Adrian Smith – Page 2 – Adrian’s electronics blog

2 min 2

Bangood XL4016 adjustable voltage regulator first impressions

Adrian Smith
24/06/2020

I am building a basic power supply for a project and decided to try one of the XL4016E1 based regulator modules commonly available on eBay, Amazon and Bangood which is advertised as being able to handle an 8A / 200W load. I only need up to 2A for my project but at £7.99 it seemed […]

3 min 0

General

Convert cordless drill to lithium battery using RC lipo

Adrian Smith
15/06/2020

Surprisingly even now you can still buy power tools that come with NiCad batteries (not even NiMh) which are a poor choice of battery for power tools due to their memory effect and high self discharge rate. NiMh is a better choice of battery to use but I presume NiMh is cheaper hence why some […]

2 min 12

Using Arduino to control display module salvaged from LED sign.

Adrian Smith
31/05/2020

I came across someone selling parts from a large LED sign on ebay which by doing some research came from a Data Display LED board originally used for movie name, showtimes and price information display in a cinema lobby. Their part number could be DL110 as that’s the only number I can find on the […]

2 min 0

General

A scrolling message display using 3x 16×32 LED matrix modules

Adrian Smith
28/04/2020

This is another unfinished project; I started making a scrolling message display using the LED modules I used for my dual colour Pong Clock around 3 years ago. I managed to get it working to the point where a message can be sent via the serial interface (or a serially connected bluetooth module) and have […]

2 min 1

Projects

A constant current load using mosfet and LM358

Adrian Smith
26/04/2020

In my below post I mentioned that I am building a bench PSU however I am still waiting for the parts to arrive. I decided to make a constant current load in order to test the electronic fuse and the power supply itself. I had built one before but the mosfet kept blowing after a […]

2 min 0

Microcontrollers

ATmega328 eeprom damaged by power surge?

Adrian Smith
25/04/2020

I had a power surge the other day followed by power cuts that lasted around a second and another about 5 seconds later. Everything seemed OK in the house and even the oven clock was still working and that always reset during a brownout. However my garden watering timer was showing garbage on the LCD […]

2 min 4

General

Scrapping a crap UPS and trying to make a bench PSU from the transformer. (Waste of time)

Adrian Smith
15/04/2020

My Trust UPS battery failed on me last year and I was meaning to replace it but the cost of a replacement battery is almost equal to the cost of a cheap brand new UPS from dubious brands. I’ve always used APC SMART ups’s as they are very reliable and never seem to go wrong […]

1 min 10

Animated clock using 16×32 bi colour LED matrix modules

Adrian Smith
08/04/2020

I finally got round to finishing the improved version of my earlier pong clock which used two single colour 16×24 led modules with a built in controller. This version can display 3 colours and has several different modes to the earlier version and also it can display scrolling graphics from the popular retro game, pac-man. […]

1 min 3

General

New LED pong clock version coming soon

Adrian Smith
31/12/2019

Well time certainly seems to fly and it’s the end of another year. It’s been a year since I finished my LED animated Pong clock which I initially started about 3 years ago and I’ve been working on an improved version using bi colour LED matrix modules I obtained from a scrap advertising LED board. […]

1 min 0

General

12V lead acid battery tester completed

Adrian Smith
01/12/2019

I mentioned before I was going to make a 12 volt lead acid battery tester at one point. I’ve repurposed the single AA tester I had made back in 2017 and converted it to test higher voltage batteries. Without repeating myself from earlier posts I have just decided to keep this short and just put […]

2 min 0

Multiplexing seven segment displays on an Arduino

Adrian Smith
03/11/2019

I’ve made a few projects that use 7 segment displays with methods involving both using a chain of shift registers and multiplexing using the sevenseg library. In my most recent project I’d used 4x shift registers to drive 4 displays which worked well but was a pain to connect up and needlessly complicated. I have […]

1 min 0

A high capacity lithium battery tester with printout

Adrian Smith
20/09/2019

I mentioned a while ago I had made a version of my single AA cell tester which can test high capacity LiFePO4 batteries with a nominal voltage of 24 volts (8 cells) which I had made for work as we supply 30 and 60 amp hour batteries which need to be tested. I have finally […]