Majority of planted tank keepers are using Carbon Dioxide(CO2) cylinders/bottles to supply CO2 for the plants. To safe cost many are using Fire Extinguishers(FE). I’ve been using FE for couple years myself but also I’ve been getting problems with them as some of them were leaking through the valve.
Here is a method how to repair the leaking CO2 FE.
The cylinder come with 2 different valves: push and screw valve.
I’ll be showing how to repair the screw valves.
Well the testing did not went according to plan but I was expecting that. The main problem is because I was planning to use LEDs for lighting up the stairs, but because of festive season they have not arrived yet. So instead of 1W LEDs I got stuck with 10W halogens. 10W might not look alot but the current it needs is ~0.8Amps where as LED would be 0.08Amps. The maximum that ULN2803A can handle on collector is 0.5Amps. So when I’ve got everything connected the lights worked half way and then the chips went dead 🙁
The solution would be to replace ULN2803A with 2x ULN2064 quad Darlington arrays as they can handle much higher currents.
I’m putting this project on hold until I get the LEDs. Hopefully it won’t be long.
Step by step I’m getting closer to setting the lights up. I’ve went to person who will be having these setup, to check the situation with cables and how to proceed further. Everything is looking OK and we did some testing. The only problem we had is that the current setup is using AC 12V voltage source and for arduino I need DC voltage. In order to get DC voltage from AC voltage I will add diode bridge to my project.
To make things easier and nicer I’ve deciced to make a shield for my arduino. I needed to add diode bridge and Darlington Transistor Array to arduino and I did not want it to be hanging just on wires. Continue reading LED stair lighting based on Arduino, Part 4→
I was having problems with CNet CQR-981 Wireless-N Pico 3.5G Broadband Router and Huawei 3G USB modem.
The router would not connect to the 3G network after checking all the setting and making sure that the 3G USB modem is working fine I’ve decided to check if there is a newer firmware version for CQR-981. The version on my router was 1.0.02 and the latest on the CNet website was 1.0.06.
I’ve flashed the latest firmware to the router and after restart it connected to 3G straight away.
You can find the latest version here. Download the firmware file. The file is a RAR archive that contains 2 files: the firmware file and also the PDF file with the instructions how to perform update.
Here is part 3. No video this time as there is not much to show.
I’ve done some coding to add some new features but nothing major. On a hardware side I was looking how to power up 12V LED or whatever the 12V light will be used to light up the stairs as there will not be enough power to drive those 12V lamps from arduino board itself. After reading through couple forums I’ve came to conclusion that I should used ULN2803A which is Darlingon Transistor Array:
It has eight npn Darlington pairs (I need to control eight LEDs)
Output voltage upto 50V (I need 12V)
500mA Collector current (is enough for LEDs as the power of them are low but might be not enough for Halogen lights)
More information about ULN2803A
I’ve tested ULN2803A with couple 12V LEDs and it seems to work fine. Now I need to move from my ‘lab’ to the site where it will be installed and see what is needed over there and try to implement it in real environment. Hopefully I’ll be able to do that this year. 🙂
It’s been a while since I’ve wrote step by step guide for SCCM but here it is.
SCCM Software Update Point is mainly used for distributing Microsoft updates but it can also be used to distribute update from other software manufactures.
First you need to download and install WSUS SP2. Installing WSUS:
