Adventures of a Tech, avonturen van een techneut

Just a short one. I bought one of these things. It can do 50 volt 5 Amp, I have not looked at the quality of the output (noise, overshoot all unknown to me)  but should be alright to control a lamp, a battery or a strip of LED's is my guess. You can easily control the current and voltage output using a serial port. (a usb-serial-rs485 was provided) I seems to talk modbus protocol. To change the baud rate and modbus-slave-address, keep POWER button pressed during power on, this will enter you into the configuration menu. register list here : Register Map for this device. Function Description Number of bytes Decimal places UNIT Read/Write Register address U-SET Voltage setting 2 2 V R/W 0000H I-SET Current setting 2 3 A R/W 0001H UOUT Output voltage display value 2 2 V R 0002H IOUT Output...

Today I got a used APC UPS RS 1000, you know those things that should keep your system up and running when the power fails. The batteries where toasted, this happens to all these devices after about a year. Since new batteries only last a year and cost about $ 65 and can only keep your system up for a very short time I decided to hack something together. I got some brand new car batteries and hooked them up, (yes I included a fuse for safety) You might ask: "Do you really need a UPS in the Netherlands?"  Answer, "no, not really" but it is fun to have and since the UPS was free I now have some long lasting power. Here are some pictures. This is just a sort of useless nerdy fun. Power! the lights come on right away. OK, maybe 16 square mm wire is too much? General setup, 2 batteries and the UPS. And another picture. I will test the performance and add data later, I will leave this stuff loading the batteries for a few days.

A few days someone gave me a TS 201 RAID NAS made by Qnap to fix. http://www.qnap.com/useng/?sn=862&c=1697&sc=1698&t=1701&n=6731 It was very bad, the power light did not come on, it just pulsed a bit. The external power supply was broken, the capacitors 16V/1000uF swollen up. 12 Volt 5 Amps standard PSU, I had a spare so that was easily fixed. Trouble was not over, the device did not work. It beeped, lights were blinking, ugly noise from disk. Connecting to NAS did not go easily, I found the IP address by using NMAP (I assumed it was using DHCP) $ nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24 .. some known machines.. and Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.217 Host is up (0.00034s latency). Connect to the thing using a web browser did not work. type in :http://192.168.1.217/ click 'administration' That redirected to a webserver on port 6000 why? New rules in Chrome and Firefox, blocking ports including 6000. I got something like this very descriptive message : ...

Hack of today, wall wart mod for USA to Euro connector. When receiving a low cost piece of electronics often you find these US type flat pin connectors without a good way to connect to a European wall socket. (with round pins) Today I finally used one of the many power cables I have laying around, probably cut of an old CD player. I soldered the wires to the flat pins, added a tye rap, used some heat shrink. This only works when the PSU is universal (100-240 volts) I guess using just heat shrink is not official a good enough insulation :-) (do not try this at home), but it works just fine here.