Hi Welcome to Mailbag Monday where every Monday I open up a bunch of packages sent in by my viewers to my Pio box. You never know what you're gonna find. So let's get to it. And there's only one way to open packages here in Australia Let's go.

thank you very much and sorry to unknown person of this obviously came in a like a satchel or whatever. um and it probably didn't have mail bag it written on it. so if it doesn't have mail bag written on it I'm going to assume that it's something I've ordered and I forgotten about. So I'm just gonna open it I probably did open this one a while back and we know that's obviously my a bag and I didn't check it out so let's oh yes that could that was that's not the eevblog logo.

I kind of do have an official eevblog logo that's not the official one, but that's one of the submitted ones. When I did like the logo design logo, it's just the name. you know? font, you know? Anyway, oh we have some. We have some sort of charger.

it's pearl pearl P IRL charger. um oh and a power brick with a funny ass Yankee plug on it. Absolutely useless but dump. yeah it looks like it's a USB charger.

2.7 amps per port. Sweet! let's check it out. So this is the pearl charger P IRL and I like the case, look at this. it's got L way top and bottom plates and then inside here is just made up with a little individual they laser-cut or routed.

Are they PCBs or plastic like fiberglass or plastic? kind of looks. fire being looks a bit fiberglass II to me. Anyway, there's our board down the bottom and now I know it is different. Now they're just like some sort of you know door and plastic material or something like that.

Anyway, it claims to be the the world's most powerful fastest ad like multi port charger 2.7 amps per port that's genuine on each port. delivered all at once 50 watts total capability anywhere from seven to I think 17 volts input so your power from life Lipo battery packs. You could power it from the supplied plug pack which is a mean well they're pretty decently. You go fifteen volts, four amps, fifty watts max so we should be able to get the full capability out of this thing a little.

LED for each one. Is that a multicolor and supposedly like all sorts of you know, ruggedized like it. You know, for ESD protection on the port's an individual shutdown, so if you short out one, it won't affect the others and all that sort of stuff. Anyway, it's ripping apart.

very rugged. Thank you. Run over that with a car. No workers.

All right. let's get in there. There we go. That all came off.

Oh yeah, that so nice short material. that is what are we got down there. that's to keep our there. The light pipes of course.

metal light pipes going up. That's kind of neat. I Love how they've got the individual LEDs on this. None of this, you know.

Integrated 7-segment rubbish. No siree. Bob that's very nice isn't it? Identical channel isolation big-ass inductor there. So this is all going to be a switch mode control of course.

so it looks like we have a micro up here. We'll have to get in with the part numbers. ICP Port there looks like is that the USB port chip? Oh I didn't see it but oh yeah, it has a button. It has a secret reset button.

secret squirrel reset button on the top. There you go. Rev: 1.02 for those playing along at home. living Amps total like 5 volts live and ants output Suite 7 to 17 volts input So this looks like this is really nice design.

Really liking this. Oops that was me. that was me I was trying to like separate this plastic bottom and I had my I obviously had my thumb on the poor socket here. Let me push that back.

Oh no, oh it's a Greek tragedy. You'll be able to solder that back in, but obviously there's no front tabs on this. It's not as rough as it could be, although of course it's sandwiched. It's sandwiched inside there so it's you know it's not gonna lift up.

Didn't use this newfangled surface mount. rubbish. You know you had big through-hole tabs in there and never would have happened. All so therein lies the problem when you just like put solder paste on this and just reflow them on your pick-and-place machine.

The solder: You're kind of sore to get a bit of fill it around the side like that, but you don't get it. You know, right over the top like that like you get if your hand solder and that's going to be more robust. And of course the the pads. This is like it's not just a pattern than a thermal relief off to the ground plane.

It's actually got. yeah, it's right on the ground plane so that's solid. So that's why we didn't rip the pad off. but the solder joint certainly failed.

And I could you know if I got my thumb in there? I Could just you know, lift this entire sock it off. So yeah, like it's not going to be a problem on the finished product. This is only if you take it apart like me and you dick around with it. Just don't do that.

So I am actually concerned about this is an original one I haven't actually touched that and yeah, well, there are like you know there are quite reasonable Phillips on there. of course it looks a bit Frosty the Snowman because of the fact that you using lead-free solder. but yeah, like all the force plugging in and out these sockets is going on those two pads and the large tabs at the back plus those four pins. Yeah, and be concerned about the robustness of the sockets and these surface mount sockets.

So here's our power input here. You note that we don't have one large DC to DC converter for the whole lot. Instead, what we've got is a little point of load job' down here. it's a Diode Zinc and AP 65, 5, 4, 3 and it's a 4 ampere buck converter.

We've got the big-ass inductor for that here. I've got to catch some output filler and stuff like that I'm not sure how tight tight that loop is in there anyway. And then we've got a Tex Instruments are 3-amp controller here, so yet no workers. Nice thick traces in there.

bloody black gloss, black solder mask should be banned anyway, so each channels absolutely identical. It's got a quality Ti3 amp controller. It's 2.7 amp rated per port. this product.

so the chipsets more than capable and the little DC to DC converters more than capable of well as well. They've got no heatsink E on there. that'd probably be like nine if you know. I did the efficiency curve.

We'll have to have a look at the datasheet I'll include that in if I can. over. the efficiency of that will change with voltage of course and with a little low eighty tiny up there do we just drive in our little LED display. So where's our load measurement being done? Is that little instrumentation amp that note there? it is there it is.

Over there. there's a shot resistor that's measuring the total power. so they're doing that on the input side so that that looks like the total power displayed here is actually the total power including the efficiency of the DC to DC converter. So that's basically our consumption from here.

it's not what's actually being delivered. I would presume because the only way to measure the power output would to be have a shunt resistor over here current shunt and then measure the power on each individual wire port like that and then add them up in software and give the total. but they're getting like near enough. Maybe they're like in software, just are subtracting a nominal amount for the efficiency of the converter.

You know, under like 10% or 8% or something like that. 5% All right, let's power this sucker up. Found one of those weird ass Yankee adapters. Hey hello, Zero zero.

It doesn't look very good unless you defuse it. Our point Two five, Five Point five. Watts There you go. So it is actually the input.

They haven't bothered to subtract the quiescent supply. Their surprise, they using white. Hmm. doesn't look.

It's not that terrific. I'm not. you know, really keen on the implementation there. So it's charging.

but like it's only charging at one like 1.2 watts. like absolutely hopeless. and then the lids not even coming on look at like it comes on initially. when I plug it in or it did before.

So much for the world's fastest charger. Yeah, sure everyone got one this stupid. Apple phones. but like, come on, let's see if it heats our T SAT soldering iron, shall we? It's not say yet.

Low volt. Forget it. Oh, but look, at least it comes with a sticky gel pad. Stick it on the bottom so it doesn't flap around the breeze.

but apparently you can just wash these and re stick so that's kind of handy to like. You know, stick it under your bench or you know, mount it vertically like that on a surface or or something like that. might support every other bloody charging format doesn't support quick charge though. Alright, let's turn it on.

We are at I think it specifies 5.0 5 volts on the output or something like that, so you know, pretty close near enough. Let's put a 1 amp load on this thing and see what we get. Yep, one amp, no worries. but this, the foragers jumped up.

Five point one, Nine volts beulah that's outside this spec. Like what's going on regulations sucks. so let's actually wind the wick up on this thing and watch that voltage change as we voltage increases as we increase the current. One point three.

Well, I'm not sure if this is actually negotiating the current I think it. I think it does what fans coming on? but Zoey two point, let's go all the way with LBJ let's go to Two Point Seven amps. Can we Can We? Now it's dropping back down so it looks like it has it like a rise and then it comes back to its nominal voltage at Two Point Seven. Is it? Go? No.

Where is it going to crap itself? Let's have a look. Oh there we go. No worries and just automatically restarted itself. I didn't turn that off.

Oh there we go. Yep, there's our Thesz L overload. Got a red lid on there. Looks like it's not going to come back on its own now.

Hey is interesting. Look Five Watts Seven Watts What? What is it? What's going on? That's for accuracy. There we're down at yeah, pretty close to being on five watts there. we're getting 5.1 up here.

so that's all right. So it does look like it is compensating because it shows a half when you disconnect this thing. So yeah, just fly to the moon on half of what? So yeah for me, um this is like not a vision. like it's okay.

Um yeah. we're getting our two points that we can get our two point seven amps per port, but it doesn't support quick charge which is useless for me from my mobile phone. So you know your mileage may vary of course I don't know, it's probably okay. The robustness all those USB ports needs to be beefed up I think cuz I reckon if we you know if we really bang this thing in and out that could be put in some heavy-duty stress on those solder joints and I think it's all going to be mostly.

Does it have like little plastic pins on the bottom that go into the board? but yeah I don't know. it's okay, but it's not what I was hoping for. Thank you very much. Nick a vessel from Bridgeport in Cts that Connecticut I think it is.

Thank you very much. We sounds innocent enough what this is, but you never know. You're lucky in the big mailbag. what are we gonna get? We've got the I Keep forgetting the name of this stuff is crinkly digi-key stuff but hey yeah, whoa jeez that smells that smells vintage or is it tell oh sweet vacuum fluorescent dot-matrix Oh Thing of beauty is a joy forever.

So these displays are very cool. They're Itron displays made in Japan all the best stuff's made in Japan they're designed to be you know standard Hitoshi LCD interface here but they're dot-matrix VFDs or vacuum fluorescent displays like this. Fantastic! So we've got the 40 by 30 to 1 and we've got your more standard one which you might be are familiar with this 16 character by 2 line displays so they're supposed to be our like fully interface are compatible. Unfortunately I have Troy over sucked out like the wire interface which came with this.

Put on the pin headers there and I cannot get the thing to work. Unfortunately, this one is actually drawing 212 milliamps there. so it's drawing about of what doing nothing. so they do.

You know they take a lot more than a standard LCD which is only you know a few milliamps something like that. I know we got one. We actually got it. Check it out there it is.

Let me switch off the studio lights. it might look a bit better, it wouldn't It wasn't working before. Anyway, we've got some garbled characters. let me see if I can press reset down here.

No. Unfortunately, it's not working which works with the LCD. But as you can see, yeah, it does work. So maybe I do need to.

You know, maybe do need to tweak the code or something like that. Probably tweak the initialization routine or whatever it is. But yeah, so not fully in this particular case. I Didn't write the software for this little board.

It's a former mailbag. It's a little geocaching thing I've just hacked it into. Why normally add up? How's the 5 volts from these triple? A's here? But of course it doesn't give enough oomph. and nope, she's not working.

but at least we got something there so it might be some initialization routine is different or something like that. but anyway, very cool. Vacuum fluorescent display is fantastic and basically a drop-in replacement for your standard LCD So if you've got a project you want it to look a bit funkier in standard LCD I'll be it at a like orders of magnitude increased current these fact Itron Vacuum fluorescents Very cool but if you want to see a video of me hacking around with a vacuum fluorescent display I Highly recommend this one which I'll link in at the end where I actually reverse engineer and how can get working this once again a mail bag vacuum fluorescent display just driving it with an Arduino compatible board. So I'll leave that one in.

It's very interesting. It's had like a couple hundred thousand views. I think very popular video. Check it out! So I want to go to the effort in this mail bay to get these ones working? It's just you know more of the same and it's just like probably just a command thing.

Anyway, cool. Thanks Dr.. Ralph Huber from Wizzle in Germany Wiesel Wizzle in Germany But all my German viewers um contains one electronic device not plural, just one. Let's find out what the electronic device is.

Never know you're lucky I'm the big mailbag did wrapped in plastic. Oh this could be fun thank you very much Ralph This is the Octopus Curve tracer. It's very simple. We've just got a Op-amp here.

We've just got a some batteries on the top. This is actually a jewel in cell holder so normally for a 1.5 volt battery but I've actually got the provided the 12 volt batteries fit in here. They're a little bit loosey-goosey but anyway, that generates a plus minus 12 volt rail for our Op amp with a function generator input and of course a the curve tracer used to be something that was often found an old analog scopes you know, like 20 Meg entry-level analog scopes. A lot of them had the curve tracer building which allows you to actually measure the parameters of that components using the XY mode of the oscilloscope.

and it's basically just a function generator through a series on resistor. and you're basically just measuring the voltage across a shunt resistor that looks like it down there. And you can actually determine on the XY mode of your oscilloscope various parameters over an oscilloscope, so let's see if we can get it working. Unfortunately I Have a look at the note.

There's a few little issues with this design though, so won't read you the whole lot. You can pause that you can read for yourself, but anyway, it's basically a the standard result of a function generator. If you get like an ellipse like a circle on the screen for example, then it's a capacitor or inductor and L shaped curve. You've got a diode, a straight line like a swirl depend on the severity of the slope, you get a resistive, vertical lines of short-circuit, and or a horizontal line is basically open circuit.

And of course that. nowadays are few oscilloscopes equipped with a component test that. many have a wave gen action. So that's the idea of this thing.

And of course, as he said, this is nothing new. He's not the first to invent this, but there's various problems with it. The 50 ohm output the function generator. Yep, it's it's too high output impedance to drive, you know, various components.

So hence why we've got the Op-amp on there just to drive it with some low impedance anyway. But the other problem is that the oscilloscope probes our mains earth reference. So you need a differential probe to do it. And of course, an oscilloscope.

You can actually use two channels in subtract mode, which then becomes a differential. You know, a poor-man's our differential probe. It's pretty good for lots of cases and stuff like that. Unfortunately, you can't combine as far as I'm aware.

I don't know of any scope where you can combine XY mode like even with a four channel scope XY mode and have the X be the X channel be the subtraction of the two channels. So Differential Probe Differential Probe XY they're all mains Earth reference as far as I know Anyway, could be wrong. All right. So what I've done is hooked up a differential probe here.

Unfortunately, this is like a high voltage differential probe not optimized for low voltage stuff. So it's times 10 10 uation. but then again, you're using the X 10 scope probe as well. Anyway, it'll do the business and so I've got the differential probe across the component under test which is these two leads here and then the scope channel wire goes across it from ground which is the Y terminal across the little tiny current shunt resistor in there don't know 'value that is, you know, probably like a you know 10 ohms hundred ohms something like that.

and tada. we're measuring a capacitor just a hundred N capacitor and we get ourselves a circle. Of course, I'm using the function generator just generating to one Kilohertz signal. So the good thing about this is that you can actually test the component at the frequency you want.

so you could actually you know go up to, you know, 20 megahertz here. If you really wanted to, you know you could go all the way with LBJ and things are going to up. Oh there we go. So we still have our circle, but now we're starting to distort.

Look at that because I think and we amplitude and probably find our amplitude is yep. once you get to a certain point, your amplitude becomes too much and you're going to saturate like that. You're not going to get your circle anymore. So a little trap for young players.

but anyway, a capacitor will give us circling and if we change out a capacitor, there's our open circuit. so we get our horizontal line. Now for clip our resistor on there. get a sloping line like that and that's exactly what we get.

So it's a resistor because they're linear and what do we get? a linear line? don't? And of course, if we go to a nonlinear component doesn't get any more nonlinear than a diode, what does it? Which is the most nonlinear component. Anyway, there we go. We get our traditional um, up there we go. we get our traditional L shape.

So yeah, I won't go into all the details of component testers. but yeah, like a real, simple do-it-yourself component tester, you can make it yourself. You know there's no need to I don't it for no, he doesn't LinkedIn don't even know if he sells a kit or what not, but it's basically just a low impedance function. Gen output: just stop amp there.

You can't do it without it, but it's just not as sensitive. But anyway, Concannon convert your scope into a component test. and neat. Anyway, if you do know of an oscilloscope that actually does allow that like a fort, you'd need a four channel one that allows you to actually do XY mode with the subtraction of one -2 and 3 minus 4.

Let us know in the comments because that'd be awesome I did offhand I don't know if there's one that doesn't and theory, it should be able to do it with these newfangled digital scopes because it's It's just really, essentially just a software function. What the heck? We'll just open up a couple of bonus: China eBay ones a lot of people just buy. This is random. Like two dollar stuff delivered on eBay Australian Capital Territory Two One Five three.

It's a phone accessory. Spoiler alert. Let's have a look. This could be bad.

What do we got? What? What is that? What? Is that? What is that? I don't know what that is. It's like that's about like a mobile phone. like cover or something. I don't and like, you know, like a there's that.

like the lens. that's the lens for the little. like the lid that lights up. that's the aperture.

You know that's the cutout for the camera that goes in there. It's like it's a phone have I Just why would somebody send me this? I don't know a new phone adapter thing I Don't get it. Okay, um, the plastic toy gift doesn't get much better than a stray in capital territory again from the same mob so they couldn't send it in the same packet. Yeah, this is like you know, $1 delivered plastic toy gift.

What have we got? Not condoms. A finger condom. Just what I always wanted. Thank you very much Medical level.

Oh yeah, you gotta trust the medical level finger condom. All right. let's have a look. Tada sealed for our protection.

Oh yeah yeah. ah ah, greasy ass. Hmm yeah. well.

you might as well go all the way with LBJ You can't be too sure these days. Catch you next time Oh Peppermint-flavored I Hope you enjoyed my Obaid. Monday If you did, please give it a big thumbs up because that always helps a lot. And you can scribe by clicking down here.

Make sure you also click on the bill notification icon so that YouTube actually notifies you of new videos. Speaking of which videos you can watch over here and over here, just random ones. Maybe another mailbag? who knows? it's a lucky dip. As always, you can leave comments down below or on the eevblog forum, which is much better place to discuss them.

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Catch you next time.