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What programming/technical projects have you been working on?
This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?
Got a working 18650 battery enclosure that handles output and charging for my audio project. So I now have it fully working not connected to the wall for power, but not portable yet due to still being on a breadboard. However, since that battery is relatively large to incorporate into a case, I am waiting for a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to arrive, as I need the space savings compared to my 3a+. This project has taken longer than I expected, due to waiting for parts, and returning parts that do not work for my project. I also have an issue with my display freezing, which I have figured out is due to the FBCP Porting setup I am using. I am going to try and set it up via SPI, I just need to figure out how to get openbox to use an SPI display.
A second project I have nearly completed is setting up a freelance website using Github pages. I even have a contact form working, using an HTML form, and then using a prefilled link and AJAX to submit the form as a Google Form. The only things left to do on this website is some minor tweaks, and I have a second person currently proofreading my grammar.
I recently had a big repair win with an eBay purchase. Caught an Agilent 34461A 6.5 digit multimeter as parts/not working status, offered $300 and the seller accepted. It had the 'white screen of death' that can result from a few different causes.
I had thought it would be the SPEAR MCU failure that is the known/common failure mode for when the screens do stuff like this, but it ended up being the actual screen itself, which was awesome since I had a couple replacements in stock I had bought for a different '61A repair a while ago that had been sitting in my queue.
The internals had been contaminated with the smoke from when the screen died, so I had a fairly anxiety-inducing cleaning session where I had to clean the mainboard by hand with tiny foam swabs and isoproply (there are areas normally covered under a combination of EMI/ground shielding that one should never so much as breathe on due to how sensitive the components are). Fortunately after cleaning and testing it, I did not appear to have damaged any high-sensitivity components and the meter is operating beautifully.
It is off by 390 microvolts when measuring my 5 volt precision source, which equates to about 78PPM drift, but the internal calibration data says it hasn't been cal'd since manufacture in 2014, so that much drift is potentially understandable - should just need to be calibrated.
Video of the repair.