I tried finding Hidden Gems on AliExpress AGAIN! (Part 5)

Do you know what this is? And no, it is not a vape; it is for electronics. But do not worry, I also had no idea what it is used for before making this video. But that is the beauty of shopping on AliExpress because there you can find new and super useful stuff you have never heard about or seen before. So in this video I will be once again having a closer look at 6 more products from AliExpress that looked intriguing; in order to tell you whether you should check them out or simply ignore them. Let's get started! This video is sponsored by Keysight World: Innovate; Keysights virtual event in which today's most exciting technologies get presented. So tune in starting June the 20th for 3 days to learn for example, how 5G and 6G will transform your daily life or how AI makes autonomous driving a lot safer. Also, learn why extraterrestrial 6G is the final communications frontier and how AI-driven devices transform healthcare beyond telehealth. Click the link below and get ready to explore a world of infinite possibilities. Let's start off with this development board here consisting of a screen, camera and most importantly a module built around the TX510 IC which is an AI Face Recognition module that you can all together get for around 54€. So in theory according to the name, this board should be capable of capturing an image of my face and then recognizing it under a variety of conditions which could be really awesome for certain electronics projects. The only problem was that the product description didn't tell me how to use this thing though, the only meaningful information I got was that it can store 1000 faces and that it works in dark environments. But thankfully this thing is pretty self explanatory, meaning after powering it, we can use the S1 button to capture a face image and with the S2 button the system does its face recognition procedure and yes; as you can see my face has been successfully recognized. So next I tested out what the limitations of this board are and all in all I can say that as long as you directly face the camera, it can pretty much always recognize you no matter if you cover part of your face, wear a hat, wear glasses or sit in complete darkness thanks to the integrated infrared LEDs. You can not even trick the board with 2D images of the captured face meaning its only weak point is that it can not recognize your face at an angle which is acceptable I would say. So after the initial testing I was rather happy with the board and since it requires 5V and a maximum of 800mA to work ,so nothing exotic, it should be pretty versatile to use. But for that we of course need it to communicate with other microcontrollers and for that the board comes with a serial communication port that other Makers already successfully used and they even already integrated the board into home assistant, awesome. So yeah all in all I would recommend it and the only downside I see is maybe the rather high price point which I honestly think though is justified because there is a lot going on on this development board. But anyway let's move on to the next product which is this Hot Plate that at 50€ is in my opinion quite cheap. I initially got it because even though my first bought hot plate and DIY one do work perfectly fine when it comes to reflow soldering electronics circuits, they are sadly limited in size and thus I quickly pushed them to their limit. But as you can see this new hot plate can house both of my old ones onto it and in numbers that means a heating area of 10 by 10 cm which should be enough for the majority of my PCBs. It heats up to a maximum of 350 degree Celsius with an OK accuracy and after taking it apart I can say that its overall build quality is pretty good. Pretty much the only problem it comes with is that its surface does not really heat up evenly and thus comes with a hot spot which is a problem my old hot plates do not come with. But even with the hot spot I had no problems so far using the product and thus I would definitely recommend it because I think the price performance ratio is incredible. Next we got a little case here in which we can find the I would say pen from the beginning of the video that is actually a rosin dispenser that you can get for around 15€. Let me show you how it works and why you might need it. After charging it up with the given USB cable, we have to push its button furiously in order to eventually power it on and then by holding the button, we can see that the coil at the top heats up quite a bit. Next we need the 4 small additional packages aka truffle that come with the pen. This stuff is basically hardened rosin flux I think that you can usually use with your solder so that it sticks better to your component leads. But in our case we want to fill this stuff into the dispenser, close it up and heat it up in order to create this smoke that we can then literally pour over our electronics circuits. As you can see this creates an ash like layer onto the components that quickly melts away as soon as heat gets introduced. So the idea is that if you have a faulty circuit with lots of components and want to find the component that is defect and thus produces the most heat, you can use this technique to do just that which I think is awesome and I honestly never heard about this before. So far I have been using my thermal camera to find hot spots but that is not as accurate and also quite expensive which is why this rosin dispenser definitely gets a recommendation from my side. And the only negative aspect I fear of is that its coil might not last that long, but then again it is replaceable. OK; next we come to a trend I see more and more which are such normal looking USB cables whose other side is magnetic and thus can be used with different connectors, in my case only with USB C though. I got my cables for around 3€ each, so super cheap, and yes I get why they are so popular because they are not as much in the way if you want to use your phone while charging. But as you might know due to one of my previous videos, I love it when my USB cables waste the least amount of power while charging and this magnetic connection here gave me nightmares concerning that meaning I had to test it out. So first off a normal charging test with both cables, during which the purple cable pulled off a current flow of 2.7A aka fast charging while the red one only did 1.2A so not fast charging even though they claimed it could do that. Next I built up my usual USB cable test setup in which I pushed more and more current through the cable while measuring the voltage before and after it in order to later calculate the voltage drop and thus resistance of the wire. And after finishing the measurements with both cables, it seems like the purple one comes with a resistance of 0.35 ohm while the red one with 0.26 ohm which is pretty close to the worst performing cables from my previous video. To put that into perspective while fast charging with the purple cable, almost 20% of the power gets wasted as heat which you can easily fell when touching the cable. So all in all I would say those cables do their job as intended but for me the power loss is just too big meaning I would not recommend them. Moving to something way more amazing though; these Buck Boost Converters built around the TPS63020 IC that you can get for around 3€ a piece. Now by shorting one of these 4 pads here you can adjust their output voltage to 2.5V, 3.3V, 4.2V or 5V; but I think for us most important is 3.3V and 5V to power microcontroller projects. This output voltage stays fixed even by varying the input voltage between 1.8V and 5.5V which is awesome if you only got one or two batteries that you want to use to power your electronics projects. But at this point you might say this is nothing special, there are tons of other voltage converters out there that can do that, so why should we care about this specific one. Well, if we look at the input current of this generic converter then we can see that it draws around 160uA while powering nothing on the output. Combine that with my batteries capacity of 2Ah and we know that my battery could theoretically solely power the converter for 520 days which is not bad. But when digging through the datasheet of the TPS63020 we can find out that it only requires 25uA, meaning my battery could power it for 3333 days, big difference. Only problem was that the converter drew way more current than that, around 11.5mA to be precise. And the reason for that was that the Power Save Mode pin is normally pulled High which we can luckily easily change though by opening up the SB1 solder bridge. Now the circuit truly draws close to 25uA while still supplying 5V on the output that we can use and that makes it a perfect fit for low power microcontroller projects that need to run for years with just one battery. But before giving it my full recommendation I of course had to test the remaining electrical properties and here I have to say that the claimed max output current of 3A was only achievable at an input voltage of 4V and everything below resulted in way less output current. But that was honestly the biggest problem because the noise output looked good and after doing some efficiency calculations I can say that those also looked decent meaning I can certainly recommend this circuit. And just like that we come to the last product which is another development board; but this time with a microphone and speaker that all together form a Speech Synthesis Module that you can get for around 15€. So in theory by typing in text, this module should be able to turn that into hearable speech which once again sounds promising for certain electronics projects. Only problem was that after connecting the board to my computer and following the product descriptions instructions I was not able to communicate with the board. You see it also uses a Serial Port for communication for which the datasheet gives you lots of commands but no matter what I tried the board never responded to any of them. Even while replicating the exact same settings from the datasheet, the board refused to work for me which is a shame but this way I sadly can not recommend it even though it initially sounded promising. And that bring us to the end of this episode and once again luckily for me there were quite a few hidden gems that you should consider checking out. And do not worry I have lots more promising candidates laying around for the next episode, so definitely look forward to that. If you enjoyed the show so far then as always consider supporting me through Patreon to keep it going. Don't forget to like, share, subscribe and hit the notification bell. Stay creative and I will see you next time.

Channel: GreatScott!

Views: 1,032,469

Keywords: aliexpress, hidden, gem, review, products, guide, project, diy, do, it, yourself, electronics, gadgets, experiment, how, to, greatscott, greatscott!, gems, treasure, face, recognition, module, ai, artificial, intelligence, board, TX510, IC, test, microcontroller, uc, home, assistant, door, lock, alarm, heat, plate, reflow, soldering, buy, hot, cheap, magnetic, usb, cable, charge, charging, measure, resistance, power, loss, rosin, dispenser, atomizer, flux, short, circuit, reverse, engineer, thermal, camera, tps, buck, boost, low, tps63020, speech, synthesis

Id: 8hKpQvw1nNw

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023