19 March, 2016

NITECORE Digicharger D4 LCD Display Universal Smart Charger


Ok, let me have my say about this battery charger. Pretty much all reviews are more than positive and yes - it is a good charger (with some concerns). But is it really "the most advanced" charger as it states in its own manual?

Let me start with the overwhelming advantages:
  • It charges almost any usual battery on the market (I will exclude NiZn batteries since they are rather unusual anyway), just to mention them: Li-ion / IMR / LiFePO4: 26650, 22650, 18650, 17670, 18490, 17500, 18350, 16340 (RCR123), 14500, 10440, Ni-MH / Ni-Cd: AA, AAA, AAAA, C.
  • Independent slots - monitors and charges independently (but only 2 charging circuits, see further below)
  • Battery type is automatically detected + different charge modes (Constant Current (CC), Constant Voltage (CV), -dV/dt).
  • Low current charging mode for small capacity batteries (that is what convinced me to buy it)
  • Attempts to charge fully discharged batteries.
  • Hard time limit to charge - max 20 hours per battery - then it supposed to stop.
  • Option to use 12V adapter.

At that point, it is pretty convincing that we are talking about rather decent battery charger. But here is what I think it is missing (or I am missing compared to some older chargers I have mentioned before IPC-1 and CM-410).

07 March, 2016

rtl_433: simple text monitoring panel

There is this really nice rtl_433 "application using librtlsdr to decode the temperature from a wireless temperature sensor (433.92MHz)"  https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 which does exactly what is says. 

I just thought that I can write a simple script that will keep showing only the latest decoded data.
As one can see in the example output, further below, some of the sensors sends the data 3 times and if you have couple of them the data starts to get a bit difficult to read. With a small awk script (tailored for my needs) I can get this simple output that contains only the interesting data and few colors to prettify it:

===================================================================================
|        Time         |               Name             |  ID  |  Temp |   %  | Bat
===================================================================================
| 2016-03-07 10:26:19 | Gym - WT450                    |   61 |   5.4 |  84% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:26:13 | Outdoor - Nexus                |   92 |   1.5 |  90% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:51 | Indoor  - WT450                |  131 |  20.1 |  27% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:45 | Outdoor - WT450                |  151 |   2.0 |  94% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:37 | Ventilation - Nexus            | 1281 |  17.8 |   0% | OK
===================================================================================