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Ryobi 18V ONE+ HP Compact Brushless Drill and Impact Driver Review
I've written a number of times about how much I like my Ryobi tools. This summer one of my small 1.5 Ah batteries died, so I looked at getting new ones. While many people prefer the larger batteries that last longer, my projects typically are short and don't require a lot of power. The small batteries are lighter and make the tools easier to use. Home Depot (the exclusive seller of Ryobi products), has a version of 1.5 Ah batteries that don't have a fuel gauge on them; to me, this makes the batteries pretty useless. There are a number of sellers on eBay selling the 1.5 Ah batteries with the gauges for about $30 per battery.
I saw that Ryobi released new HP brushless tools including a drill/driver kit with 2 1.5 Ah batteries that have fuel gauges! The cost, however, is $180 meaning the driver and drill are about $120. As I already have a perfectly good drill and driver, it was hard to justify.
For the holidays, I saw that Home Depot discounted the set by $40 bringing the cost to a bit more reasonable $140. I still didn't need the set, but the new tools are lighter than my current ones and potentially more powerful than the ones that I bought many, many years ago. I couldn't help myself and hit the buy button!
The tools arrived last week and the batteries are smaller and slightly lighter than my existing 1.5 Ah battery and have a sleeker design. The new impact driver weighs 842 g (without battery) and the drill 952 g vs 1192 g and 1226 g respectively for my old set (I have an even older drill that weighs 1420 g). The battery is 410 g vs 446 g for the 1.5 Ah battery. The weight differences are huge!
Left is the oldest drill/driver; middle was the one I bought a few years ago and the one on the right is the latest brushless drill/driver
Left is old impact driver; right is new impact driver.I've used both tools briefly and they perform well. Are they better than the older tools? Maybe marginally, but it is hard for me to tell. I've seen a video where the person compared the new brushless drill/driver with the old brushless driver and found it less powerful (he had some odd results depending on the type of battery he used). Am I going to notice? I will definitely notice the weight difference, but probably not the performance.
Pros
- Brushless motors
- Lighter than what I already had
Cons
- May not provide better performance (depending on what you already have)
Summary
If you have existing tools that work, it is really hard to justify these new HP brushless drill/driver. Having extra batteries is always good and the lighter ones are well worth it for me. If the tools last as long as my old ones, then this will be an excellent purchase.I was impressed enough with the set that I purchased the combo set for my dad. He has been using a 12V DeWalt drill for ages that is starting to fail. He likes the lightweight tools and I hope that he can get as excited for the Ryobi tools as I am.
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Debugging Firebase Analytics on iOS
Once again I've been instructed to add analytics into an app. Anyone that has ever instrumented analytics knows that it is a royal pain as analytics requires various pieces of information in all kinds of places in apps. While there are ways to mitigate the number of places that code has to be modified, someone still needs to verify that the required events are fired and the necessary parameters are included.
Like many analytics systems, Firebase batches events and sends them off to the server every so often making it hard to see in real time what events are being fired. In order to facilitate analytics verification, Firebase has a method to enable near real time events. Unfortunately this requires access to the source as the parameter Google says to add is a runtime parameter (
-FIRDebugEnabled). I was also told to look at an article about debugging, but clearly the author never actually tried the method described on iOS as it references the runtime parameter which is NOT available in TestFlight builds.Just to make sure I wasn't crazy that there was no documented way to enable debugging in a TestFlight build, I asked a friend to review the documentation. He confirmed what I thought, but pointed out the following:
This behavior persists until you explicitly disable Debug mode by specifying the following command line argument: -
Building an Air Quality Sensor
With the recent fires in California, I've been concerned about the air quality as it tells me if I should run, if we should go on our daily walk and if we should leave our doors open like we usually do. The EPA uses air quality sensors around the country to collect data and displays them on the AirNow website. These sensors are very expensive and therefore not placed everywhere. The air quality, of course, can differ depending on where you live and the closest EPA sensor to where I live is about 10 miles away. The EPA has started including data from low cost sensors made by a company called PurpleAir in their fire and smoke map.
With someone's PurpleAir sensor about 0.5 miles from me, I can get a reasonable view of local air quality. Being the tinkerer that I am, I decided to look into the PurpleAir outdoor air sensor. At $279, it was a little out of my "curiosity price range". After a little research, I was able to determine what parts are in the PurpleAir sensor. It consists of 2 Plantower PM5003 laser particulate sensors, a BME 280 temperature/pressure/humidity sensor running on an ESP8266 board.
I've been experimenting with the NodeMCU microcontroller which is based on the ESP8266, so I was already familiar with parts of the setup. I already have an indoor temperature sensor running on a NodeMCU, so adding a second device shouldn't be that difficult. On my Home Assistant instance, I'm running the ESPHome add on which makes the ESP modules available to Home Assistant. ESPHome has support for lots of devices including the PM5003 and the BME280 which simplifies the software part of the setup.
In addition to purchasing the PM5003, BME 280 and a Wemos Mini d1 compatible board (ESP8266), I purchased a PVC cap to mount it. Total parts cost was about $45. I followed parts of an online tutorial for wiring things up which meant soldering the PMS5003 power to the 5V on the board, the ground on the sensor to the board and the TX line to D4 on the board. For the BME 280, power went to 3V, SDA to D2 and SCL to D1.
After wiring up the board, I used my trusty Ryobi Hot Glue Gun to glue the pieces into the PVC housing.
I then configured ESPHome. The ESPHome configuration is below:
uart: rx_pin: D4 baud_rate: 9600 -
Combining Ryobi Batteries and Emergency Preparedness
As I've written about before, I really like my Ryobi tools. I have a number of batteries to go with the tools that sit idle most of the time. Ryobi sells a USB charger as well as an inverter that plugs into the batteries. Ryobi's options didn't fit well with my usage as I wanted a way to be able to power 12V electronics such as my HAM radio, HAM radio charger, etc. and using a 120V inverter would be very inefficient. I found a 3D printed case that goes on top of the battery that was pretty close to what I wanted. However, I didn't want a power switch, didn't want USB ports and it didn't terminate in Anderson PowerPole connectors that I use with my HAM radio equipment.
The first step in creating what I wanted was to get the case to look right. As my son is a wizard at Fusion 360, I asked him to make a few modifications to the case to close it up. I then printed the pieces and purchased a step down converter and some Keystone 209 cell leaf spring contacts. I soldered the spring clips to the step down converter, soldered the other end of the converter onto a short piece of 14 gauge wire and then terminated the wire in the PowerPole connectors.
Using some screws I had lying around and hot glue, I assembled all the pieces. Now I have a case that I can easily put on a Ryobi battery that has a 12V PowerPole connector on the top ready to accept any number of devices.
It is a pretty simple project and am not sure when I'll ever need to use it, but I have 2 of them just in case I need some extra emergency power. I have a cigarette lighter adapter to PowerPole that I can plug in and then can put USB chargers in there or I can plug in an inverter or even my HAM radio. I'm not sure of the runtime with a battery, but with the 7 Ryobi batteries I have, I'm sure I can at least charge a few cell phones!
