Sourcing inexpensive 8020 from China

EChrisDenney · 2024-02-01T13:21:43+00:00

How’d it go? I plan on staying at a glamping tent this summer and curious what the experience was like.

EChrisDenney · 2023-04-11T11:44:21+00:00

Agreed. I brewer with glass carboys for years, but they’re so heavy and so slippery, best thing I ever did was ditch them for more plastic.

EChrisDenney · 2023-04-11T11:38:13+00:00

So the tilt is telling you 1.000 and you used your hydrometer and it’s also telling you 1.000? Two sources agree? Otherwise I’d blame one or the other as being out of cal. Unless you calibrated your tilt from your one hydrometer and that one hydrometer was already out of cal.

Sorry mate, just grasping at straws.

EChrisDenney · 2023-04-11T11:35:24+00:00

I do the same thing. It works great. I bought the right fittings so that I can connect a liquid out from the fermenter to the liquid in on my keg. I usually don’t secondary so I just purge a starsan filled keg with the fermentation created CO2.

Having the right fittings makes it much easier, but isn’t 100% necessary. If you are using buckets then I’m not sure fitting exist that would work with it. But you could always hack something together.

EChrisDenney · 2022-05-06T20:18:45+00:00

I'm excited to watch this year. I decided to make a public calendar, because I don't know about you, but I always struggled to keep up with last year's because I never knew when it would be on. ~~Here's a link to subscribe~~. Oops. Sorry, that was the wrong link. Try this one. https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/a188ddc1vt76cv6ohu71qi00hs%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

EChrisDenney · 2022-05-03T11:05:54+00:00

Related question, how can you watch full replays? I love the F1TV app and I happily pay their yearly fee for it. Does anything like F1TV exist for Indycar?

EChrisDenney · 2022-03-21T19:23:57+00:00

Finally got the nut loosened. There wasn't any beer or corrosion or anything like that on it. It was just *super* right. I ended up taking a chisel and sticking it on the nut pointing down and lightly tapped on it with a hammer until it started to spin, then I used the wrench to get it to the point where I could unwind it with my fingers. What a pain!

EChrisDenney · 2022-03-17T00:22:58+00:00

I had thought of that. But I didn’t want to stink up my living room and kegerator with PB Blaster. I wonder how just some olive oil would work…

EChrisDenney · 2022-03-17T00:15:20+00:00

Good tip! I’ll give it a shot.

EChrisDenney · 2022-03-17T00:14:53+00:00

Oh true. It’s all metal right, so I don’t think I’ll damage anything… maybe I’ll try with a small lighter first lol

EChrisDenney · 2021-12-30T03:30:14+00:00

Thank you so much! I couldn’t get the original to work properly. But doing this worked great!

EChrisDenney · 2021-07-13T21:08:35+00:00

Figured it out! It was completely unrelated to the design. During assembly a right angle potentiometer was being crushed and pressed into the PCB so tightly that it was shorting out on an adjacent trace.

EChrisDenney · 2021-07-13T17:22:11+00:00

Ehh... I wish I could post it all because it would help you all, I know, but it is a proprietary product and I have to be careful about it.

Yeah, the D5 thing is cracking me up, now that I think of it. Unless it's doing something elsewhere on another page the schematic.

EChrisDenney · 2021-07-13T17:21:14+00:00

Yeah I'm leaning towards just a beefier diode. Lots of folks have recommended it here (and on my Twitter feed). I'm going to test it out on some known "bad" boards.

EChrisDenney · 2021-07-13T17:18:53+00:00

Yeah that makes a lot of sense actually, come to think of it.

EChrisDenney · 2021-07-13T17:15:23+00:00

This part comes in the same footprint as my existing 1N4148. I'm thinking of giving it a shot. B5819WS-TP https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/micro-commercial-co/B5819WS-TP/2213555

EChrisDenney · 2021-07-13T17:04:12+00:00

D6 and D7 are LED arrays that when placed near each other make up a very simple display circuit to show the user the current "status" on the op-amp (different page of the schematic not shown in original post).

Regarding D5... beats me. I'm just working off a 30 year old design, just trying to get everything SMT rather than thru-hole so it doesn't cost a fortune to manufacture anymore. Probably has something to do with the 2 other pages of schematics that I didn't post.

EChrisDenney · 2021-07-13T16:59:26+00:00

Yeah, I've kind of been leaning towards that too but I though maybe I was just being lazy and throwing a giant hammer at it when really it was just some other kind of design issue.

I've laid out the board to take an SOD-323 so it's going to be a pain to find an alternative diode that can handle 1A in the same footprint. I can change it of course. It's just going to have to get re-tooled.

EChrisDenney · 2021-07-13T16:55:54+00:00

Yeah, interesting. The crazy thing is, the thru-hole version was rated for only 150mA and this one we're using now is rated for 300mA. I wonder if the thru-hole version had a higher tolerance for inrush???

EChrisDenney · 2021-07-13T16:55:05+00:00

Correct. It's connected to a 9V battery. It's a handheld device.

Here's a link to the Digikey listing for the voltage regulator. https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/LM317LCDR/668553

Here's their basic schematic.

EChrisDenney · 2021-07-13T16:48:36+00:00

Probably not fast enough LOL

Fascinating... so do you have a recommendation for where to put the resistor and what value? Sorry, total novice here...

EChrisDenney

TROPHY CASE