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ETek Lab Blog

Category: Electronics

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

18650 Batteries testing station – pt1.3

Part 1.3 : Charger/discharger completion… ish? So, the next step was to install the PSU and wire everything, which went rather well. The connector did fit super nicely in the slot designed for it and I opted for only putting 2 screws instead of 4 on the PSU since it is pretty solid like that. […]

Ellie
Published on September 27, 2024