Hello post bag video. It's the lucky dip of the electronics videos. What do we have in the first packet? Oh I'll use this blade for this one. It's not a very good blade, but it is.

Oh, it's a box and in the Box 18650 cells. But these are not Lithium ion. No, these are sodium ion. So sodium is a metal.

It's directly underneath Lithium. It's heavier than Lithium Lithium. It's directly underneath Lithium in the periodic table. And of course you can use it to make batteries.

This technology has been known about for quite a long time, but it never really took off because lithium has a higher energy density. You can see that these are 1500 milliamp hours and that's kind of state of the art for 18650s in sodium ion. Lithium is up to all the high three thousands I think and these have some interesting properties. You can see that the nominal voltage is three volts, but the upper cutoff voltage I Think for these cells it was Uh rated at 4.1 volts.

The lower cutoff is way down at 1.5 volts. So they have a huge Uh voltage range from fully charged to fully discharged. So on AliExpress these are the cells. Now you can buy four for 13 pounds 89 or you can get eight cells for 19 pounds 76 free shipping and I Got these from the Hakadi store and here are the specs: Uh nominal voltage 3.1 volts.

Okay on the cells it actually says three volts 1500 milliamp hours Size is 18 by 65 of course. Now the standard charge voltage is up to 4.1 I Have seen other sodium ion cells where they say charge up to 3.9 I think I've seen some they say charge up to 3.8 So the voltages are similar to those for lithium ion Nmc Nickel, manganese, Cobalt lithium ternary as they're being called and the cutoff voltage at 1.5 volts is similar to lithium titanate. So if you can get a smart BMS where you can set the upper and lower cutoffs and I'm looking for one at the moment, then you could probably set parameters to have these cells properly managed by the BMS maximum charge current 1C which would be 1.5 amps Maximus maximum continuous discharge 3C which would be what 4.5 amps. But of course you can parallel these up and look at the temperature range minus 30 to 60 degrees C Now of course that temperature of discharge I can't see a temperature for charging I Know Lithium-ion phosphate? You shouldn't charge them below zero degrees.

Uh, not sure we have that information for sodium ion. so I will have to make up some battery pack. uh battery packs using these. and yes, it's going to be interesting.

This wide voltage variation between fully charged and fully discharged could be a problem. For things like powering devices, you may have to use Uh Buckle boost converters to sort of manage that variation in voltage. On the other hand, it should be a lot easier to tell the current state of charge from the voltage, but we can play with these at some future time. And next in our lucky bag of goodies are these and they are simply fans.

5 Volt Fans if I'm not mistaken. Yes, Dc5 Volt fans and these are 20 millimeters uh, thick. So they're called 50 20s. They're 50 millimeters on the Square Dimension and then 20 millimeters thick.

Now these I Bought in response to some other five Volt fans which I'll show you yes, these, uh, five volt fans which are only 10 millimeters thick. Uh, I bought a few of these I don't quite know why I bought so many, but they're not that powerful. there's the thickness difference and so I bought these because I I'm hoping that they will have a bit more grunt. So what's going through my mind here is that to get the best out of this, uh, DC to DC converter, it really needs to be cooled.

So I've put one of these 5010 fans on the bottom, but it's not got much power and so I bought the 5020s I Got a feeling the spec for these said that they are something like either 0.24 amps or 0.28 amps I can't remember. Let's take a look at AliExpress So this is the fan in question. It's a 5020 5 Volt fan and there are these options. and there are two Five Volt fans: 5 Volt 4400 RPM and 5 Volt 2200 RPM And if we scroll down the 5 Volt 4400 RPM is 0.22 amps 1.1 Watts and the other one is 0.08 amps.

Uh, 0.4 Watts that's the 2200 RPM fan and that's probably similar to the 5010 fans that I've got. So we really need to check this out, don't we? Oh um. pricing. Two pounds 46 free shipping from Sen case Company Limited Store Okay, power supply set to 5 volts.

This is the small fan, the 5010 and the power. The current is about 150 milliamps and here's the 5020 fan, 5 volts and the current. Oh dear, it's only a hundred and well, possibly around 100 milliamps. Gosh, that's bouncing around all over the place.

Does it shift any more air though? I mean it feels pretty weak, so they're not .22 amps at all are they? That's a bit of a con I Mean it is possible that there's a bit more air shifted by this fan because of the deeper sculpting on the blades. Uh, this one doesn't feel quite as cool. not quite as much air blowing. But yeah, very disappointed with the uh Power that this is drawing I Thought it would draw more current.

Oh well. the search looks like it's going to continue for a more powerful Five Volt fan. Uh, moving on this one next and it is an energy monitor with a UK style outlet and a UK style plug. So I'm pretty sure this was my first energy monitor which I bought from Maplin.

Oh gotta be two decades ago. The 2000 mu, let's plug it in. I've got some real Mains here as well so this would show voltage also Watts Uh, nothing there, of course. amps and also it could do some basic kilowatt hours.

Also does hurts, doesn't it? 49.8 I Graduated Uh to this sort of thing. This is the energy. See if it still works. Yes, it does.

and this could display uh I think energy on one line. Yeah, what? I think if I do energy I volts Hertz um. power factor max watts Min Watts overload watts and back to watts and then on the cost line. Yeah, so you could do cumulative kilowatt hours on one line and instantaneous Watts on another line so it was just a bit more.

You could do more with it, but now there's this sort of thing. Let's plug it in. It's an A torch. Oh, it's not very bright is it? it's doing uh, some Wi-Fi checks I Think it's trying to log into a Wi-Fi network.

The Wi-Fi network is set up and the device is connected to the router and we're away. And what have we got? We've got voltage, current, power, energy. What's that in red? Oh, frequency. Yes Actually, we should look at frequency.

Um, because it's very precise. Oh yes, that's right. After a while, it times out and I think I have to press anything actually Okay So we've got voltage, no current, obviously no power, um, frequency to two decimal places which is very precise. Uh, it's even got the time and that is actually correct and that is the date that first of August Uh, it's got.

Uh, this was not got. Bluetooth Actually, this is Wi-Fi CPU temperature. How interesting is that? Now, this thing has a number of modes. so this is the security protect mode over voltage over current protect and over power protect if I press and hold a plus or a minus button.

We've got the electricity price setting and Bill and you can set a very simple tariff rating. Price A which is just a fixed rate for kilowatt hours, but you can also go to Price B which has dual time zones. Um, let's see if I can move to that. Oh yes, to get the more complicated price modes, you have to press and hold M to go into the background settings.

Come down to price mode and we'll go to Price B. In fact, let's go to Price C press and hold M and then you can see multiple time zones for pricing so that it matches a more complex tariff system. If that's indeed what you have now, it's worth pointing out that this thing also has a relay in net. So if you go to modes such as Smart Power Off, you can tell it that below a certain power setting, it will actually turn the relay off.

You've then got a Smart Power Off, B You've then got a timing cut off. You've got timing on timing cycle. now. this one's interesting because you can tell it that for so many minutes it should be on and for so many minutes it should be off.

And you could use that, for example, to trigger a watering system in your garden. So it Waters the lawn for so many minutes and then switches off for so many minutes. So this is a full time switch as well as an energy monitor. And then just to add to the ridiculous Ceviche Set that this thing has.

It's also Toya or Smart Home or in my case, Little Home compatible. So you can see all of the electrical data there. and there's graphs and all that kind of stuff. There's a whole set here of graphs.

For some reason, the app's very slow on this tablet. I Don't know why I can also trigger the relay on or off? Uh, you probably can't hear the clicks of that and it says are you sure you want to turn off the switch Yes, that's right. It says if you turn off the switch and your router happens to be powered by this switch, of course, you'll lose access to the switch. So it asks you that every time, which is slightly odd and then in settings, this is a terribly slow.

It runs terribly slowly on this particular tablet. I Don't quite know why it runs a lot quicker on my phone. Perhaps I'll get that. So yes, here on my phone I can go to the graphs and we've got all that stuff.

Lots and lots of graphs. And if I go into settings, then I've got all the settings that you can get to on the device itself. You can also see on here and back in home. you've got all of the electrical data including that nice precise frequency figure, the voltage figure, and well, so much stuff that I haven't fully explored this a log of when you switch the relay on and off.

Fantastic. Now you can also have it after a certain period of time it goes into this sort of, uh, very general voltage, current, power, and energy display. I should peel that off, Really? Because oh, that's fantastic. Actually, that would make it easier to see, wouldn't it? Well, you can see the little uh, red and blue LEDs quite well without this cover on.

but I think I will put it back I just don't think someone had pressed it fully home. so I will do that I will press it fully home. Um, yeah. Well, I was going to say here things have moved on a little bit since I bought this rather Basic Energy Monitor advice on AliExpress in a Innovative Manufacturing Company Store 1519 I think I got it for slightly less than that.

ended up being about 18 pounds I think including that. it is free shipping and oh there are Oh yeah, of course you've got the UK, the French, the United States and the UK uh variants. Get the one that suits your country And so these are today's post bag items now. Big thanks as usual to my Patreon patrons.

They get to see the videos about 24 hours earlier before I switch on the Google ads. Um, but that's it for this video. Cheerio.