.

That obviously wasn’t enough power, and once Raspberry Pi released the CM4, the Turing Pi 2 was conceived, boasting 4 slots compatible with the Nvidia Jetson compute units, as well as the Raspberry Pi CM4 with a minimal adapter. We even covered it shortly after the Kickstarter. And now we have the RK1, which is an 8-core RK3588 slapped on a minimal board, pin compatible with the Nvidia Jetson boards. Continue reading “Finally Putting The RK1 Through Its Paces” →

Reviewing The World’s 2nd Smallest Thermal Camera

November 7, 2024 by Al Williams 26 Comments

A thermal camera is a very handy tool to have, and [Learn Electronics Repair] wanted to try out the Thermal Master P2 for electronic repair, especially since it claims to have a 15 X digital zoom and 1.5 degree accuracy. The package proudly states the device is the “World 2nd Smallest Thermal Camera” — when only the second best will do.

The camera is tiny and connects to a PC or directly to a tablet or phone via USB C. However, it did look easier to use on the end of a cable for probing things like a PC motherboard. The focus was fairly long, so you couldn’t get extremely close to components with the camera. The zoom somewhat makes up for that, but of course, as you might expect, zooming in doesn’t give you any additional resolution.

He also compares the output with that of a multimeter he uses that includes an IR camera (added to our holiday gift list). That multimeter/camera combo focuses quite closely, which is handy when picking out a specific component. It also has a macro lens, which can zoom up even more.

We’ve looked at — or, more accurately, through — IR cameras in the past. If you are on a tight budget and you have a 3D printer, you might try this method for thermal imaging, but it doesn’t use the printer the way you probably think.

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KolibriOS: The Operating System That Fits On A 1.44 MB 3.5″ Floppy Disk

October 30, 2024 by Maya Posch 29 Comments

While most operating systems are written in C and C++, KolibriOS is written in pure x86 assembly and as a result small and lightweight enough to run off a standard 1.44 MB floppy disk, as demonstrated in a recent video by [Michael].

Screenshot of the KolibriOS desktop on first boot with default wallpaper.

As a fork of 32-bit MenuetOS back in 2004, KolibriOS has since followed its own course, sticking to the x86 codebase and requiring only a modest system with an i586-compatible CPU, 8 MB of RAM and VESA-compatible videocard. Unlike MenuetOS’ proprietary x86_64 version, there’s no 64-bit in KolibriOS, but at this level you probably won’t miss it.

In the video by [Michael], the OS boots incredibly fast off both a 3.5″ floppy and a CD-ROM, with the CD-ROM version having the advantage of more software being provided with it, including shareware versions of DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D.

Although web browsers (e.g. Netsurf) are also provided, [Michael] did not get Ethernet working, though he doesn’t say whether he checked the hardware compatibility list. Quite a few common 3Com, Intel and Realtek NICs are supported out of the box.

For audio it was a similar story, with the hardware compatibility left unverified after audio was found to be not working. Despite this, the OS was fast, stable, runs DOOM smoothly and overall seems to be a great small OS for x86 platforms that could give an old system a new lease on life.

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