Teardown of a 65W Cree LED Bulb
I few months back, I wrote about my experience with the six dimmable Philips LED bulbs I purchased a year ago. Those light bulbs all failed within months of each other in just over a year of use. This time…
Teardown of an Extech 380460 Milliohm Meter
In this blog post, let’s take a look at what’s inside an Extech 380460 miliohm meter.
Teardown of an ATVR-1000D AC Voltage Regulator
I bought a used RegVolt ATVR-1000D automatic AC voltage regulator (the model I got has long been discontinued, but you can find a current production model here) off eBay last week. This regulator was produced for the 110V market, but…
Reverse Engineering of BK Precision 1696 Switching Power Supply’s LCD Protocol
As mentioned in my previous post, besides the broken LCD there was also an issue with the power supply portion of the unit and the output voltage was clamped at around 10 to 11V. The digital circuitry portion however seemed…
Teardown of a BK Precision 1696 Programmable Switching Power Supply
I recently picked up a BK Precision 1696 programmable switching power supply off eBay. Unlike many of the vintage test equipment I did teardowns with in the past, this model is still in production today. The one I got was…
Teardown of a Watts Up? Pro ES Power Meter
Power meters for measuring power consumption of consumer electronics have been around for at least a decade. The most popular ones are argubly P3 International‘s power meters and many of its clones. I have a later version of the P4400…
Diode Equation and Forward Current Measurement
We are all familiar with the I/V characteristics of a diode. The main characteristics of a typical diode is that when forward biased, it starts to conduct as the voltage applied approaches the threshold voltage of the diode and the…
Modifying a Computer ATX Power Supply For Higher Output Voltage
To charge the 110Ah battery bank I built, I need a power supply that can provide at least 10A at 14.6V. Since I have many old ATX power supplies lying around and the 12V rails of these power supplies are…
Teardown and Testing of an 800W PureSine Inverter
The last ingredient for my backup power project is an inverter. Since the battery bank I built is a 12V 1.5kWh one, an inverter that can handle a load between 500W and 1000W would be a suitable choice. In theory,…
Building a 12V 110Ah Battery Bank Using 80 32650 LiFePO4 Cells
During the past couple of weeks I have been busy making a large battery bank using the eighty 32650 LiFePO4 cells I bought on eBay. The battery bank I am building is a 12V (13.2V nominal) 4S/20P one. With each…
Modifying a 4S 100A LiFePO4 BMS Module
For those who are following my YouTube channel, you would know that I am in the process of building a high capacity battery bank. When this project is done, I plan to use it with a 12V inverter as my…
Teardown and Experiments with a Doppler Microwave Transceiver
I got a couple of Microsemi’s C900502 10.525 GHz X-band Doppler radar motion sensors a while ago. This batch was made in UK and had “UK patents 2243495 and/or 2253108 apply” printed on the case. I have seen a teardown…
Teardown of a Philips Dimmable LED Bulb
I bought six Philips dimmable LED bulbs for my dinning room chandelier last year. These are 45W incandescent equivalent (7W, 450 lm 2700K) and are supposed to provide years of trouble-free illuminations. Over the course of a year of light…
Converting Celsius to Fahrenheit – The Analog Way
I have an old Keithley 1301 temperature probe. This probe is an accessory to the Keithley 130A/131 multimeter and is capable of measuring temperatures between -55°C to 150 °C. Since it outputs an analog voltage linearly proportional to the temperature…
More Information on BSide ACM03 Plus Clamp Meter
In my previous post, I did a review and teardown of a cheap BSide ACM03 Plus clamp meter and concluded that it was a surprisingly good meter despite a few minor annoyances.