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ETek Lab Blog

Category: Electronics

Power polarity problem

Hey guys, so lately I’ve been staying to investigate how to add a home assistant integration with my house and I’ve came to the resolution that I have a network problem. My instance of HA is on my servers which is on top of my network ( topology wise ) and that means that anything […]

Ellie
Last modified on September 15, 2026

Attempt to repair a cracked PCB

With a title like that, you can figure out that it didn’t went extremely well. 🙁 Nonetheless, let’s start from the start shall we? I was presented with a wireless charger circuit that had a crack in the PCB near the USB-C connector. Normally these kind of gizmos are so cheap, they’re just going to […]

Ellie
Published on August 13, 2025

NanoICSP – pt2

Part 2 : Received, installed and… need debugging? I received the package shortly! most impressed by the quality too! I might have been a tiny little bit overexcited to receive my first PCBs too but that’s another story. 🙂 I started to assemble the first one and within minutes I had one assembled (I think […]

Ellie
Published on January 19, 2025

NanoICSP – pt1

Part 1 : Finally ordered my first PCB online! I’ve been fiddling with electronics for quite some time now (decades?), and I’ve always been making things. One thing I never did was order PCBs tho, and I resolved that problem yesterday! In the past, making PCBs for me was pretty much ‘Get a perf board, […]

Ellie
Published on January 12, 2025

New Lab PSU – pt2

Part 2 : The Beast I have received the new toy and, oh my, what can I say…. It’s by far exceeding any kind of my expectations except the body of the unit has a bit of wear. Also, the unit is not a ‘true’ TekPower 3005 but is re-branded as ‘Selectron 3005’, which is […]

Ellie
Published on December 28, 2024

New Lab PSU – pt1

Part 1 : Amazon Fraud??? TLDR; I was SOOOO not expecting this to ever happen to me. I got scammed on Amazon! but hey, at least, they’re offering full refund and all that so, all good… just a bit annoying that I can’t use the new toy. Long story: I received something I’ve been wanting […]

Ellie
Published on December 25, 2024

I²C OLED display experimentation – pt1

Part 1 – Failure is the first step to success (?) So, I’ve been trying to get a 0.96″ OLED display too work with a rp2040. it seemed really easy to figure out how to get it to behave but, for some reason, I get all kinds of issues. I found a micropython driver for […]

Ellie
Published on December 12, 2024

Thermostat hacking?

Can’t win them all, right? So, I’ve been donated some old thermostats from a coworker and one of them had a stuck button, I had to open it to unjam it and in the process, I moved the LCD screen connector and kinda ruined it ( these rubber connectors are SOOOOO temperamental… ) . Since […]

Ellie
Published on November 9, 2024

Desoldering plate – pt1

Part 1 : why is it always broken when I need it?! A little while ago, I grabbed that kit online to build a desoldering plate meant to “demolish” LED strips from TVs. The idea is simple: an aluminum plate that heats up and you put your part on it so the solder melts and […]

Ellie
Published on October 30, 2024

18650 Batteries testing station – pt1.4

part 1.4 : cooling and completion! I finally finished to put together the tester and charger system! By itself it would probably deserve a project category on it own but I’m lazy and tired so for now, it is what it is. Last time I left off with a pretty usable system but it was […]

Ellie
Published on October 2, 2024