Welcome to a new in the Mail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. This video is hosted on the Eevblog channel thanks to Dave Jones who is giving us smaller Youtubers the chance to reach a wider audience. So if you like it, don't forget to check out my channel and subscribe. You will find a link in the description below.

For those who are new to my In the Mail series, it's about cheap electronic modules or parts coming from the usual three suppliers. in China its eBay Aliexpress or Banggood I Show you what I buy and what I Think about these items. This way you might find something interesting to inspire you for your next project or it might help you stay away from the really bad stuff. For each of the items shown in this video, you will find links in the description below.

My first item is this set of five automotive test pins. Let's get them out of the anti-static bags I'm not sure why they use the mental Static bag because I'm pretty sure these are not sensitive to a static discharge. so the set has a part number. it's a P8 double two and inside the set, you get these five test pins in five different colors, but they also include 10 spare tips.

Because these sharp tips are removable, they have a thread so I guess when you wear them out, you can exchange the tip on the other end. These test pins they take a standard four millimeter banana. Jack As you can see, it's quite a tight fit and you can use these with a pair of standard test needs. These feel sharp and strong enough.

They feel like they could puncture through the insulation of a wire and they were showing a picture of that on the product page. You can probe through a wire just by puncturing the insulation. That makes sense when probing automotive circuits because you might have a wiring harness and you don't want to start cutting worse and ripping off the insulation to test them. So it could be just a matter of inserting this test pin through a wire.

and I need to be really careful here not to stab myself in front of the camera. So yeah, it was quite easy to to go through the installation of this wire. so let's check what kind of connection. Yeah, I'm using the I'm using the An Angle A and 8009.

This is the latest model and as you can see, we get quite a good connection by going through the middle of the world because you go right through the middle of all the strands of wire which are packed very tight in there and it makes a good connection with the test pin. I Paid something like seven dollars with free shipping for this set of five test pins and I think they're going to be very useful someday. When I do some troubleshooting on a wiring harness or anything similar where you would need a strong pin like this that is able to puncture through the insulation of the cables. Next up: I got myself a set of thick ten AWG silicone cables I Paid one hundred seven dollars for this set on Aliexpress and let's see how they feel.

Yep, they are pretty soft and they feel like a nice silicone insulation. Let's check the ratings on these so these are ten AWG They can withstand up to 200 degrees Celsius which is quite normal for silicon insulated wires and inside we can see there are quite a few strands of wire judging by the cord. They might be tin plated copper wires, but you can never be sure with these words coming from. China If you you really need to know the composition of your cable, you need to get it from trusted source, but that will probably cost you way more.

I Plan to use this for the wiring on a modified 12 volts server power supply. if you remember my fuse testing videos I Needed a much higher rate at 12 volts rail for properly testing those fuses. So I got a server power supply which is capable of 50 amps at 12 volts. I Will do a video soon on how I modify that power supply to use it on the bench.

Next up: I got this guy which is a whiner thickness gauge tool. As you can see, it comes with a pouch for storage. It's not very good quality, but hey, it has a pouch for storage and you get both AWG and the S WG markings on this gauge tool you can use this week. You can use this to quickly find out the gauge of a particular wire.

It's made out of metal so it should last you a lifetime. and I think it was cut using a water jet machine. The edges do feel a bit sharp so you need to be careful not to cut yourself with this. The tool is fairly inexpensive.

I paid something like four dollars shipping included so it can't hurt to have one of these in your toolbox. My next item is a borescope tied camera and I've always wanted to have one of these for those jobs where you need to pick in a place where a normal camera would not fit. During the past couple of years these got very cheap and now you can find something like this for nine dollars shipping included. Don't expect the professional grade quality, but for the Hobby level it's great and it doesn't break the bank.

The great thing about one of these is that it supports both PC and Android devices, so it's pretty easy to connect this to an Android tablet or smartphone because everyone has one of those I Believe there are also models designed to work with iOS devices, but I opted for this one which works with Android devices. Inside the box, you also get a couple of accessories. There are these hooks that you can attach to the end of the camera and if this one is magnetic, it might have a magnet in there so you can insert the camera, maybe pick up a lost or dropped item from a tight space. and you also get one of these attachments with a 45 angle camera so you can maybe peak around the corner.

But what's really interesting is this connector that will allow you to connect it basically to a PC to a regular type a USB connector. but then you can flip this bit like this and it's a micro USB connector that will allow you to plug it into a smartphone for example. So the smartphone needs to support these kinds of accessories and supply power over the USB port. but in this case you can see the smartphone does that.

and there is this camera. five applications and I can see that it automatically launched the app as a connected the camera. It's a free app and now as you can see, there is a bit of delay in processing the image, but it looks really good. I mean yeah, this is me shooting the video and this is the quality that I'm getting from this camera.

It's pretty decent quality considering that we'll only use this for inspection. so you have a couple of different options in here. You can capture images, you can capture video and I haven't looked through the rest of the rest of the options but the basic stuff is there. And another interesting thing, you can use the the button right here on the USB connector to turn on or off the LEDs on the end of the camera and even control a few steps of brightness which is pretty cool.

This particular model is eight millimeters in diameter with a two megapixel resolution, but as you can see here on the box, you can also get some thinner ones and with with a 5 megapixel camera or a 10 megapixel camera I believe you can get all these options. If you search the web, you also need to consider the camera has a fixed focus so you can't really focus on very on objects which are which are very near to the camera, but with a bit of hacking that focus distance might be adjustable from this camera. So in the end I'm pretty happy with what I got and I'm sure this will save me some trouble. someday.

When I need the view inside an enclosure or when you're doing some automotive wiring jobs, this will for sure be useful. You know, in a project. My next item is a set of 5730 LEDs I Got five colors in this kit. Each set is twenty pieces so I have 100.

Let's in total, it's nice to have sets of LEDs and I Keep several of these in the lab in different sizes here. I have oh, six, oh three, and oh it on five SMD LEDs here I have a three millimeter and five millimeter LEDs in different colors because you never know when you're going to need some LEDs for a repair or project and it's nice to have all of these options available in waiting for them to be delivered these days. LEDs are cheap enough that you can just keep them on stock in different sizes and colors. For example, this set was under $2 shipping included, so you'll not break the bank by keeping a few of these in stock.

Of course, this will not be the good quality LEDs from Ostrom or any other well-known manufacturer. They will be made by the One Hand Low Led factory in China, but that shouldn't matter much as long as you use these for Hobby projects. I Wouldn't use the One Hand low LEDs for any serious project, certainly not for something you'd sell because then you might get reliability and quality issues. My next item is a GPS module and inside it should be a Neo M8n module from New Blocks which is a nice module.

It supports connecting up to three navigation systems at the same time so you could be getting data from GPS, GLONASS and Galileo which increases the coverage and precision of the system. This module is a bit special because it also has a magnetometer inside and that is to help with the flight controller systems of drones. or UAVs So you basically got two connectors here. one is for power and your TX and Rx and the other one is for the I squared C interfaced with the magnetometer since I got this for a lower price than usual I Paid just 15 dollars for the module I will open the case just to check We have the correct GPS module inside.

By the way, this is my Wii Hawk show me we have screwdriver set which I absolutely love I Showed this in an earlier in the mail I Got it for about $20 shipping included but it was on discount that day and it just screams quality when compared to other fifteen to twenty dollar sets of screwdrivers. I'll also put a link to this in the description below so you can check it out. so it appears they are using the correct M8n Neo module from you blocks. So here we have the magnetometer I was telling you about.

So now I can be confident that I got what I paid for and I will be using this for one of my RC airplane builds. but I showed this module in this video because you really can use this for anything and it's a great GPS module that many people might be interested in. Next item is a rather interesting of fun controller I Found inside the package. you'll get this board and a couple of four 10k thermistor 's with Jst connectors.

So the way it works the board takes 8 to 60 volts DC input as specified on the PCB and the same voltage you supply. The board is used to power these two fan outputs, so the input voltage of the board has to be correlated to the working voltage of the fan. Not to exceed that because the magic smoke will escape from the fans you are using. The board takes these two thermistor inputs from these two pins and converts the temperature to degrees C.

The range is minus 10 up to 100 degrees Celsius And with these two temperatures, it offers you two controlled outputs independent for fans that support the PWM input. So those are the ones with four wires because tours are used to supply power to the fan. The third wire is the tacho output for measuring rpm and the fourth wire is the PWM input for the motor driver on the fan itself. so it kind of looks like this: a fan that has the PWM input.

The board offers the possibility to set some thresholds and let me just power the board and show you a few things. There we go. So I have the two thermistors connected and a fan connected on the fan one output. So the board by default will cycle through the two channels.

It will show you the temperature in degrees Celsius as well as the RPM. So right now we're seeing Twenty Seven Point Six Degrees Zero, RP rpm on fan Two, Twenty Seven Point Four degrees Celsius, and 700 rpm on fan One, and there are two thresholds that you can set a lower threshold and a higher threshold, and between those two, the board will just ramped up the RPM which is basically the duty cycle output on that Pwm pin. It will ramp that from 10% up to 100% in a linear fashion. You can also set an alarm threshold and if you connect a buzzer to this output right here, you will get an audible alarm once that threshold is surpassed.

The circuit controlling all of this is an SDM a test microcontroller which makes it very easy to hack. so you could potentially use this as a development platform to create your own custom fan control. And this is something I like about newer models Coming from China they use STM microcontrollers more and more. We see the STM 8.

We see the Stm32 quite often and this is a great thing for hack ability. This fan control is fairly inexpensive at under $10 with free shipping and a link will be provided in the description below That was all for today. Thank you for watching this video. If you found anything interesting, you will find the links to each of the products shown in this video in the description below and there will also be a link to the Vote Log channel if you'd like to subscribe.

Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.