Changing the battery of your tablet for a few bucks

In this post we will change a spent battery to a 9-inch tablet

Currently it is not uncommon to see every family with an Android or Apple tablet, and over time the piece gets more wear of this useful accessory is the li-ion battery, especially if it is of poor quality, and when it lasts less than an hour we should change it, improving the original capacity if possible. In this case we have a Edertix Tablet 9.7" whose battery lasts less than half of its original capacity.

Extending the battery life of your phone past 3 DAYS

S5 with housing and battery Zerolemon What's hot?

Granted, cheating is so fashionable today... but if not, "you wouldn't go read" this entry. No, there are no magic tricks to make your smartphone lasts, in normal use, more than calculated by the manufacturer (beyond a few more hours);  if you want your battery to last more, the only answer to your praye is to change the battery with a higher capacity one at the expense of giving more thickness to the mobile, yes, and if the change includes a cover that protects it from knocks great, welcome are the "fatphone"! 

But do not go! This entry is not sponsored! The Zerolemon are not the typical Chinese fat batteries, with a shabby housing to accommodate them. It is quality batteries, yes manufactured in China, but with reliable Design and Quality; I tell you I've been using for the last year one for my S3 with results that have exceeded my expectations, with actual 6000 mAh .

Build your own fully customizable Energy Monitor for 30 bucks

Arduino UNO with a 2.4 "TFT monitor the consumption of a house

The crisis continues, so If you want to know how much electricity do you need every hour of the day, or switch power contract to the TDH or reduce the contracted power, or make estimates, you can install an expensive energy monitor, or, as we will see in this post, we manufacture ourselves .

IMPORTANT : If your supplier has telemetry on your electricity bill, chances are that hourly consumption can be consulted on the website of the supplier.

Version 1.0 of the program and debugged

Everything you wanted to know about planned obsolescence ... and other topics on home appliances

Good, I was thinking about writing an article about the "planned obsolescence" after having a nice discussion with a "Blablacar" passenger long ago, but what was my surprise that my a friend Antonio Sanchez has already done it, and very well in his blog on saving on home appliances, and I 'm grateful to him for keeping people well informed of (I subscribe to every word of him, I think I wouldn't explain it better). Well, for me:

How to locate the fault point on a fiber optic cable without tools

24 port switch with Allied Telesys Quality

There are expensive cable testing tools that tell us quickly and reliably what fiber cable is failing sending the light signal, but do not usually indicate where it has been broken. 
But with a simple trick we can see which section of the connection is broken , just using a powerful chip CREE LED Flashlight XML-T6 and the ability of the fiber to transmit any light waveform trhough it.
At one end we put the flashlight focusing terminations:

Blurry text in Google Chrome and other Aplis after installing Windows 10: How to fix it

Windows 10 by default applies a display configuration and scaling according to the screen size that we have, which may result in a neat desk, but in some computers the applications could be all with blurry text, as if it were not using the native resolution of the screen, despite having drivers and well detected screen. To fix this and get and clear view in Windows 10, we just have to follow these steps :

Fuel economy in a car: Charging battery the Arduino way: 2nd and last part

26650 LifePo4 A123 batteries (2.3 Ah)

After analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of changing the car battery for a homemade LiFePo4 one as we discussed, I've finally discharged it for the following reasons :

Home Automation: How to activate a relay via USB on Windows to control devices (blinds, lights, etc)

Although it is most economic and versatile use Arduino as a programmable electronic board, so we avoid the known unreliability of Windows, when you want to activate a equipment is sometimes easier to use a USB relay, either because we have a computer that has to be always on, or for other reasons, allowing us to theoretically control up to 8 switches for each USB connector on the same PC. 
I had to replace an old system that used the LPT1 port for controlling a time alarm (not compatible with Win XP or 7) so after investigating it I bought 2 pcs. of this USB-controlled relay  in Aliexpress.

And if we want to control multiple devices there are up to 8 channels (relays) in the same unit, with each relay 10A capacity, so the possibilities are very extended.

Fuel economy in a car: Charging the battery the Arduino way - Part One

In this post we will see what details we consider to adapt a vehicle to save fuel by switching off the alternator when we are not interested to charge the battery (and take advantage of braking, engine braking, etc. to do so), taking advantage of lessons learned in the previous post . This It is especially useful in a diesel , where power consumption is much lower than in a gasoline car.

Currently any measure is little to lower the consumption of a car, and although we are in a period of decline in fuel prices, this is transitory, because as with any commodity product high demand prices will soon go back up (or keep at the highest possible price that permits its competitors).

We can change the wheels to a eco profile ones, change the oil by other more energy efficient (as we discussed), etc. And one of the points of great savings capacity (between 1 and 5% savings) is in producing electricity, generating electricity with oil is very expensive. Some people even partially hybridized vehicle for changing the alternator motor / generator and replacing the battery with a LifePo4 (Forum GoldenMotor).

You have to evaluate the suitability of this modification, as the lead-calcium batteries do not allow more than 20% discharge without damage, so there is little room to use them with a programmed charging. Ideally mount a LiFePo4 battery, but can cost more than 200 €, only useful and profitable to people that uses them a lot in short travels in the city (taxi drivers and transport vehicles).

The most innovative engines are now including programmed battery charging, so that is only activated when the low voltage level is reached, although I do not know what kind of battery this cars uses and what the procedure in detail.

Curiously, in the following video you can see how the workload on the alternator note clearly appreciate the drop in rpm (and automatic adjustment by the control unit) of this PSA 1.6 HDI diesel engine:

The Li-ion 18650 for sale on the Internet: There are more false than legitimate

When I started acquiring Li-ion batteries 18650 back in 2012 to restore some packs, there were still no stores in Spain that had them and I started to import them through Chinese pages like DX.com, aliexpress, Ebay, etc.

Note: The reference "18650" refers to the shape and dimensions; 18 is the diameter in mm, 65 is length and 0 indicates the shape; in this case cylindrical.

At first I was confident and I trusted the ads in some extent, I knew the false capacities of some NI-MH before, where manufacturers also indicated many times more capacity than real, so I was prepared. I compared, and bought cheap, but not the cheapest, high capacity (announced) batteries, , and hoped that there would not be much difference.

This problem is very well explained in Energizes or Bateriasdelitio.net , which echo the deceptions of Chinese "smart" guys.

I was wrong. I came to ordering (ouch!) For 3 €/unit. 18 batteries "Fandy-FIRE", the "manufacturer" marked them as 3600 mAh capacity, when in fact they only had 800 or less! When they arrived the first thing that struck me was how little weighed; the larger capacity usually weigh 47 grams / unit, when these did not reach the 30 g / pc., although some manufacturers are "approaching" the weight of the good ones filling them with materials as diverse as flour!