Hi and welcome to the ever popular mail bag segment where I open my mail and if you want to send stuff, send it to Tada that crazy Aussie Bloke P Box 7949 Borham Hills BC Borham Hills New South Wales 2153 Australia not Austria Let's get on to it. I've got three of them today, so let's crack it open and see what we've got. and the first one I've got here little padded envelope. it's got no name on it so I have no idea and uh, very nice handwriting there I rather like that and uh, that crazy Aussie beautiful with a smiley face and uh, what are these stamps here? we've got.

Uh Bosner BOS I am not even going to pronounce that. um, is it from Bosnia I'm not sure I have no idea. Sorry, but let's uh, crack this sucker open and see what we have. Ah, it's always fun.

Maybe that's why this mail bag is popular? Oh Seamons, you have something to do with Seamons. There's a little little pouch all right, no idea, your guess is as good as mine. Let's have a look at what we've got on the bit of paper. Hi Dave I Saw your video.

vintage brick mobile phones decided to send you um, old terms but already vintage piece of electronics. It's an external camera for a mobile phone a seaman S55 H Interesting believe that there was one of the first mobile phones to have a camera as I saw inside. it seems like it would have enough material to make a short tear down video of it. Greetings from S AO Wow Bosnia and of sorry, can't pronounce it I'm hopeless but uh yeah, I was right.

um Bosnia there. so uh, thank you very much. Thank you for a very Dynamic and comprehensive vblog Vlog I Wish you great success with it. Thank you very much veteran if that's that's uh, your name.

So greetings from Sovo hello to all my uh viewers from Sovo Wonder how many I have in Sova I might have to do a quick YouTube search on that and I just checked and it's another big massive YouTube fail They only show the top 10 countries now it's hopeless God I Used to be able to see every country right. even if they only had one view. it's hopeless. Don't know what they're done with that idiots.

God Anyway, um, apparently in the last 30 days, um Saudi Arabia has rocketed to my top 10 list. Hey good on you all my viewers in Saudi Arabia Who knew? Apparently only in the last 30 days I don't know we' done a video that appeals to them? Not sure. But anyway, sorry all my Uh S avens is that how you pronounce people? Is that how you call yourselves? I don't know, but sorry you don't make the top 10 Lis in number of viewers. Oh look at this.

here we go. That's a Seaman's mobile phone camera. that is hilarious. Oh it's got a flash on it.

Has it got like an inbuilt rechargeable battery I wonder I presume it would to uh, do the Flash in there. That's what I would presume. it's got the uh that looks like a seaman proprietary uh phone connector I've never had a or used a Seaman's phone, so I don't know. that might be Seaman's standard thing and it's got a little viewfinder in it.

You got to be kidding me. Oh man, that's a Triumph of uh engineering over practicality. and apparently this is also known as the Iqp 500 uh camera attachment for the S55 Sean phone. although the ones I've uh, seen photos of on Google I sort of have a rounded uh corner like this on there.

so I'm not sure if this is an earlier or later model, but uh yeah. Anyway, it's rather fascinating. I'm um, a bit surprised that they don't actually have a camera button on here I guess you have to use the button on the phone itself I think that's a bit of an oversight. Uh, really.

And and if there is like a rechargeable battery in here, that would make sense cuz then you could have used it um, as a complete Standalone camera and then hooked it into your phone and uploaded and uh, sent the photos later or something like that, you know if it was Standalone Anyway, I'm definitely going to have to do a tear down of that. but I think because I've got two other Uh boxes to get through on the mailbag I will leave that for tear down Tuesday Thank you very much and what do we have here? It looks like it's from Australia based on the stamps, it's from Inside Gadgets Thank you very much. Whoever it is from Inside Gadgets, we might find out when we open it and the stamp there. we have a soldier playing the uh bugle obviously uh playing the last post which is a famous uh War um uh, you know, trumpet uh solo to honor the dead.

It was originally a bugle call for battle I think I don't oh something? I'm not sure. Anyway, we use it to, uh, honor the war dead. Anyway, let's open it up and see what we've got from inside gadgets. Let's see what's inside.

ironically Tada oh oh, we have another kit we have some scribbled out okay, reusable bag. let's have a look. hi Dave Just another fan sending you a kit to play around with Standalone Temperature voltage logger. That's nice and it's my first kit I've produced available for sale too.

Excellent! Do check it out! I Have included the first few pages of the PDF guide available from Insid Gadgets.com That's a excellent domain name I Like it I'm surprised you're able to get that actually. Um, so everyone please check it out out Insid Gadgets.com Thanks for the videos. They're helpful to us young players to save your time before trying to find the r blah blah blah yeah. Great.

All right. This a standalone voltage and temperature logger kit. Beautiful Version 1.0 T Schematic parts list step-by-step guide. Beautiful.

Oh, look at that. It's going to Fair bit of trouble. It's got a photo of each part. Nice, nice, well done.

There's the schematic. Let's have a look at it. What do we got here? All right, let's see if we can get this. Let's have a look what have got.

We've got an At Tiny 885 there that's uh powered from VCC which is uh yeah, powered from I don't know what it's powered from USB port over here. Okay, we've got our USB port VCC directly on the chip. So the Um unfortunately because I don't see another voltage reference on there am I incorrect. So the voltage reference would uh come from hey, don't know what's going on here.

There's a battery connected directly across VCC what's going on there I Guess that's uh, optional. You wouldn't want to have the Uh battery and the USB connected at the same time because otherwise you'd uh, blow the crap out of your battery. It's the Um Es Prom H, a Dip8 24c, E prom array. Uh, we got some N Channel mosfets.

We've got some diode uh protection with Uh Fage dividers and that's about it. So it's a voltage and temperature logger. Beautiful. All right, Let's crack it open.

let's have a look at the parts and here we go. What do we got? All right. Jeez Tiny, it's all through hole stuff. Oh hey, we got some surface mount parts already solded.

surface mount ones already populated. We've got two So 23s there and there's our USB connector on the Uh left hand side there. Let's have a look here: Inside Gadgets Standalone Temp Volt Logger Version 1.0 Beautiful. So Um I presume does it? Uh, get the data? Um, out of the USB Um, presumably I've got to look at the schematic again.

Yes, it does data the Um At Tiny of course the At Tiny I didn't know the At Tiny had USB uh support in them I Have to check it out. the At Tiny 85. Aha. the 3v lithium coin cell battery isn't connected directly across.

uh, the 5V USB input of course, because it would. that would be a really bad idea. It's um, there's the N Channel mosfet which is actually controlled via the Uh 5V uh USB input here. So you plug in the USB and it disables the battery.

Neat. Um now I Just checked the Uh website here for inside gadgets and this little Kit only costs um, anywhere from $14 to a whopping $17 Australian dollars. Um for the kit. depending on which E squ uh prom option, you get up to 512 uh K and it's only like three bucks International postage because it goes via an email letter cuz it's so thin you can actually send it as a letter instead of a uh parcel.

So um, yeah, that's absolutely dirt cheap. But the Um 80 tiny 885 I was right. It doesn't have a USB transceiver built in, so um I'm not sure how he's doing the USB he's obviously um, you know, hacked. He's done some firmware to be able to talk via USB um without a USB transceiver in there.

Neat, go figure. And sure enough, I did a quick Google search and there's a library called the USB Tiny Library and it's a software implementation for a lowspeed USB interface for um at tiny devices which or any uh appil uh micro which AVR micro which doesn't have a built-in USB peripheral Neat I Like it apparently takes like a 1 and 1/2k or 2K of something of program space. but eh, whatever. And the specer? it's got a 1year battery life.

Very nice. Measures temperature from -40 to 125 stores in the East E Square prom is 8 bit or uh uh, two or a 10 bit where you've got to use two bytes for that and measures voltage from 0 to 15 volts. Uh, once again saving as 8 bit uh or oh 9 bit, not 10 bit. There you go.

Uh. Voltage range can be increased if the two voltage protection diet are removed and the code is modified. Um uses an external E squ uh prom as I mentioned. Um, it can go up to 512k bit which is 65,000 Uh readings for those one by values and it's got um various sample delay times available from 28 seconds up to 24 hours per sample.

I'm not sure why it's 28 seconds. Um, go figure. I Don't know why you wouldn't uh offer like a 1 second option perhaps I don't know um and you transfer the data to uh Us PC via USB I presume it's a Windows only software don't uh quote me on that. haven't looked at it.

Anyway, there you go. That's a uh USB uh data uh logger. Basically it's um, a standalone Data Logger with does temperature and uh voltage and comes as a little kit. It's Dirt Cheap so if you're after that sort of thing, check it out from Alex insid thank you very much Alex that's awesome and I almost forgot to mention it is Open Source Hardware as well Creative Commons Beauty and the third one I Was very excited when I first uh opened the Uh PO box and I saw a National instruments box cuz National instruments make some High um some very nice high priced uh engineering porn.

but uh I don't think it's a national instruments product I think it's a reused box and it's from Miroslav Baytech thank you very much Miroslav he's from the Czech Republic and his website is uh DIY for fun. Blogspot.com so check it out and uh, it's We've got one electronic kit, another kit 10 bucks worth, but maybe that's just for Customs purposes? who knows. And we got some nice looking uh stamps up there with some flowers on them from the Czech Republic Beautiful. All right.

Well let's open this thing up and see what we get. Sorry just had to finish the whistle there. haven't finished it yet. Here we go.

open it. There we go. sorry had to sing it hey we got a note. thank you very much Mir hey Dave I'm your big fan I saw your videos same as other people I'd like do your mail bag So I decided to send you one Electronics kit as a rotary rotary encoder module for the At.

Sprint transceivers is a small ATS is small portable transceiver for ham radio operators developed from Steve His cor sign is Kd1jv that's a mouthful in the US He's A Yank There you go. So it's a uh I Know you are not a radio operator, but maybe you can find another application for it. For example, I use one kit in an audio power amplifier to replace the up down volume buttons. Neat.

It can be hacked. I Like it. thank you very much mirl. Oh ah, postcard very nice.

Oh look at the Czech I assume it's from the Czech Republic Beautiful. Jeez, it's got more bridges than Hamburg in it. man. look at all those lovely lovely Bridges I Love it! Oh haven't been to the Czech Republic I must say but uh, that is.

Oh where is. it it's Prague Is that Prague I Don't know I Haven't been to Prague There you go Well Pra I guess that's um check Fort Prague Is it mostly? Go figure? Thank you very much Miror Slab, let's have a look. We got some. uh no.

We got empty padding there and we've got Tada Oh nice knob, nice looking knob. Let's have a hey, hang on no let me. let's check the parts out first. let's check the board out.

Oh it's a beautiful looking knob. Love a good looking knob. Look at that Beautiful! Oh there's our rotary encoder and uh, we've got our little tiny board. There we go, let's take a look and we've got our encoder for ATS Not sure what micro uses.

Clearly, there's a micro on there. It's got some uh LEDs it looks like it uses triangle LEDs by the looks of that silk screen there. and uh, yes it does. There we go have a a beautiful green triangle PCB That would be very nice.

Well actually I like the idea of this. It's just a standalone Optical encoder. Beautiful. So as he says, you can, likely, uh, hack this thing and uh, use it for other projects so that's rather neat.

I like that rotor and cod of ATS Series transceivers. Yeah, it was designed for that, but I Can see how you could, uh, use it for other things and there you go. It's just a um, open collector output. presumably the microcontroller is an At Tiny 2313.

It's just got a voltage regulator and a Uh and an Uh output. I presume. Oh no. three-way sorry, it's a three-way bus output there.

So, and that's how you connect it into the transceiver. But if you haven't got one of these transceivers and you want to use it for something else, no problem. g Into a bit of effort with the Uh documentation. Very nice photos there.

Let's have a look at the schematic. Not much in it really. It's an optical encoder. There's an 80 tiny 20 313 that looks like it's been done with alum designer, the yellow insides of the and the looking feel of that as a dead giveaway.

It's Alum designer stuff. It's got a couple of LEDs and three open collector outputs. um I'm not sure why they didn't use the direct open collector outputs on the uh micro uh because you can just uh, make them into open open collector outputs by just uh, either shorting the output low or making it and input. but uh, this just allows a higher voltage operation and stuff like that.

If you interface into a higher voltage system, it's rather neat. I Love how they've put the uh, um 3D uh render of the board on their schematic. That's very nice touch. I Love schematics that are finished like that that actually you know have uh, like IM photos on them, photos of the chips, pinouts of the chips, things like that.

In this case, they got the full overlay so you only need the one uh PDF file for assembly and you got the schematic as well. Beautiful. Good job! So I Rather like that I think I might build that little sucker up and the rotor encoder used in this thing. It's got the two extra pins over here as well as the the standard uh ground with uh, the n B, uh phase outputs there for the rotor encoder.

Those two extra pins means it must be one of these push types. and yes it is. So it gives you three functions and that's why over here on the Uh circuit. here it gives you well on the Uh documentation.

here it gives you what three outputs as up, down, and uh menu. So it gives you three open collector outputs. so you could use this Um board to actually replace any product at all that used. you know, either up down buttons and that third button press could be you know, menu or okay, or uh, something like that.

So um, that's rather quite neat. I Like it, so thank you very much Mirus Laav It's excellent. He sold almost 200 units mainly into the US and Europe So if you want to check that out and jump on over to Mirror Slab's website, where was it did he have? yes he had it there we go go to DIY Fun. Blogspot.com and I'm sure you can buy the kit directly from Mirus Slav.

Thank you very much and that's it for this week. I Guess it's not quite a weekly thing, but uh, I'll say that this that's this week's mailbag I Hope you liked it and if you want to discuss it, jump on over to the Eev blog forum. And if you like the video, don't forget to give it a big thumbs up. Catch you next time! Um,.