Another day in a geek’s life

First of all, why is this post in English?  First reason would be, that Enlish language is widely understood (in comparison to Slovene)… the not-so-obvious reason is, that some people keep bugging me about my Slovene and a thing called “dvojina”. Dvojina is a really nasty part Slovene vocabulary (probably because there are only (iirc) 2 languages that use it).  For example, I usually say “dve ure” [two hours], and those people immediately correct me, and say “dve uri” [two hours]… Tomato, tomato…  They should probably create a Toporišič fan club

So, because the intro was relatively long, I am going to make the rest of the post shorter (i’m lazy, so what).

A couple of weeks ago¹ Brodul² and I decided to trash/wreck/destroy an old non-working laser printer, and harvested some interesting parts. Most of the motors, and the laster module are still in Kiberpipa, but I decided to keep 1 capacitor and 4 resistors.

Why the capacitor?³

As you can see in the picture, it is a 330uF capacitor, built for 400 volts. Anyone who ever tried charging a high-voltage capacitor in a wall outlet (for example through a bridge rectifier) and throwing it towards someone else to catch,  knows how funny that is

And why the resistors? Aren’t they dirt cheap?⁴

These are 2.6ohm 20W resistors (4 of them), they were used in the printers power supply, and when fully loaded released 80 watts of heat. That’s more power then your whole laptop uses… and all of it went to (probably unwanted) heat.

I can’t wait for the next ‘breaking and smashing day’ in kiberpipa

elektro stuff, geek stuff