Posted September 21, 2014 by Chris

"There’s another article in the series of photography related DIY projects using the Raspberry Pi single board computer…With all the talk about time lapse rails, I though I’d have a go at building one."

Posted September 17, 2014 by Chris

"Gavin bought two battery operated Glade Sense and Spray fresheners at a local drug store and pulled out the logic board and hooked the motors up to the emitters of an NPN 2222 transistors so whenever the Arduino sends a high signal to the base of the transistor the freshener sprays."

Posted September 14, 2014 by Chris

" I got this coffee machine from work because it was a maintenance nightmare. I’ll tear it down, do the analysis on how it works and detail on some design problems as well. It’s going to be a rather long post with quite a lot of pictures."

Posted September 13, 2014 by Chris

"While testing my automated critter camera, I was getting lots of false positives caused by clouds gathering and growing and then evaporating away. False positives are annoying, but I discovered that it’s fun watching the clouds grow and change in all those photos … which got me thinking about time-lapse photography."

Posted September 10, 2014 by Chris

"I wanted a machine capable of engraving, drilling and milling printed circuit boards, and cutting out shapes in thin aluminium sheet. Basically so that I could more easily build things like this robot. I also wanted to have fun building a technical and robust piece of machinery."

Posted September 3, 2014 by Chris

"This project describes an easy and inexpensive way of adding a digital thermometer and data logging feature to a PC. It involves a PIC microcontroller that gets the surrounding temperature information from the Microchip MCP9701 sensor, and sends it to a PC through an USB-UART interface."

Posted September 2, 2014 by Chris

"Here is a method for making an encoder with two sensors for your application. If you only need speed sensing, you may want to skip down to the construction section. The important variables are the radius of the circle (r), the distance between the two optical sensors (s), and the number of divisions in the wheel (d). …."

Posted August 29, 2014 by Chris

"Abstract: Measure the temperature with one or more LM35DZ or DS18B20 temperature sensors, and then publishes the result when the value changes or every 20min. There is also a alarm function when the value goes higher/lower than the alarm limits."

Posted August 26, 2014 by Chris

"The stepper motors are 6 wire unipolar steppers that are controlled by a TI SN754410NE H-Bridge that is connected to a PIC 16fF84 microcontroller. The PIC sends pulses to the H-Bridge that move the motor in 1 degree/step increments in either a clockwise or counter clockwise direction. An infrared detector is used to sense IR pulses sent by the TV remote control."

Posted August 19, 2014 by Chris

"When I was 8 my mother gave me the book – ‘And then the engineer said …’. It consists of many simple manufacturing related stories about technological issues and how to solve them. The book meant to teach kids the key principles how accomplish seemingly insolvable things. The book is lost, but here is what I learned and still use on every occasion."