Giving A 6th Generation IPod A New Lease On Life

March 30, 2018 by James Hobson 13 Comments

It can be disheartening when a favoured device begins to break-down. Afflicted by an all-but-dead battery and a fritzing-out hard drive, Redditor [cswimc] sensed the imminent doom creeping up on their 6th generation iPod, and responded by reviving and upgrading the decrepit device instead!

It’s no easy task to crack open one of these things, so they found themselves taking their time and carefully wedging the pry tool between the front and back covers, working their way around the exterior. Once separated, gingerly disconnecting the few ribbon cables allowed the iPod to be opened fully. From there, they turned to swapping out the original hard drive for an iFlash dual SD card board — one of the cards turned out to be a dud, but 128GB is still a step up from 80GB — and a new 3000mAh battery. Combined with replacing the power-hungry HDD, the battery life has been overwhelmingly increased over the original’s 650mAh capacity!

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Great Emergency Lights From Not-So-Great UPS

March 24, 2018 by Jenny List 25 Comments

We know your shame. Like you, we wanted to save some scratch and bought the bottom-of-the-range UPS, only to discover that it is no use to man or beast as it lacks the power to perform any reasonable task. It’s now sitting in a corner, to gather dust as its batteries deteriorate.

Not so fast with the UPS abandonment! [rue_mohr] came up with a modification for a small APC UPS that turned it into something a little more useful. Removing the mains inverter from the picture with a few displaced wires and PCB mod, the UPS is now a 12V battery with a mains charger and power outage detection built-in. In this state it’s the perfect power pack for some 12V LED strips used for emergency lighting. There is a handy 3D print that fits the rear socket cut-outs on the US version of the device and provides apertures for a pair of DC power jacks.

This is a relatively simple hack, but we like it for taking the focus away from the obvious part of the UPS, its mains inverter, and turning to the batteries as the main event. It’s a relatively tiny device, but in the past we’ve featured a UPS at the other end of the scale being used for power back-up to a whole house. Meanwhile we’d like to take a leaf from the [BOFH]’s book, and recommend that the most important piece of infrastructure requiring a UPS is the sysadmin’s coffee machine.

Solar Power In A Can!

March 2, 2018 by James Hobson 17 Comments

When spending time camping, people often bring lanterns, flashlights, and the like — you might even bring along a solar charger. Instructables user [bennelson] is combining all your electrical powered needs by cramming solar power into a can.

Already designed to resist the elements, [bennelson] is using a 50cal. ammo can for a portable enclosure. Inside, he’s siliconed a 15AH, 12V lead-acid battery in the centre to maintain balance and to leave room for the wiring and storage. One cardboard mockup later, he laser-cut the top panel from 1/8″ plywood and secured a 20A solar charge controller, a four-in-one socket panel, and two banana plugs on its top face.

[bennelson] is using 12 AWG wire to match the 20A rating of the solar charge controller — including a fuse for safety — and lever lock-nut connectors to resolve some wiring complications. Industrial velcro keeps the top panel in place and easily removed should the need arise. When he’s out camping, he uses an 18V, 1A solar panel to charge, but can still use a DC power adapter to charge from the grid. Check out the full build video after the break!

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Monitor Power Consumption Of Low-Power Devices

February 28, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

Perhaps the most important consideration to make when designing a battery-operated device of any kind is the power consumption. Keeping it running for longer between battery changes is often a key design point. To that end, if you need to know how small programming changes will impact the power consumption of your device then [Daniel] has a great tool that you might find helpful: an ESP8266-based live power meter.

The power meter itself is battery-powered via a 600 mAh battery and monitors an e-paper module, which also displays information about power consumption. It runs using a NodeMCU and measures voltage and current across a 100-ohm resistor to calculate the power use, although the resolution does start to get noisy when the device is in standby/sleep mode. One presumes this could be solved by changing the value of the resistor in order to get more accurate measurements at the expense of losing accuracy during moments of high power consumption.

While this power monitor was built specifically to monitor power consumption on this particular e-paper display project, it should be easily portable into other battery-based systems that need fine tuning in order to maximize battery life. As a bonus, the display is already included in the project. There are ways of getting even more information about your battery usage, although if power consumption is important than you may want to stick with a more straightforward tool like this one.

Making Software Defined Radio Portable

February 5, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 20 Comments

While most smartphones can receive at least some radio, transmitting radio signals is an entirely different matter. But, if you have an Android phone and a few antennas (and a ham radio license) it turns out that it is possible to get a respectable software-defined radio on your handset.

[Adrian] set this up to be fully portable as well, so he is running both the transceiver and the Android phone from a rechargeable battery bank. The transceiver is also an interesting miniaturized version of the LimeSDR, the Lime SDR Mini, a crowdfunded Open Source radio platform intended for applications where space is at a premium. It operates on the 10 MHz to 3.5 GHz bands, has two channels, and has a decent price tag too at under $100.

For someone looking for an SDR project or who needs something very portable and self-contained, this could be a great option. The code, firmware, and board layout files are all also open source, which is always a great feature. If you’re new to SDR though, there’s a classic project that will get you off the ground for even less effort.

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Coin Cells: The Mythical Milliamp-Hour

December 22, 2017 by Elliot Williams 16 Comments

Just how much metaphorical juice is in a coin cell battery? It turns out that this seemingly simple question is impossible to answer — at least without a lot of additional information. The problem is that the total usable energy in a battery depends on how you try to get that energy out, and that is especially true of coin cells.

For instance, ask any manufacturer of the common 3 V lithium 2032 batteries, and they’ll tell you that it’s got 230 mAh. That figure is essentially constant across brands and across individual cells, and if you pull a constant 0.2 mA from the battery, at room temperature and pressure, you’ll get a bit more than the expected 1,150 hours before it dips below the arbitrary voltage threshold of 2.0 V. Just as it says on the tin.

What if you want to do anything else with a coin cell? Run an LED for a decade? Pull all the energy out right now and attempt to start a car? We had these sorts of extreme antics in mind when we created the Coin Cell Challenge, but even if you just want to do something mundane like run a low-power radio sensor node for more than a day, you’re going to need to learn something about the way coin cells behave in the real world. And to do that, you’re going to need to get beyond the milliamp hour rating. Let’s see how deep this rabbit hole goes.

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Ask Hackaday: Preserving Electronic Devices

December 20, 2017 by Dan Maloney 62 Comments

Conventional wisdom holds that we no longer make things to last for the long haul, and that we live in a disposable world. It’s understandable — after all, most of us have a cell phone in our pocket that’s no more than a year or two old, and it’s often cheaper to buy a new printer than replace the ink cartridges. But most of that disposability is driven by market forces, like new software that makes a device obsolete long before it breaks down, or the razor and blades model that makes you pay through the nose for ink. It turns out that most electronic devices are actually pretty well engineered, and as long as they’re not abused can still be operating decades down the road.

But what happens when you want to put an electromechanical device away and preserve it for a rainy day? What can you do to make sure the device will operate again a few years down the road? Are there steps one can take beyond the typical “keep it in a cool, dry place” advice? In short, how do you preserve electronic devices?

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