Posts in category "project" - page 3
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How I Waste My Time
You know, in a typical year after retirement, I noticed that I have been working on some repair or pet project at the rate of 1 or 2 per month. I don’t like to explain all of them, otherwise this blog will be just that – my repair/project blog. But once in a while I feel like I should write about these small projects. Otherwise many keep wondering what I do after retirement and how I am able to spend time. Generally I just tell these folks that I am busy with my family especially my daughter since she does not attend school (unschooled). After hearing this, most stop asking any more questions. It is not that I am working on any top secret projects. Just that these small project don’t qualify as something to write or talk about them.
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Android Tablet As A Second Monitor
In one for my earlier posts I mentioned about using an android tablet as a second monitor for my laptop. I wanted to explain how I did that in case anyone is interested, although I am not sure how useful it will be. First of all, let me explain my setup. I almost always use Linux and my current favorite distro is Manjaro. I dual boot to Windows 11 for the occasional gaming fun. On top of using Manjaro Linux I am on the bleeding edge usually. So instead of using X11 I am actually using Wayland as the display server. If I already lost you, then don’t worry. Continue reading because you may still find something useful in here that works for Windows as well as for Linux with X11.
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Savings Due To Solar Panel
Last year, around this time, I wrote a post on how much money my solar panel was saving us. I was supposed to write a follow up to it after one year, but I completely forgot about it. Thankfully, a reader reminded me to give an update and here I am. Unfortunately even after one year I still did not finish the software that was supposed to instantly tell me how much I am saving each month. I should be able to get that information because I have a bunch of sensors monitoring my solar panel system. They measure the power generated by the panel, the amount of power we are using at home and how much power we are drawing from grid. All that data is stored in the cloud in Firebase. Yet I did not finish that part of the software. And to think I am actually retired. Wonder where all my free time goes. Anyway, in this post I will give a guesstimate using our electricity bills as a proxy.
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Reusing Old Android Tablets
Before I retired, I used to work as an Android engineer in a reputable company. One of the benefits of working in an android team is that we get access to a lot of devices and form factors so we can test our products (the android apps that we build) on various devices. As a result, I have a bunch of android mobile devices and tablets. I will show off the collection in another post some day. After I quit, we were allowed to keep some of the old devices and use them for personal work. However, we are not allowed to sell them or give away to non family members. So I thought I need to put them to good use.
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Tools I Use To Repair Electronics
This is a continuation of my previous post on the tools that I have at my disposal when I am building electornic projects. As I mentioned before, this is not the comprehensive list of tools, but it should give you an idea. In the last post I left off at my soldering station. I use a couple of solder tips depending on the work. If I am soldering thick wires or soldering pins to an arduino nano board, I will use a chisel tip because it spreads heat well and makes good fat solder joint. For delicate work I use a thinner conical tip. Other than that I don’t use any other tips.
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Tools I Use In Electronics Projects
A reader asked to me to write a post on the tools I use in my projects. Since my projects range from software to electronics to mechanical, the number of tools I use becomes quite large. So in this post I will cover the tools I routinely use in electronic projects. May be in another post I might cover the tools I use for more mechanical projects such as repairing cycles or scooter, setting up solar panels and batteries, building rain water harvesting pipes, plumbing, drip irrigation etc. If anyone is interested, I might also write a post on the tools I use in software development but in this case the tools vary quite a bit depending on the software. Anyway, lets get straight to the point and do a bit of show and tell of the tools I use in my electronic projects.
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Repaired My TV
In one of my previous posts I mentioned that I tried to repair a TV but my first attempt failed. After some more work I was finally able to fix it! At least some positive news after a lot of set backs in repairs, about which I will write in another post. If you have not read my previous post, I urge you to read that first. Basically what happened was that my old LCD TV back from 2006, started to show its age and conked out, not quite spectacularly though. My initial investigation led me to believe that the culprit could be 3 capacitors (caps) on the power board. However, when I ordered the replacement parts and soldered them, the TV was still not turning on, or is turning on briefly before freezing.
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How Not To Repair A Phone
The last few months have been quite busy for me. I was so busy that I could not allocate any time to write new posts on my blog. Multiple things were happening which were more exciting and interesting. In between I had a bad shoulder injury which put me completely out of commission for a good one month. It has been more than 2 months and I am still recovering. Meanwhile other events demanded my attention so the frequency of my posts have gone down from two per week to just one. If things ever normalize I will go back to my previous cadence. While there were a bunch of interesting events that took place, here are a couple of them related to mobile phones.
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Failed To Repair My TV
The past few weeks have been quite busy with multiple electronics failures and other interesting things happening in my personal life. One of the failed electronics was my old TV. This was the first TV that I bought with my salary a few months after I landed my first job. So it has some emotional connection. To get you up to speed, I finished my MS in the US and also started working in the US. In 2006 when I bought the TV, flat screen TVs were just coming into the market. I wanted to test out the latest in tech but did not want to spend too much on it. So I bought a cheap Sceptre X32GV-Komodo flat screen TV. It worked great. So great in fact that I shipped it to India when I moved in 2011.
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DIY Newton's Cradle
It has been a while since I wrote anything about the projects I do with my daughter. Actually we haven’t built anything in a long time. I was doing some small cardboard projects but nothing to write home about. However, recently we built a newton’s cradle just for fun and I thought it might be an interesting project to blog about. I think my daughter came across Newton’s cradle somehow in one of her videos and she was explaining to me about this toy where balls would swing like a pendulum. I immediately understood what she was trying to explain and decided to built it.
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