We had to dig up the church well

The pump quit in the church well so we had to dig it up.  When we tried to pull it we could see somthing on the pitless adapter.  We tapped it with a long stick and discovered it was a rock and now it was further down in the well.  No amount of pounding or pulling would loosen the pitless connector.  So we had to did up the well.

After digging up the pitless and removing it, the pump came up easily.  We did not see any rocks!?!  We did see the real problem: the wires to the pump were burnt and one wire was disconnected.

We could also see the pitless was bigger than normal and after hitting it many times with different hammers it finally came apart.  there was no O ring!  It had likely leaked and the leaked water formed a rust/calcium bond glueing it in place.

Waveshare Zero to Pi3 Review

I recently purchased a Waveshare Zero to Pi3 adapter.  I had a couple of Pi zero's laying around not being used because I had to look up the HDMI and USB adapters in order to use them.  One Zero was even so old that it did not have any built in network ability.  I had to use USB memory sticks to add programs to it.  

This next picture shows the Zero adapter in use.

I could not get it to fit my 3D printed case as it is a very tiny bit wider and the memory card jack is in the wrong place.  I might design a modified case with the new memory card position.  It did mount fine on a piece of plastic with the standard raspberry Pi hole spacing.

When I went to test it, the video worked but the USB jacks did not work.  Then I squeezed it a little more and the USB jacks moved a tiny bit and started working.  Even the network jack worked but, to be honest, the Zero is a model 1.3 and it is to slow for browsing online web sites.

The adapter is also missing the audio jack, but most of the time I have to disable audio to run my projects so that is not an issue for me.  Alltogether I love this little adapter as it brought back usefulness to my Zero's.  

I own a raspberry Pi model 1, 2, 3 and 4.  I was surprised whrn I discovered that I needed a HDMI adapter for the model 4!  Now if I can just keep from loosing it!

Mackie Thump TH-15A Powered speaker Repair

 I was asked to repair a Mackie Thump TH-15A Powered speaker by a friend.  It powered on and everything looked good but there was no sound coming out.  I checked the speakers and the power supplies but everything was just fine.  However, the computer board was getting really hot.  It had 3.3 volts coming into a voltage regulator but only .5 volts coming out.  I tried easter egging the capicitors and it turned out to be the tiny little .1 uF capacitor that was shorting out the power supply.  The correct output is 1.2 volts.

This is what the guts look like, we are going to zero in on the logic board.

This is the logic board once the metal cover is removed.

These are the filter caps on the 1.2 volt power supply circled in red.

This is what the powered speaker looks like once it was back together.

ESP32 HUB75 DMA Hue Value Spectrum demo

The Hue Value Spectrum demo is beautiful, cameras do not do it justice.

This is found at https://github.com/mrcodetastic/ESP32-HUB75-MatrixPanel-DMA

This software connects to just the input port of the LED array.

The issue with this software is that it it too fast.  The speed results in noise from the 3 volt logic driving the 5 volt panel.  You have to play with the ground wires and keep the ribbon cable as short as possible to prevent noise and even then there are faint blinking LED's from th noise issue.

Another issue is the software does not support "Strange" LED panels like most 8S outdoor panels.

Aurora Demo on ESP32 with a 16S 32x32 LED panel

This is the Aurora Demo working on 32x32 RGB LED matrix panel with an ESP32 Processor.  I bought a circuit bard to do this but could not get it to work, so I went with jumper wires and it worked almost perfectly from the start!

This wiring arrangement uses two sets of jumper wires going to both the input and output of the LED panel.  This makes it almost impossible to transfer it to another panel to test different ones to see if they are supported inthe software.

The wiring looks like this:

This wiring makes it difficult to add more panels or to try using another panel.