Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Things I do for fun
Used an Adafruit Perma-Proto board to make this reference guide for the breadboard jumper wires I’ve acquired recently.
The bottom one has wires from sets that I bought before my local Radio Shack stores closed, and the top ones are from the 700 piece kit from Sparkfun. Since they each used different colours for the various lengths, I thought it would be useful to have a reference guide for what length each colour was.
A Sparkfun bench top power board kit let me take a 300 W power supply salvaged from a dead computer and use it as a bench power supply.
It’s a handy little kit that takes the power supply motherboard connection and breaks out the +12V, -12V, 5V and 3.3V DC to fused 5 way binding posts.
According to the label on the power supply, it can source 17A at +12V, 0.2A at -12V, 19A at 3.3V, and 15A at 5V. That should be more than enough for any projects I’ll run off it.
I also picked up a few of these simple little 3-digit voltmeters that I’ll connect across the outputs to show the voltages.
Next will be to figure out an enclosure to contain everything.
A couple years ago, the power supply in my computer went belly up because the power switch had corroded and stopped being a switch.
No idea what caused it to become so badly corroded, but I finally got around to finding a new switch for it. The new switch fit perfectly into the opening, and getting it reconnected was a pretty simple job.
Now I’ve got a couple of power supplies to work with. Plenty of projects out on the web describing how to turn computer power supplies into useful bench power supplies, and I could definitely use a couple of those on the workbench.
While I was playing in the South Carolina QSO party yesterday, I discovered my Nest thermostat decided to flake out and turn the AC on, even though it was saying the AC was off.
It’s not the first time I’ve had a Nest fail on me before (technically, just the base of the Nest).
No idea if it just happened to be a coincidence, or if it got zapped by some RF while I was playing on the radio. Also a little puzzled as to why the Nest base failed this time and not the other times I’ve been on the radio.
A search of the internet brings up a few forum and email threads that suggest the Nest thermostat base might be susceptible to RFI, probably via RF coupling through the control cable between the thermostat and the HVAC unit.
At the old house, I think the antenna was far enough away that it was never a problem. Here, with the antenna pretty much on top of the roof, RFI into the thermostat via the wiring is a definite possibility.
Guess now I need to see if I can add a bunch of ferrites to the wiring.