Li-ion DC-DC Battery Tech.

    A year ago, maybe two, I was not aware that Li-ion AA-type batteries were even a thing.  The closest thing I had come across, involved a Gofundme or Kickstarter idea that had 'ordinary' batteries sitting in a barely non-existent holder, with an even smaller DC-DC circuit module, that generated a constant output voltage for the duration of the battery life.  Thing was, it didn't work anywhere near as well as the developer suggested, and the people that funded the venture, ended up losing hundreds of thousands as a result.  But it appears to have got people thinking, and possibly was the chicken that ended up laying the egg I'm about to discuss. 

    Instead of dealing with 'ordinary' batteries, this new battery technology starts with high energy-dense Li-ion batteries.  Curious as to how they performed, I bought a handful of type AA's and a pair of PP3 type 9 volters.  The 4 AA's weren't cheap, costing $30, but that included the charger as well.  The PP3's were a more reasonable $6 each.

 

 

    Performance-wise, both types fared well.  The Liitokala brand, though fairly well regarded, claim a ludicrous 1100mAh capacity.  Their actual capacity is closer to 350mAh.  Instead of fibbing, Liitokala should instead have listed the battery capacity in Wh, which provides a more accurate capacity measure where DC-DC supplied outputs are involved - in this instance, between 3.1 to 3.2Wh from my measurements.

    The Hixon AA batteries more sensibly use Wh for claimed-capacity from the get-go.  The battery manufacturer itself seems highly regarded, and my measurement results would tend to bear this out.  Rated at having 3500mWh capacities, all four AA batteries measured significantly higher in my testing, coming in between 4.3 and 4.4Wh.

    The main downside with this type of DC-DC battery is that you have no clue as to their remaining state of charge.  A secondary unexpected annoyance is that, in use, they supply power for appreciably less time than say, NiMH batteries.  This became evident over the Christmas period when I was using them to power Christmas lights.  The reason is obvious when you think about it.  Their constant voltage output means that they provide constant power for the duration of their charge - in my case, the lights maintain max brightness - whereas Nimh battery voltage drops appreciably as they discharge, so lights glow less brightly, but for a longer time.

    In summary, it's interesting tech, but not jaw-dropping.  Certain electrical appliances whose performance are effected by voltage fall-off while running, will benefit.  But generally, normal rechargeables will do just fine.  I won't be ordering more any time soon.

 

UT-210E Clamp Meter Repair...

     Another quick post, and a tip of the hat to the New Year.

    I'm sure I've raved about it already in a past post, namely, that I'm a huge fan of the UT-210E Clamp Meter.  I bought my 1st (of 3) around about 2015, well before the dirty little secret of how capable they were became common knowledge.  As a result, at the time, they were cheap - my first cost just €20 & change!!!  This is the meter pictured below, along with the original, broken LCD.

 

    This damage came about as a result of my throwing in disgust a DC power monitor that I had just bought, in the meter's general direction, when I discovered what a piece of shit it was.  Unfortunately, it came housed in a hefty anodised aluminium case, so was akin to whacking the meter with a hammer!

    On realising what had transpired, my second impulse was to toss the meter in the rubbish bin - I had already realised my first impulse - to take an actual hammer to the offending power monitor!  After a cooling-off period, I went scouring the internet for a replacement LCD, and after failing in that pursuit, I figured the only recourse left was to order a replacement UT-210E, this time priced €30-something.  The broken one I boxed for posterity.

    That was 5-6 years ago.  In the interim, I had purchased my third UT-210E, though at a much inflated price, in the region of €45-50.  More time passed, right up to about 2 months ago in fact, and while perusing the web, came across Sellers asking €62-€65 for the same meter, which got me wondering if anyone was now selling LCD's for a meter that was now costing 3 times what I had originally paid for it.  Lo And Behold, there was - UNI-T themselves, as it turned out - and for €20.48 to be precise - I jumped at the chance!!!

    

 

    Probably the most satisfying €20 I've ever spent - yeah, I like my UT-210E's.
         

My Metal Detector Missive...

     I recently bought on AliExpress, a Tianxun, TX-850 metal detector.  This I'm sure I read at some time or other, is a direct copy of a once high-end American design, virtually identical in everything, but price.  Indeed, I don't think I've seen one negative review of it on YouTube, even if it was a reluctant 'thumbs-up' from one or two 'Purists' out there!  I'd love to be able to tell you that I've put it through its paces, and found it to be a winner, but I can't - as it's still sitting unused in the corner, and will likely remain so, til summertime.

    My only real critique thus far is the volume-control omission - what was the designer thinking!!!  It's ear-splittingly loud, a major distraction, I would have thought, not to mention, no friend, where battery longevity is concerned - a single 9V PP3-type.  So, headphones with a means of adjusting the volume is a must-have.

    While this is the first metal detector I've ever bought, it's not the first one I've owned.  Or, 'Built', rather.  My first build was a simple affair, based around an equally simple circuit, that I came across in the long defunct Practical Electronics (P.E.) magazine. Its regular, "Ingenuity Unlimited" feature-article, consisted mostly of  P.E. reader's circuit submissions.  This design worked, but had rather low sensitivity.  It was however easy on the 9V battery, a important consideration to an 'always-broke' teenager, when Zinc-carbon batteries were the norm, and the only rechargeable option then available was expensive, 'then-hi-tech', Ni-Cads.

    But as 'much always wants more',  I finally got the chance when P.E. published Andy Flind's, 'Magnum Metal Detector', project.  This proved far more capable, and another defunct entity, Maplin Electronics, took much of the heavy lifting out of the build, by supplying the necessary PCB's, electronic components, knobs, case & meter - easy-peasy!  A PDF of the project, that I scanned & uploaded as a torrent decades ago, also available from Maplin, is downloadable from here. 

 

 

   The only challenge remaining was construction of the detector head - which proved a major pain!  Not the coils per-se, but the coils enclosure.  The head proved ultra-sensitive to false triggering, a slight bump off the ground being all that was needed to set it off.  I remember scouring the local hardware store in the search for a suitable enclosure, in the guise of  a 'heavy-duty' flower pot, or the like, but all in vain.  I finally settled on gluing the coils assembly to a piece of extremely strong resin-type material, a sheet of which I came across at the place I then worked, then gluing this inside a typically flimsy flowerpot base.  This worked wonders where false-triggering was concerned, though still far from perfect, but the best I could manage back then.

    All done more than 40 years ago - how time flies!

Morse Tutor Reprise...

     Another quick post.  This involves a little program I wrote on the Oric Atmos, way back in 1992 - so over 30 years ago!  The Atmos was not my first computer - that distinction belongs to the Sinclair 48K - but it was my first love, in the silicon sense, and still is.  In fact, I still have, and dust off, my Oric setup on occasion, which is more than I can say about the rest of my 'retro' computer collection.

    Anyway, I acquired my Oric computers (1 Atmos, & 2 Oric-1's) during my time in the UK.  I also subscribed to an enthusiast-run magazine, the 'Oric User Monthly', (OUM), published by the irrepressible Dave Dick.  'Published' is probably too strong a word - this was pre-internet, so we're talking about dot-matrix printouts, that needed to be photocopied and posted out by Dave to subscribers, no doubt, an arduous task.  When I first joined, OUM had well over 100 subscribers - a number which only grew.  Before long, I had resolved to learn to program in 6502 assembly, and what better way to start, than to code something substantial, involving a subject I knew practically nothing about, but that had always interested me - morse-code.

    Long story short, over the course of about 2 months, I wrote a 'Morse Tutor', a little program that allowed the user to both listen to, and key in, morse-code.  I then sent it to Dave Dick, hoping that he'd include it on the Oric User Disk, that was published a couple of times yearly.  Needless to say, I was chuffed when Dave said he'd add it to the upcoming disk.  He even reviewed it in the magazine, a gracious, yet balanced review, pointing out some of the issues he encountered.  Morse Tutor had some huge problems, the biggest of which involved the morse-encoding option.  Basically, there was no easy way of exiting the encoding loop, short of turning the computer over and jamming your pinkie into the Reset-button hole, in order to return to the program's Options Menu.  The scandalous thing was, I deliberately programmed it like this!  I figured that if people found it useful, they'd complain and I'd graciously fix it - thing is, no one complained, in all likelihood because they found it infuriating to use!

    And there things lay.  I had always planned a fix, if only for myself, but life got in the way.  Fast forward 32 years, six months ago, I finally had a look at it.  Fixing the 'stuck in loop' problem proved relatively easy, improving existing features, or adding new ones, has proven anything but!  Even though I still have the original source-code, it has been a real hassle trying to figure out how, say, the drop-down menus work.  As a result, right now, my enthusiasm for continuing is non-existent.  But I figure that by posting this, future-me will be cajoled into giving it another shot.  Only time will tell.

New Erying Computer Ahoy!

     And we're on a roll!  Another one, this time about my new computer, the latest in a very short line of current computer hardware that I've bought.  Given AMD's ongoing 'blitzkrieg' of favourable opinion in the computer press, I was sorely tempted, almost swayed, towards a Ryzen-based solution, but eventually ended up with an Intel setup.

     I came across Erying motherboards on AliExpress many months ago and was intrigued by the notion of low power, high spec laptop CPU's - many being pulled straight from laptop motherboards, so essentially, 'e-waste' - being reacquired and given a new lease of life, in desktop PC motherboards.  Since most laptop CPU's are now soldered straight to the PCB, it ends up a case of, 'til death do we part', as there is no way of upgrading the CPU.  And that's just the first 'caveat', of many!

     While Erying, the company behind my purchase, do supply boards with current Intel CPU offerings, these will almost double the final price of the motherboard being bought.  The much cheaper solution, and the route I chose, is to opt for their 'Engineering-sample' (ES) CPU's.  As the name implies, Intel & AMD, and probably any CPU manufacturer, provide sample chips to board makers etc. on the run-up to the final design being settled upon.  And from what I can see, there are a lot of these cheap ES chips about.

    Oddly enough, despite being classed as a 'work-in-progress', there seemed to be practically no one having issues with them in operation.  And thus far, that has been my experience as well!  But there is more than ES chips to contend with, at least with the board that I bought, so yeah, another caveat.

 

 

 

     Erying have a selection of boards where they have removed the main PCIe connector entirely, apparently because there were major issues (read, complaints) when a graphics card was fitted.  My purchase falls into this category.  Thankfully, all of Intel's laptop CPUs have integrated graphics, which is also not too shabby, but still not up to playing top-rated games.  Luckily, a game-player I'm not, so that's a moot point, but it would still have been nice to have had the option of a graphics card, for the likes of accelerated hardware-encoding of movies etc.  Alas, that will remain a pipe dream.  One plus, discovered recently, is that my ES CPU's integrated graphics, which was listed as having just 80EUs (Execution units), has in fact 96EUs, so there's that.  The actual CPU, though an ES, is based on the 13th Generation, i7-1360P laptop CPU, featuring 12 cores - 4 Primary, 8 Efficiency cores, 16 threads in total.

    That is just the motherboard, which cost €142.  I needed to buy 500GB of M.2 NVME storage, and 32GB of DDR5 memory, the combination costing €164.  I also bought a 550W power supply, that turned out to be not needed as the old Corsair 450W that I had,  proved sufficient.  Another purchase, not strictly needed - as much cheaper options are available on AliExpress - but I felt like treating myself, was a snazzy LED keyboard, having USB, Bluetooth, & 2.7G connections.  This cost €79.  Then there is the Erying 4-pipe radiator/fan combo, costing €28, and the AC9560 network card, costing €16.  Lastly, a mouse, which similarly, has both Bluetooth & 2.7G wireless connections.  This, and the accompanying mouse-mat,  cost another €16.  All housed in a case that had  been lying about, gathering dust for years, complete with DVD recorder.

 

    The final caveat with this build has gotta be the BIOS.  This appears to be a hacked version from American Megatrends, and as a result, many options don't seem to work correctly, or not at all.  Add to this, Erying is upfront in saying not to expect BIOS updates, like EVER!!!  While I think of it, another real annoyance was the discovery that the motherboard comes without a PS2 mouse/keyboard connector, but that was on me.

    But how does it run, I hear you ask!  Very well, as it happens!  It highlights just how slow the old Dell laptop (XPS M1210) runs with current OS's.  Having 1080p HEVC videos run silky smooth with barely 5% embedded graphics utilisation, was a real novelty for a while.  Even better was finding that the CPU supports HEVC (H265) hardware encoding!  Needless to say, AVC (H264) hardware encoding is also supported.  My excitement was tempered somewhat by the realisation that AV1 hardware encoding is not supported, even though Handbrake, the video transcoding app I use, will allow AV1-generated videos utilising the CPU.  It turns out from my experimenting, that large (2-3Gig) video downloads, transcoded with a constant video bit-rate of just 350K, will produce excellent quality, feature-length films of between 300-600Megs - one-third to one-quarter of the original in size!!!  While H265 & AV1 encodes end up with a similar file-size, I find that AV1 encodes at this low bit-rate, have practically no unwanted artifacts - in foggy/smoky scenes, for example - whereas they are intrusively obvious in HEVC encodes.

    The latest Linux distros, Mint 22 in this instance, also run silky smooth.  The only 'penguin in the ointment' I've discovered relates to the new keyboard & mouse - the BT connection option simply does not work with either, whereas it works perfectly with Windows 10!  I've tried posting for help online, to no avail so far.

    They say, 'there's no such thing as a free lunch', and this is partly borne out here as well.  Idling, the computer consumes about 30W - my laptop uses 25W.  100% CPU utilisation  sees the power consumed rocket to about 110W - flat out, the laptop's 2-core, 2 threads, consume 55W.

    In conclusion, caveats aside. I'm happy with my purchase.  The BIOS is really poor though.  Having obvious stuff like the CPU's fan running flat out 100% of the time, despite the BIOS having a comprehensive (non-working!) fan-configuration option sums it up.  Were I to have a glass-half-full moment, I would of course point to the Erying fan being rather quite in general.

Kauilepele's 'KpBlog.space' site, flushed...

     Quick one this.  I've had 'Kauilepele's' site tabbed in my browser for years.  I mentioned him a few years back in another post here.  On the one hand, his wishy-washy candles & incense new-age philosophy used to get on my nerves.  On the other, I guess I hoped at some level that there might have been something to that tat.  Well, from 2018 onward, his posts seemed to become increasingly despondent in tone, until two years ago, when he inherited the family home after the death of a parent.  Then nothing, no more posts.  His final entry can be seen below, or its full-text is available on the 'wayback-machine', here.

 

Well, in the last month, I noticed that the site has had an update;

 The hosting company has apparently flushed it, no doubt for non-payment of hosting fees.  I guess 'Love & Light', and what 'resonates' with New-agers, are insufficient recompense, when reality diverges from illusion.  On the plus side, that's one less browser tab that needs monitoring!!!

Why Does AliExpress Allow Fake Sellers....

 Crazy, 19 months since my last post here - where does the time go?!?!?!?

 And this one is mostly intended as a 'placeholder', to prevent my missing 2024 entirely, though hopefully, I'll fire off a few more before 2025 sees the light of day.

 First, AliExpress.  I'm after ordering quite a bit of stuff from them over the past 6 months, not least of which has been a computer upgrade - yeah, I finally have a computer with some horsepower again!  My last significant computer purchase was way, way back in 2006, which was the stodgy old Dell XPS M1210 laptop - dual core, Pro Duo CPU 32-bit, running at 1.83Ghz.  By today's standards, slow as fcuk, but back then, capable, but it wasn't cheap - if memory serves €1200 - which turns out to be four times what I've paid for the new arrival.

 But wait, I'm getting off track here.  The 'bee in my bonnet' at the mo, concerns the number of obviously fake Sellers that are turning up on AliExpress over the Christmas period, and why AliExpress seems to be doing nothing about them.  Right now, two examples will suffice.  First example involves the motherboard manufacturer Erying, coincidentally, from whom I bought my latest upgrade.  I bought mine for the very good price of €142.  But right now on AliExpress, a much higher spec board from the same manufacturer is purported to be selling for just €40.  See pics.

 

 

  This supposedly is from an EU Seller, yet is providing free postage, first red-flag.  Secondly, when you hover off 'Sold by', then click on 'business info', you are treated to a 'system error' being displayed.  So, ludicrously cheap price aside, these 'Sellers' don't even provide the Trader details that are required by AliExpress, yet are allowed to continue on scamming the naive & gullible.  The other example involves the ridiculously cheap EV bikes with fantastic specs, again, purportedly coming from EU Sellers.  There seems to be quite a few falling for this one in particular as there are a lot of reviews complaining that it's a scam.

 But what is the point in this, if AliExpress is the escrow agent, and all monies are held by it until confirmation of a valid sale?  And how do you define 'gullible Buyers'?  I for instance bought a metal detector a few months ago on Ali, at what I thought was a good price, €92 - usual price at the time was €110-€120.  What the Seller actually sent was a role of wallpaper, value, 5 Euros!!!  On contacting the Seller, I was told my only recourse was to open a Dispute with AliExpress.  I got stressed from sending photographic evidence and explanations of what I had received, to AliExpress, over the course of a few days.  The Dispute went in my favour, but it really put me off Ali for awhile.  I ended up successfully buying the same metal detector from a different Seller for €97.  One would think that AliExpress would come down, hard & fast, on Sellers like this.  Or maybe it's too big to realise, that these rats are out & about...