jolshefsky

Member Since: June 1, 2006

Country: United States

  • So does this also tie the "on the go" pin to ground on the microUSB so it can be used with mobile devices' bidirectional USB ports?

  • Funny that your image with the ahem model includes warm white, cool white, red, and blue ... but not green which is, you know, the LED you're selling here.

  • Well, Edison "invented" a lot of things, just like Intel "invented" the Arduino.

    *Edison ... damn you autocorrect ...

  • Browsing through the comments (but not every single one), while I despise the combination of a Draconian and moronic US Patent and Trademark Office, I do side with Fluke's rationale of safety.

    I own a few cheap meters. And they work fine as long as you stick to low-voltage/low-power applications. But they are wholly unsuitable for mains-voltage work (e.g. when attempting to troubleshoot any plug-in piece of equipment), or for high-currents (e.g. LiPo battery packs). I've become a fan of Dave Jones' video blog and forums, and his teardowns of cheap meters ( http://youtu.be/gh1n_ELmpFI?t=8m56s or http://youtu.be/n3WGaiYF2sk?t=17m43s ) and his own near-death experience with a cheap meter ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ewyf9mzIfi0 ).

    Basically, you get what you pay for. I think it's irresponsible and dangerous to hand a novice a cheap meter and let them go to town. I used to take those meters and test mains voltages, and if I happened to have the range set to anything but high-voltage AC, the meter could literally have blown up in my hand, and possibly electrocute me.

    It might be nice if all the cheap meters in were red (a la Harmer Fright), but you just have to look at each one and make sure (a) you've got a good brand in your hand, and/or (b) you took it apart and verified High-Rupture Capacity (HRC) fuses, high-voltage isolation slots, and other good design decisions.

    (Alternatively, +1 for a clear case!!!)

  • For what it's worth, I think the SPL chart should be done in line with other commercial speakers: SPL at 1 meter driven at 1 watt. It won't be perfect, but at least it'll be comparable to, say, a stereo speaker. Even if you get a reading for say 2KHz so that the ratio can be calculated and extrapolated would be nice.

  • Completely non-snarky: this is an awesome set of products that look to provide a LOT of utility.

    Completely snarky: now a whole new generation of engineers can suffer the indignities of the Imperial (American) system of measurement. All that work, and http://OpenStructures.net/ already defined an excellent metric standard ...

  • Owl your base are belong to us!

  • Nice explanation, mostly, but you do need to correct a few things ...

    First, car batteries are not sealed lead-acid (typically). They are usually flooded lead-acid batteries known as "starting batteries". The difference is the lead plates in a starting battery are thinner than in deep-cycle batteries allowing them to deliver a lot of current for a short amount of time.

    Sealed lead-acid (SLA) batteries are what you find in uninterruptible power supplies and such. The difference is they are sealed so you can't get to the electrolyte (acid) and they won't spill unlike a flooded battery which will if you tip it on its side. It appears that all new SLA use "absorbed gas-mat" (AGM) which is some kind of fiberglass (fiberglass-like?) material that suspends the acid as opposed to the older gel-style SLA batteries which used a gel to do the same thing. AGM batteries work much more like deep-cycle batteries than gel cells which tended to die if deeply discharged. (I'm skeptical that all the batteries labeled AGM really are — it seems that in just the past few years, every single SLA says it's AGM, but I suspect new labels for the same old gel cells made in China ... so far I haven't found a teardown test to confirm or refute that suspicion, but I digress.)

    For the same capacity in amp-hours, a flooded deep-cycle battery will weigh more and cost more than a starting battery. And for the same capacity, a SLA battery will cost more than a flooded battery. SLA batteries also come in smaller sizes (

  • The link to the datasheet on this page doesn't work, but the one on the single LED does.

  • If you'll indulge me (well, if you won't, then stop reading now, I guess), allow me to add another comment. I also have a disdain for selecting board-level connectors. If I want something substantially smaller than 100 mil headers, I turn to the Mill-Max catalog. After my eyes turn bloodshot from browsing the catalog, drawings, and datasheets for interminable hours, I finally give up and pick some barely-acceptable connector. I go to the usual sources and discover it's not actually stocked by anybody — or that half is but the other half is not.

    I would love a source for very-small board-to-board interconnects with both mating ends in stock, an option to do SMD myself, and a break-out board that can be used with a 100 mil header or to splice to wires. I mean, the JST-SH is a pretty good start — I may just start making projects with those — but an addition (hint) would be a selection of connector-to-connector cables.

No public wish lists :(