WaterWaiver
@WaterWaiver@aussie.zone
I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.
Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.
- Submitted 5 days ago to australia@aussie.zone | 1 comment
- Comment on Unexpected use of FR2 of the week: Phenolic gears 4 weeks ago:
There are some youtube videos of people machining them (sadly no phenolic smell is communicated though). Looks like you treat it like any other solid material: hobb or mill the teeth.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to electronics@discuss.tchncs.de | 4 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to electronics@discuss.tchncs.de | 0 comments
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
If you end up buying some flux then I’d recommend you also buy and try a block of violinist rosin:
www.ebay.com.au/itm/315948528490
You break it up and then dab chunks onto your joint whilst soldering. Some will melt off and then burn. From there it acts just like any flux: reduces the metal oxides, makes the solder suddenly flow (behave) a lot better and provides some level of temporary oxygen shielding with its off-gassing products.
Pros:
- Cheap
- Doesn’t smell awful
- Long working time (easy to use)
- Very simple ingredient (distilled pine tree sap) made by many manufacturers, so it will never go out of stock.
- Residues are non-conductive and can be safely left on your boards
- Residues are reasonably easy to clean (isopropyl & most board cleaners work; ethanol also works but tends to leave ugly white streaks)
Cons:
- Smoke is still harmful (smoke = incomplete combustion compounds)
- Residue is dark, unlike the transparent residue of many no-clean fluxes, so it can hamper inspectability for mass manufacture.
- Best handled with tweezers, otherwise your fingers end up feeling sticky (pine resin compounds are slightly sticky)
- Not Modern or youtube popular, so people will tell that it’s therefore bad or worse than other products.
I use it often, it’s my favourite for both big joints and fixing smd work. Grab some and try it :) The worst you will be out of pocket is a few dollars.
- Comment on Questions about the insides of this optocoupler (TLP250) 2 months ago:
Triangle is an amplifier and rectangle is a black box (“don’t worry what’s in here, we promise it’s not gremlins”).
I suspect that the box might be a biasing array for driving the two output transistors, but then I would also expect two wires to come out of it (one for each transistor) rather than a single combined wire.
Broadcom’s datasheet for their version of the part seems to be more akin to what I’m thinking:
Could be either. You’d have to decap the chip to find out, the datasheet writers thought these details were not important.
- Comment on Pretty part of the week: Ruishen RSCM11548 3-winding common-mode choke 2 months ago:
So many CMCs seem to be marketed based of visual appearance and hope. I guess maybe people already have a design that works, so they go for things that look like clones visually? Otherwise I don’t get how anyone would choose their product when there are alternatives with actual specs.
Another gripe: When the only datasheet available is a combined one with tables and graphs listing the specs of dozens of part variants. But yours isn’t on there. So you find two similar models in the list and mentally interpolate between the graphs whilst worrying whether or not this is a long-term supply item or some spares that a retailer is selling off from a custom order run.
- Comment on Pretty part of the week: Ruishen RSCM11548 3-winding common-mode choke 2 months ago:
I just realised how hard it would be to manufacture this thing.
Imagine having to bend those copper wires into that shape around an already-existing toroid ring. Or maybe they glue together a few pieces of ring?
- Comment on Pretty part of the week: Ruishen RSCM11548 3-winding common-mode choke 2 months ago:
It’s 50 bucks though. Too expensive of a date for me.
- Comment on Pretty part of the week: Ruishen RSCM11548 3-winding common-mode choke 2 months ago:
In the picture are 3 coiled wires, all sharing the same dark grey ring/toroid (but it looks yellow because it is wrapped in yellow kapton tape).
If you try and send the same signal through each of these 3 wires then they will all fight and cancel each other out (a bit like 3 people trying to through the same narrow doorway at the exact same time; no-one gets through). If the signals are different on each wire then they will get through fine (a bit like people going through a door at different times).
common mode chokes = choke/kill the signals that are common/same on all wires
You typically do not want common mode signals to exit your device and travel along wires, because then these wires act like radio transmitters. The exact reasoning for that is a bit more than I want to write here, but it’s best explained with some pictures and phrases like “you turned your cable into a monopole you doof, use more common mode chokes and think of England”.
- Submitted 2 months ago to electronics@discuss.tchncs.de | 14 comments
- Comment on A couple of community requests 2 months ago:
Chux Baku, I didn’t think I was doing much :)
AusTransport sounds nice. But what happens to the old communities, to avoid people using those? I don’t know if it’s possible to lock them and leave a notice, or unlist them somehow?
- Comment on As a novice at soldering, I now have an opinion about single-sided vs. double-sided breadboards 4 months ago:
Probably double-sided prototyping PCBs. The double-sided ones tend to be green (FR4 fiberglass resin), the single-sided orange (FR2 paper phenolic-resin).
Terminology varies, a lot of greymarket sellers use “veroboard”, “prototype board” and “breadboard” interchangeably.
The glue between the copper pads and the board itself tend to better with the double-sided boards, I agree with you OP :) Although this isn’t universal, I’ve had some nasty bare copper boards on FR4 where the pads pop off when you try to solder to them; and some old FR2 boards with really well adhered pads. I’ve read somewhere that this might (?) be due to moisture in the PCB boiling off when you put the soldering iron to a pad and that baking the board in an oven first can help, but I have not tried that. I suspect a lot of it comes down to the quality of adhesive used between copper and substrate.
- Comment on Customers suddenly find their new phones can't make calls or send texts 5 months ago:
I hesitant to say that this shouldn’t affect you. I’m sure that somehow, somewhere, Optus still managed to ruin your day. Hope it resolves SynopsisTant.
- Comment on NBN Co to accelerate higher speed tiers and launch multi-gigabit speeds in September 2025 5 months ago:
There are no changes to the nbn wholesale pricing of these speed tiers arising from the speed increases.
Interesting, however, are there not other fees and prices that need to be paid by the ISPs? ie it won’t be the same price for end users?
I am suspicious that they only talk about wholesale, not end user, pricing. They’re not directly responsible for it but they would have modelled it and then decided not to mention it in this article.
- Comment on Timeout errors in last few days 5 months ago:
Ditto three. Pages hanging too.
Lots of gastro cases in NSW the last few weeks, maybe server has it too. Make sure to take plenty of fluids.
- Comment on Opened an old scientific instrument to see if it works... 5 months ago:
I would recommend rinsing the vinegar away with water instead. It’s already completely dissolved, but the baking powder might not be if you add that undissolved. You don’t want to leave anything behind.
- Comment on Coles' and Woolworths' alleged land banking comes under the microscope, $30 million more given to watchdog for crackdown 6 months ago:
It’s not land banking. It’s land investment. We’re making the land better, more luscious, stronger.
