About
-
Recent Posts
Archives
Categories
Tag Archives: Electronics
Solar Panel Monitor
It’s been cloudy enough this winter that the solar plant charging has not been able to keep up with demand. Short days and new consuming devices contribute to the problem. I have had to use a trickle charger to keep up. I’d like to automate this process so that the back-up charger comes on when […]
Posted in Projects
Tagged as: controller, Electronics, solar plant
Playing with PICs
A while back Big Clive published a video about controlling a string of LEDs with a PIC 8 pin microcontroller. I lost track of the video but I remembered the concept and thought I’d give it a try. It’s based on the fact the LEDs are diodes that conduct in one direction only, and that […]
Posted in Projects
Tagged as: Electronics, PIC, programming
Grizzly Gets Music
So, we take our sewer pipe elbow and cut ourselves a couple of rings. Face them off in the lathe, drill mounting holes, paint, done. On to installation and electronics. And a bit more machine work to make a volume knob (very important) All done. I like the eleven dollar “12V/5V LED Car Bluetooth MP3 […]
Posted in Projects
Tagged as: Audio, Electronics, Grizzly 2
Lathe DRO Redux – Part 2
It’s finished! I’ve completed the software, built the circuitry on protoboard, packaged it up and installed it. The software – since the Z axis used an iGaging scale and the X axis used a Harbor Freight caliper, I had to mash up two different Arudino sketches to deal with two different protocols, making sure […]
Posted in Projects
Tagged as: DRO, Electronics, lathe
Lathe DRO Redux – Part 1
You will recall that I built an X-axis (cross-slide) DRO for my Atlas-Craftsman Lathe using an Harbor Freight caliper. X Axis DRO I also had an iGaging setup for the Z (carriage) axis, pretty much out of the box. So it turns out that several folks, most prominently Yuri has done a lot of work […]
Posted in Projects
Tagged as: DRO, Electronics
Soldering Station
Chris gave me this really cool soldering iron for Christmas. It runs open source software (!) and there is quite the cult, er, community that has grown up around it. I’ve already upgraded the software to the most popular open source contribution, which was so good that I actually sent the developer five bucks (well […]
Posted in Projects
Tagged as: Electronics