Comments by "Keri Szafir" (@KeritechElectronics) on "Technology Connections" channel.

As cool as rapid discombobulation of an electrolytic capacitor :)
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@Splarkszter ha! For me, it only compares to seeing Usagi Electric and CuriousMarc together.
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Chinesium is better, LOL (just kidding!)
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Where's that Black&Decker hydrator when you need one? Level 4, please!
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Hey, where is GreatScott? We're discussing Wago vs wirenuts! (and I'm from Europe, the winner is clear :)) Okay, let's move on to that long wire loop and lamp switch-on delay problem... On a more serious note, I've mounted and repaired more than just a few of these fixtures. One had two strings of LEDs (warm and cold white) with a microcontroller that toggled between cold, neutral and warm white when power was turned off and on again. It had an interesting failure: a cold joint on one of the microcontroller's pins caused the LEDs to flicker or not turn on at all. Problem solved by removing all "excess" parts and hardwiring the thing to the desired color temperature. I prefer keeping things simple, reliable, elegant and beautiful. As always, I love your insights - and I've been missing you! And your lava lamp too :) "Boob light" LOL!
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Interesting concept. Made me rethink a thing or two about energy use on grid-scale. I live in northern Poland, where the climate is marine temperate, so heating is more prevalent than cooling, but the idea seems pretty applicable here as well. Brownouts are already a thing, with an occassional blackout happening mostly because of damage to the grid in rural areas. The generation is almost exclusively coal-based, no nuclear plants, a few wind turbines in the countryside and pretty widespread on-grid solar panels on detached houses. Utility companies offer a few tariffs to domestic customers: flat rate, as well as peak and off-peak with different hours (most common is 1pm-3pm and 10pm-6am off-peak, mine has two more off-peak hours 1pm-4pm and 10pm-7am, a lower off-peak rate for a higher peak one). Off-peak consumption is ca. 75% (I run all major loads off-peak: storage water heater, induction hob, oven, washing machine and dishwasher). We decided to go off gas - it's one less thing to worry about and one less bill (and fixed cost) to pay.
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"Coolest warmest" haha, I love the pun! Looks like nice and well designed bulbs. I'm partial to Philips and Osram/Ledvance when it comes to buying LED bulbs.
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2:37 it's @Technology Connections doing @ElectroBOOM with great style! And you REALLY got to make a video about Nixies. I love that stuff :) Looks like the flicker effect is somewhat similar to what you have on a Jacobs ladder: the gas discharge (in case of JL it's high voltage in the air, here it's relatively low voltage in neon) starts in the point where the electrodes are closest to each other as the voltage reaches certain threshold voltage, then the arc (in fact, it's conductive plasma) travels outwards and then extinguishes. Since these electrodes are unstable and able to move, the electrostatic and maybe even a teeny tiny magnetic field (after all, it's wherever the current flows) may be at work here, causing attraction between electrodes countered by their elasticity, which will lead to mechanical vibration, change of distence between electrodes, discharge wandering across them, which is in result visible as flickering. [raises her crowbar, +20 damage against headcrabs] In the name of SCIENCE!
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Cool! I was wondering if I could get myself an electronic typewriter and hack it to make an old school text terminal. Respect from a Polish fan BTW :D
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Very interesting. I never realized it's so clever. "No Nut November: Because there's a whole world beyond threaded fasteners!"
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Another great take on heat pumps :) Here in European cities it's common to have cogeneration plants and steam networks, and a heat exchanger in the buildings for central heating. There's often also another exchanger for heating the warm water. Gas is ubiquitous, both for cooking and heating the water, and less common for space heating. I was thinking about using a heat pump for heating water while cooling the air inside the apartment during hot days, and taking heat from the outside when no cooling is needed. You really need to try Dave Jones' "haaaaaaaaai!" :)
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"...none of that PID regulator rubbish!" Pretty much like the thermostat in clothes irons or fridges. And yes, that's duty cycle control :) To be honest... I'm in favor of touch controls on induction cooktops, especially the flat ones that drop into a hole in the tabletop, European style. These things work in a rough environment, it's not your clean lab or living room. There's just too much risk of the cooktop getting flooded with boiling water, or dirty with oil/fat/etc., which would invariably lead to ingress of water, whatever is dissolved in it including salt, as well as household chemicals, through the buttons and rotary encoder stem holes. That would kill the electronics inside way sooner than expected. Using special industrial or military grade controls that offer IP67 or better at improved protection against chemicals could be a solution, but that's an expensive one. Plus having any holes in the glass increases the risk of cracking or breaking in case something hits the glass (e.g. if you accidentally drop a pan).
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@fredashay I know that story, it's a sad one...
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"Wasn't very bright" haha, that's a nice pun! 3:05 wait until you see an IEE (not IEEE - let alone SMIEEE!) Nimo tube... Hey, where's Fran? Again in the lab? She got me to love all those vintage display technologies, even if most of that stuff is out of my reach economically. Beautiful closeups here! :) Don't let incandescent segments (or bulbs in edge-lit and projection displays) go completely cold - use biasing resistors to pass a low current; shoot at a value where they're still dark, but when they light up, that'll reduce the thermal stress, prolonging the filament's lifetime. VFDs are going down - as far as I know, only Futaba or Noritake Itron make them, and with war in Ukraine, production there was halted. Sad news... I've never built a clock using any old display technology - apart from my MTZVFDCLK project (Multi-TimeZone Vacuum Fluorescent Display CLocK) that's not finished yet, and is more about telling time in a specified timezone than telling time per se. I intended it as a tool to check the local time of youtubers doing livestreams, because it can get confusing really fast if I need to calculate it myself. Knowing that someone is e.g. in Sydney, Philadelphia or Austin, I could just choose an option in some web interface or send a command by MQTT... and the clock would show me the time anywhere in the world. But I've used Nixies in a bunch of projects, from thermometers to a little art installation.
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@robinsparrow1618 ha, I haven't noticed.
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 @jongeers1954 loveliness! I have a Selectric III, still gotta fix it.
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Ha. Here in Europe they're indeed fast... just a teeny weeny bit faster than a stovetop kettle on an induction (not ceramic) hob, but the difference may be seconds rather than minutes and the stovetop kettle is small, very reliable and IMO handier, that's why I use it.
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Nice to see some elegant recreation and explanation. I always wondered how this thing worked. BTW, since the LED has a threshold voltage, it could use some biasing to reduce signal distortion at low levels. Hey, you got an awesome tee! Earns you the vacuum tube witch seal of approval. Oh, and the icons on the TC30 box look like something you'd find at Aperture :)
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You can talk the talk, but can you wok the wok? I'm far from being a purist round-bottomed elitist gatekeeper type here, got two flat-bottomed woks (not fat-bottomed girls... they''ll be riding today, so look out for those beauties, oh yeah...) which work perfectly well on a regular induction cooktop, provided the field and bottom are size-matched and not offset.
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That's "Automatic Zone Triggered Electromechanical Computer" for ya! A magnificent and beautiful machine, its control systems and wiring itself clearly having more in common with old electromechanical phone exchange switches than with modern computers. That's just loveliness. 16:05 the schematic uses non-typical symbols for switches and contacts; it's pretty much like the diagrams for graphical programming of PLCs (programmable logic controllers) in industrial automation. Now, try beating Jeri Ellsworth at a pinball game! :)
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@Outworlder now it's 2024, where's that Mr Fusion, for cryin' out loud? Shoulda been here in 2015 already!
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Hey, nice jukebox! Cool to know about the door closer adjustments - now I'll be traveling with a set of hex keys, hacking every one of them I encounter, making the world a better place, haha. Probably starting with the one at the staircase in my tenement house.
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A lightbulb moment indeed. Loved the video, and the Scott Mackenzie reference!
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Remember what Sam the turtle says... when you see flash, duck and cover! That would make a really dynamic shot. Lovely slo-mo shots of magnesium bulbs. Thing of beauty, joy for ever... maybe not for ever because they're disposable and obsolete. I definitely prefer the electronic flash units.
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Interesting heating element placement indeed - I like the clever idea behind it :) Here in Europe we use these standing heaters for houses or small tenements / apartment blocks (gas boilers esp. combined with central heating are more popular). Smaller storage heaters up to 150 liters are hung on walls, mainly for space considerations. When getting a storage heater, pay close attention to its insulation and standby power losses. I've got a 120 liter heater, one of the best to be had (Stiebel Eltron SHZ120S) and retrofitted it with a contactor and ESP8266 based relay module. It starts only in off-peak hours on a split tariff. Heating water up to 70...80°C and running it through the pipes was a recommended practice for legionella disinfection, but I don't know if it's still the case.
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