Review: Seeed Studio miniature soldering iron

The Chinese company Seeed Studio offers a lot of interesting things for electronics enthusiasts. Along with selling products from various manufacturers, Seeed develops and produces their own products, many of which are very innovative. Seeed has also developed their own miniature soldering iron, which is now available in a European version.

Isolation is a means of preventing direct current (DC) and unwanted alternating current (AC) between two parts of a system while still enabling signal and power transfer between those two parts. Isolation is used in a wide variety of applications: to protect human operators and low-voltage circuitry from high voltages, to improve noise immunity, and to handle ground potential differences

Although the projects published in Elektor Magazine can be built and used without modifications - at least, that is what we aim for - in many cases they double as sources of inspiration. The Power Analyzer we present here is such a project. Inspired by the AC/DC Power Meter published in Elektor September 2015 it evolved into a 3-channel high-performance, high-precision instrument with a graphical user interface. The software was written in mikroBasic.

You can make a smart power bar (also called ‘block’; ‘strip’) with one single semiconductor component: a triac!

LEM has introduced a new series of small integrated-circuit transducers for AC and DC isolated current measurement up to 100 kHz. These new parts offer complete isolation despite their tiny dimensions. They have an integrated primary conductor for nominal current measurements up to 20 A and with a measuring range of 2.5 times the nominal current. In addition they can handle large current surges up to 200 A for a short time (1 ms).

1, 2 or 3 channel power analyzer, giving number or graphic display (scope picture or FFT) on a 128 x 64 LCD

With this little tool, id like to make a simple, but efficient monitor to see if all wiring in a power socket is connected right. In general, a single phase power socket and be wired in 2 ways:1. PHASE/PHASE/EARTH: we get 2 phases; 230V between them. If the earth is connected right, we measure 115V between both phases and earth.

Microchip has expanded its line of power monitoring ICs with the new MCP39F511N. In addition to providing standard power calculations and monitoring two loads simultaneously, the IC simplifies the overall circuit design. The MCP39F511N has three integrated A/D converters to measure the supply voltage and two load currents, a 16-bit calculation engine, EEPROM, and a versatile 2-wire interface.

Who ever said green power has to be fresh? HP is looking into turning something smelly into something useful: running datacentres on cow poo. Did you know livestock is responsible for a big amount of the emission of greenhouse gasses? Up to 51%, studies suggest. Cows in particular are bad girls, outclassing even man-made cars in amounts of CO2 emission! (Another surprising big player in the greenhouse gas game are tiny termites, but that's a story for another time!). We can generate methane fr...

The toilet of the future helps mother nature by using less water, and it saves us a buck by turning poo into power! Lucky people in Sneek (Holland) are 'testdriving' this toilet of the future since 2006. It flushes by means of a vacuum mechanism, just like airplane toilets have. This vacuum-flush uses just one liter of water per go (as opposed to around twelve for your average flush - you do the math!). Next to that, the smelly toilet-water gets separated from the comparatively less-smelly dome...