Electronics - IoT-Revolution Kft.

2024.06.10.2024.06.13.

Slave Box 2 wiring

Intro Slave Box 2 wiring

The owner of the house lost the remote controllers which was paired to the opener throughout the years. Now it seems he cannot by these old controllers anymore so he had two options. Buy a new opener which would be very costly or find a solution to use newer remote controllers. Obviously we went to implement the second option. This is now we arrived at today’s topic which is Slave Box 2 external radio board wiring to Exitec garage opener.

Investigation

When we opened the main unit of the garage opener we realized there is no exact ports, connections or other possibilities to hook on. The Slave box 2 requires input power to work and it has 2 NO/NC connector to use. This is what we needed to combine somehow to make our customer happy. Of course all the time when we need to do something like this we are very carefully measuring all ports, connectors voltages and write them down.

Solution Slave Box 2 wiring

After the initial investigation we tried to find relevant wiring and installation how to manuals. After several hours of searching without luck it turned out that there is no information available online. Right here would like to say “Thank you!” to all the installers whom we were able to reach as they were so kind and helped us with their expertise. So the solution is the following:

keep all the hooks/loops as if you remove them the gate will not work.
you can safely get the power from the infra port
you can use the gate port ground leg to have a signal which can be “transmitted” via the Slave Box 2 relay legs.
you need yo use proper wire size as the ports are not designed to handle thick wires.

External Links:

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2023.12.17.2023.12.17.

Solar street light repair

Solar street light repair intro

We bought a two new solar street light which we planned to mount on the street front of our property. After reading the manual it recommended to put it to direct sunlight for a day or two to make sure the battery will be charged. Unfortunately the batteries fried themself and we had no lights anymore this is where our solar street light repair story begins.

Investigation

After disassembling the unit it revealed its secret. The LiFePO4 battery “ran out” of juice literally and now it was showing short using a multi-meter. As we have lots of space in the lamp we decided to create a new battery set from our remaining 18650 cells.

Solution

We took our remaining cells and created a super huge capacity battery so our solar street light can light all now long even during the long winter nights. We created a 2S Li-Ion battery pack using BMS to make sure we will not over or undercharge the cells. We had this idea after we have measured the short voltage value of the solar cells. This was a mistake! The solar cells produce less voltage when they are under load… So after we created our battery pack we faced two issues: – we created a bigger pack and it did not fit [we forgot to calculate the size of the plastic holder] – the battery pack provided more voltage then the circuit was needed. Yes your are right we fried the PCB! 🙁

Solar street light repair tests results and future improvements

We have the following open topic:
– when disassembling something do not through away parts till you took photo of them. Even if they are leaking batteries

– do some test with labor power supply unit to make sure about the operation voltage of the system

– the lamps do not work
– we do not have a proper battery

– do not be afraid to use Google

– we did not solve the issue 🙂

process of making a battery pack half way

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2023.09.01.2024.06.13.

DIY Garden automation controller – Final Part

DIY Garden automation intro

In our previous post we showed what where the steps during the process of making our DIY garden automation controller. If you have not read them we highly recommend to read those entries. But back to track: in this entry finally all the components got connected and the first tests where conducted.

Investigation

We encountered several bumps just when we thought there is no more surprise will arise. First it turned out there the desired place of the water tanks are lower then the surface we would like to irrigate. So as you can see we have to move 2m3 dirt to have the right surface at the right place.
The final most ‘unwanted’ issue turned out to be the connection issue. The 2.4Ghz signal was not reaching our main Wifi router. Let’s solve this issue 🙂

Solution

So the connection issue. We tried several approach but nothing helped… After a few devastated minutes we realized that in our shelf we have a Wifi antenna which was brought to a different project but it has not been used. Let’s use it. Of course the male/female SMA connectors were not matching 🙁 Pfff … this is not good. Then again! We had some smd to SMA connectors in some of our boxes. We had luck and find one which made the connection possible. With the usage of a laser pointer we managed to mount the antenna correctly and we had signal!

DIY Garden automation tests results and future improvements

This is the lists where we have room for improvements:

The water level sensor can get ‘clogged up’ which results in incorrect readings. this is caused by the scale and the algae
It is highly recommended a physical water level detector just like with the submerged pumps because that’s more reliable
electricity goes through water obviously but it means that one of your cheap can generate unwanted-faulty ground connection [flow sensor]
Do not be afraid to use Google

DIY garden controller box on its final location

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2023.02.19.2023.02.19.

Repairing card shuffler #ReduceElectronicWaste

Intro

In this post we are a bit diverted from our main focus, but we feel this is an important topic which worth it. We would like to share our experience in repairing a card shuffler #ReduceElectronicWaste. In these days people tend to throw away electronic devices without any hesitation.

Investigation

So let’s dive into the details! After removing the screws and opening the device we again realized that simplicity rules :)! The two battery holder which are holding the four AA battery are wired in series and they are just soldered on the motors terminals. In the middle there is a push switch which can be operated by the user which is closing the gap between the battery holders and that is it. Then if it that simple what could go wrong? Well we assumed the the motors are operational so we did not check them one by one. We started to investigate the power terminals of the motors and realized that no power is provided to the terminals. Hmmm nice that is something! Using a multi meter we started to measure voltages on the battery holders. Wow! None of the compartments terminals have actual voltage… Investigating further we realized that there is no contact between the batteries and the holder so not even inside the compartment we have a ‘circuit’. We have found the root cause!

Solution

We used a little screwdriver to bend the terminals within the battery holder so they touches the relevant side of the AA battery. After double checking that both holder has voltage on their terminal we gently pushed the button. Viola we have a working unit! In 20 minutes we were able to repair / fix it and now we completed repairing a card shuffler #ReduceElectronicWaste. Please try to consider repairing everything which you could to reduce our impact on the environment!

Have a nice day!

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2022.06.28.2022.06.28.

Do It Yourself battery pack

We were planning to create a DIY battery from 18650 cells for our off-grid project for a long time but as always low priority experimental tasks have to wait. The goal was to reuse some 18650 cells from previous builds to test their capability and be environment friendly. We also wanted to create the biggest battery that would fit in the box for obviouse reasons, and before I forgot we wanted to created a 12v battery pack.Let’s see what we have created in our free time!

We prepared for a build with the followings:

18650 cells
Charge controller
Nickel plated steel belt
12V car battery charger
test load device [a car h4 bulb with 65W which requires ~5A]

These are the steps we did:

we charged / test all the cells so make sure we have the same condition cells in one series
with this information we were able to determine which cells were not usable
then we packed them in a group
we used our spot welder to weld the nickel belt to a series
then one by one we connected to the series to each other carefully making sure no short will happen
soldered the charge controller to the battery pack
tested the load and charge process
tested the load and charge process with 10 times the current which we will need
tested the balancing option within the charge controller by cycling the battery and checking the voltage level of each pack[in the series] within the battery

Summary of our DIY battery from 18650 cells:

we completed the task without any major issues 🙂
we were able to created a 65Ah battery which is huge
it fits into the required space with the plastic holders [they were not counted…]
with this capacity, we estimate that our device can operate for three weeks without having any sunshine

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2022.01.12.2022.01.13.

Soldering issues wemos pro mini

Today’s topic will be the soldering issues with wemos mini pro. When dealing with today’s micro electronics even on entry level these components can be really small. On one side it is good as you can have a lots of memory and computing capacity in a tiny place but is also means when you have to modify / fix something you have to have a stable hand and a very good pair of eyes. Even if you do you can still ran into issues which we would like to show you in this post. We were working on a very simple proof of concept and we were in a rush to deliver it. Everything was ready on ‘table’ meaning that you probably familiar with. All components wired together software is working correctly BUT you still need to pack it somehow to deliver and test it in its desired location.

Realizing we haven an error

When we completed packing / boxing and conducted a final test the
project was not functioning anymore. Huuuuuh – big hale and exhale. What
is the first question which goes over our head? Is the wiring got
broken? Is the hardware got damaged? No not these 🙂 The first which
comes out from your mouth is : “Why it has to happen with me?”

Finding the root cause

Then you start to disassemble the POC wire by wire and checking the outputs. Of course two things can happen during this process: the last connection which you are going to double check will be the issue, or none of them. So no matter where you start it will take long time. When our board had no connections we came to a conclusion that it has to be soldering issues. So we took our microscope and started to examine the soldering points. On image 1-2 you can see the legs where we had the soldering issues on the wemos mini pro . The soldering material was not running all the way down to the panel which caused the connection error.

Finally we could assemble the project and move on!

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