Teardown of a laser printer

In this age of mass consumption  and programmed obsolescence, it is not surprising that a few years after you shell out money for a printer, the availability of its consumables starts to decrease, followed by an increase of the associated price.

Gimbal finally onboard

After a long wait and a hassle with a chinese seller, finally I could but together the gimbal, flash the board with Brugi (Martinez) and do some tuning and testing.

While a first flight have not yet been done, manual handling with rough attitude change movements shows that the gimbal seems to respond pretty well and no vibration could be perceived in the video at 1080p.

Custom made BEC

BEC's, which is short for Battery Eliminator Circuit is a fancy RC hobby term for a DC-DC converter that steps down the voltage to a given value used for example by servos and control electronics such as radio gear and flight controllers.

In the market there are two main types, most of which convert from a higher voltage to 5-6 Volts DC. These can either be of the linear type, or switching mode. The first is the simplest, where a simple linear regulator is used to drop the voltage to a constant value at the output. These tend to be very low noise steady sources of voltage, but have the disadvantage of being quite inefficient, getting worse the higher the input-output voltage differential. A considerable amount of energy is wasted in the form of heat.