10-19-2024, 12:22 AM
I had a fascination with electronics since my late primary school years, building a crystal radio that could be extended step by step into a transistorised end result.
Amazing what one can achieve with a length of pine and cup head washers under screws!
I guess that's where the term "breadboard" started.
So eventually progressed into a 37 year career at the Bureau of Meteorology, most of the time spent working on the front end digitising and processing systems of the weather radars, only did that for a mere 30+ years!
At the end as retirement was nearing, I happen chanced upon decoding the Chinese heater protocol due to curiosity as I replaced my non tunable rotary knob controller with a shiny LCD, which could be tuned.
"What's going on that blue wire?"
It took a couple of months to figure out the bytes, and formulate what was what.
I initially thought others may find this useful to do something with so published a PDF with details of what I found.
As I was prone to do, I started tinkering and had the gleeful moment of turning on the heater under my command, and well the snowball started to roll.
Then interest was piqued by a post I made on a Facebook group, and then people asked about kits.
Did a few, then gave up as they are very fiddly to prepare.
Initially I was hand building tested units, but after 100, it was getting very tedious, something had to change.
After deliberating over giving up, I bought a desktop pick and place machine and suddenly those fiddly bits were under machine control, and life eased.
Still other bits to hand solder, but no crossed eyes required (mostly!).
So, that was it, the Afterburner was born as a snotty nosed kid.
It has now matured over the last few years into a decent product that you now know.
I must especially thank the select team of assistants via the private beta messenger group I created, many of whom were early adopters of the idea.
They provided the extra monkeys to drive the extra typewriters to shake out bugs introduced by settings / actions I could never dream of combining :-)
Amazing what one can achieve with a length of pine and cup head washers under screws!
I guess that's where the term "breadboard" started.
So eventually progressed into a 37 year career at the Bureau of Meteorology, most of the time spent working on the front end digitising and processing systems of the weather radars, only did that for a mere 30+ years!
At the end as retirement was nearing, I happen chanced upon decoding the Chinese heater protocol due to curiosity as I replaced my non tunable rotary knob controller with a shiny LCD, which could be tuned.
"What's going on that blue wire?"
It took a couple of months to figure out the bytes, and formulate what was what.
I initially thought others may find this useful to do something with so published a PDF with details of what I found.
As I was prone to do, I started tinkering and had the gleeful moment of turning on the heater under my command, and well the snowball started to roll.
Then interest was piqued by a post I made on a Facebook group, and then people asked about kits.
Did a few, then gave up as they are very fiddly to prepare.
Initially I was hand building tested units, but after 100, it was getting very tedious, something had to change.
After deliberating over giving up, I bought a desktop pick and place machine and suddenly those fiddly bits were under machine control, and life eased.
Still other bits to hand solder, but no crossed eyes required (mostly!).
So, that was it, the Afterburner was born as a snotty nosed kid.
It has now matured over the last few years into a decent product that you now know.
I must especially thank the select team of assistants via the private beta messenger group I created, many of whom were early adopters of the idea.
They provided the extra monkeys to drive the extra typewriters to shake out bugs introduced by settings / actions I could never dream of combining :-)