Looks fine. Mayyyyyyybe the 1k resistor is a little high, depends on the gain of the transistor. 5 volts would feed it with 5mA on its base, which might not be enough to fully switch it on. However, as it's only driving the relatively high resistance coil in the relay it's nothing to worry about if it works.

If you were driving it with 3.3V, I'd probably swap that transistor out for a Darlington pair to make sure the gain is high enough to fully switch on at that kind of drive voltage. You can get Darlington pairs in the same pinout as normal transistors so it would be a straight swap on the board.

Having said all that, if it's working in your application, leave it. 🤷

You can only flog off grandma's fine china to the pawn shop once. And then how are you going to buy smokes next week?

Everything costs billions to construct these days. We're going to sell already built and depreciated assets for that sweet cash injection now, and then a few years later it'll be all surprised-pikachu-face when we discover we're renting all sorts of fixed infrastructure at exorbitant costs.

(squints)

Looks fine up to about 6 amps I reckon, judging from the size of that relay. Not a huge high power coil on that so a simple npn transistor switching the coil to ground would be fine. Got a diode across the coil to catch the back-EMF, looks like all the basics are covered .Would only bother adding extra solder to the tracks for the relay contacts if I was doing it but that's neither here nor there.

Dunno what those eevblog folks are on about 🤷

I dunno, it's been like, 5 years..... I'm not sure if this whole world-domination-5G-injection-communist-new-world-order-plandemic-slavery thing is working out.... Maybe it's time to update the car with the next Big Conspiracy?

All current datacentre hardware is being run at power and density levels that hover somewhere between "operational" and "pile of glowing silicon slag".

I'm sure some enterprising Chinese companies will take all the surplus hardware and create underclocked "consumer-capable" versions for inference. I'd happily pick up a couple of cards that are 75% of cutting edge performance if they're a hundred bucks a pop.

But it's the sport of kings!

Careful research and knowledge of the horses, jockeys, and track is needed to select the optimal competitor for that cheeky $50 punt you put on while trying to use the self-checkout at Woolies. Don't tell the Mrs, she'll lose her shit again.

Ooooo wait, maybe it's the AI going rogue and trying to spread itself around, as foretold by the mad priests of Anthropic!1!1!!

We've got to lock down all AI models now!! Keep all the RAM in the datacentres for safety!! We can't allow this to happen! Not without a lot of money getting siphoned into billionaire's pockets! Won't someone think of the billionaires!?

I work with embedded devices that use canbus. Last week it was happy to read the manufacturer's published .DCF files for a couple of joystick panel interface boards. Not anymore, conversation flagged and halted any time I get near them.

Claude. You can download these files from the manufacturer's website. They only describe how analog and digital inputs get converted into canbus packets. I am not trying to hack Adobe here. Nope.

Oh well, DeepSeek, Mistral, GLM, Beam et. al. are all happy to read these files and continue work on the project. Anthropic's usefulness to me has ended, it was nice while it lasted.

But yeah for early game, it seems like a simple solution, and the answer is proper delegation instead of a free-for-all.

That's the problem. Humans would each gravitate to what they do best and organise themselves into a structure relatively quickly.

LLMs get stuck in circular patterns because they don't have the ability to do that. They can't think outside the box. None of them arbitrarily becomes the boss to take charge. They're all yes men stuck in endless board meetings where even just flipping a coin would break the deadlock. But they are incapable of realising that, because they are just statistical regurgitation machines flavoured with a bit of randomness on the most probable outputs.

Certification marks are just extra silkscreen printing applied at the factory in China. In my field I've seen plenty of melted UL marked relays that were clearly cheap clones of the original.

If you're buying a 5 dollar adapter off Amazon and it has those marks, you can pretty much assume that they mean nothing.

I feel there has to be a "tinkering factor" in there, so that if that non-RF link is something constructed from spare parts and curious fingers it still counts to some extent depending on the home-brew component of the construction.

Also distances over the internet are immaterial. Perhaps shifting to a module/component count would be better. For example, 2 radios on each end 100%. A radio, a self-built software modem, ((the internet)) , another self-built modem, a radio is still 80% HAM.

People in this thread don't realise it, but they are actively discussing the downfall of the USA as a world power in real time.

A very rough timeline:

Post WWII manufacturing surplus.

"We're #1!" American exceptionalism delusion begins.

Cold war and baby boomers, the coke-fuelled '80s and all that stuff.

Shifting away from a manufacturing base to "tech". Detroit ain't what it used to be.

Tech boom, more manufacturing shifts overseas.

Tech bust, manufacturing doesn't really come back.

Agriculture stalls and needs to be propped up.

TechBros emerge.

Government becomes a bit unpredictable towards outside parties (Trump Era 1).

Government stabilises for a few years (Biden) other countries breathe a sigh of relief.

TechBros gain more power/influence over government decisions.

Government becomes worryingly unpredictable to outside parties and trade partners (Trump Era 2).

"Uneccessary funding" is dropped and the USA loses a huge amount of soft power overseas.

Full on grifitng and blatant market manipulation by party leaders begins. Reasoned political debate is long gone, you're with us or against us prevails.

Instability upsets government income streams. Government pisses off trade partners by tariffing everything and tries to get into a tariff war with China, who says "that's just stupid" and doesn't call their bluff.

Economy shifts further away from primary industries towards technology, but it's technology manufactured overseas. This becomes a problem when overseas manufacturers refuse to "just eat the tariffs" for some reason, choosing instead to pass them on to buyers in the US.

Government fucks around with Iran and finds out, pissing off the nearly the entire rest of the world who gets oil from there, and spiking prices at home.

Government props up the remaining local tech and manufacturing industry to ensure sovereignty over military supply needs.

Government feels a bit of a pinch from Iran locally and goes looking for more money and resources and drops in on Venezuela for some of that sweet oil. Via a profit sharing deal with major oil companies, of course.

TechBros inflate the market in a frenzy of circular purchasing/funding on the back of technology easily duplicated by other parties worldwide.

(We are here)

TechBros bubble pops and kills the entire market because government forced the major funds to participate in TechBro delusions.

Local manufacturing is gone. Agriculture is running at a loss. Trade partners don't trust the USA and are actively forming other alliances with other countries. The USA is a service economy with no cash to pay for those services. Political parties polarise even further.

Inflation spikes, job losses across the board as businesses from all sectors can't afford to do anything.

???????? - your guess is as good as mine, but it won't be everyone skipping through a field of daisies.