Peter Miller

For small components use the vacuum tool without any of the rubber tips. Again, this needs a small amount of practice but it means you can lift components straight from the tape.

I set the plate to 180°C with paste dabbed onto the pads with quite a lot to spare and had a very high success rate. Takes about 1 minute to reflow. Some components need a nudge with tweezers while hot if they get attracted to the wrong pad. It’s well worth getting this to work imho.

Oh, but you might want a magnifier with a light as well, that’s also really helpful. Here is a board I assembled recently using the above.

And some low temperature solder paste. It’s then really really easy. amzn.eu/d/ib5wkv0

Rechargeable ESD Vacuum Pen for IC Component Placement and SMD Chip Rework, with 3 Suction Cups, 6 Interchangeable Nozzles, Aluminum Body, USB-C Port, and Up to 10 Hours of Battery Life. Shop Rechargeable ESD Vacuum Pen for IC Component Placement and SMD Chip Rework, with 3 Suction Cups, 6 Interchangeable Nozzles, Aluminum Body, USB-C Port, and Up to 10 Hours of Battery Life.. Free delivery on eligible orders of £20 or more.

And a vacuum pickup like this. Rechargeable ESD Vacuum Pen for... www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D234YZ2...

Top tip. Get yourself a hot plate like this 700W Electric Heating Plate... www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F1935LN...

So what is it that has to change to make it less brittle? As far as I can see the mesh is fundamentally ok but the way it is used isn’t resilient. My hunch is that there need to be a lot more messaging to check that things are working right and also to take corrective actions if they are not.

'Brutual' cold snap? 'Barrage of snow'? Met Office weather headline review As autumn deepens across the UK, weather headlines have once again captured the public’s imagination with dramatic claims of snow barrages, cold snaps, and even the promise of late Autumnal warmth. Bu...

🧊❄️ “Brutal cold snaps” and a “barrage of snow” - how accurate were these headlines?

We review the most dramatic weather headlines from this week and separate fact from fiction.

Read more 👇

Is this while using matter/ thread or zigbee? And with home assistant or apple or google as the hub?

Grid scale batteries are changing our electricity system. Excellent new visual story on batteries in FT today shows just how far this technology has evolved.

Fasten your seatbelts, this is just the beginning.

ig.ft.com/mega-batteri...

History - Jim Henson's Creature Shop history For more than half a century, the Jim Henson name has been synonymous with the creation of expressive and enduring characters. Innovation has been a hallmark ever since a teenage Jim Henson ma...

That’s lovely to hear! One of the curious turns of my career was developing an animatronic control system for Jim Henson’s Creature Shop
used on Babe the Pig, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other films (but that might have been a bit late for your childhood). creatureshop.com/history/

We were selling SWTPC 6800 computers at that time, and amazingl also sold Microsoft basic… when Microsoft corp was 9 months old!! Later on I worked as a member of the operating system team for the BBC Computer implementing the sound interface. Funny old world!

France’s Green Roof Mandate: The Future of Bio Construction Explore the benefits of green roofs and the influence France’s mandate has had on the future of biophilic construction around the globe.

Just like the one France mandated 10 years ago! www.viritopia.com/blog/france-...

So now let’s talk about power consumption. In 1979 the computers we sold possibly used about 200W. My new computer maxes out at 70W for a computer with a million times more computing power, not the 200MW that would have been required.

How extraordinary it all is.

And then to consider storage. We sold twin 800Kb floppy disk drives for about £1000. Call it £1 per Kb. The computer I just bought has 1Tb of storage. So that looks like another £1 billion to add to the cost.

Oh, and the computers we sold were 8 bit @ 1MHz. The computer I bought today has 14 off 32 bit cores @ >4GHz, which is some 200,000 times faster without even considering the instruction set improvements. Oh, and it also has 20 gpu cores so is probably more like a million times faster.

In the late 1970s I worked in a computer shop where we sold 4kb memory cards for £100 (£550 in today’s money). So… if those prices had held, the 24gb of main memory in the computer I bought today would have set me back £3,300,000,000! Exponentials are wild.

A graphic showing the enormous improvements since the launch of the original Nissan Leaf 14 years ago the new one goes four times further charges three times faster has two times more power and is 36% cheaper than the original

Useful comparison

Isn’t the biggest and best use case for lighter panels for use on those large commercial roofs that aren’t able to take the weight of typical panels?

Did you get my email? Cambridge also works well for me.

Apologies. I have just sent you an email,

Now that’s what I call a red heat pump! I love it when our customers ask us to really stretch the boundaries of what is possible. I think we are going to see a lot more wrapped heat pumps in future!

Shot, chaser

Young men more likely to vote Green than Reform. Young men second most progressive group of any demographic. Combined right-wing vote barely bigger than Green vote alone for young men

Just look at what happened with solar investment - it’s astonishing.

Solar has seen the most rapid investment growth, soaring from $142 billion in 2015 to a projected $441 billion this year.

Wireless Alarm System Battery AA 3.6V Lithium Saft UK

This lithium AA 2.6Ah 3.6V battery costs £2.60 in volume and has a working life of potentially 20+ years in an iot application www.buyabattery.co.uk/batteries/li...

Fantastic. I’ll watch with interest. What i’d love to be able to offer is a room temperature sensor that can run for 10 years on a 2,600mAh battery. I can do the casework, but if you happened to have a micro and the software to make it happen … :)

Anyway, this is only going to get better over the next couple of years by which we should be getting 10 years operation from a single battery. Until then it might be less.

Anyway, 25 micro amps in light sleep is respectable as an initial figure. But that depends how much gets added by the higher power states. And if they can’t turn off the rf elements then 85 micro amps seems a bit high.

I don’t know the thread protocol we enough but I’m expecting it to be possible for the sleepy device to say ‘I’m going to sleep for a minute, I’ll send you a message you when I wake up and then deep sleep, but even if I’m right it might not be possible to operate in that mode for software reasons.

I see that the base current of the esp32-h2 chip is 7micro amps so that is a good start. But it does have to wake up from time to time! and does also need a wee bit of circuitry around it.