Brian Dorey.com | Random Stuff and Projects, page: 11

Magnetic PCB holders

Posted Saturday 01 December 2012 19:46 Page View Counter 451

While building pcbs on our manual pick and place machine we have been looking at various options to hold the PCB boards still while placing the components but without having to use complex clamps to hold the boards in place. To solve the problem we tried...

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Google Talk and Google Chrome Windows 8 Bug Fix

Posted Sunday 25 November 2012 22:11 Page View Counter 356

Since installing Windows 8 earlier this month I haven’t been able to use Google Chrome as the default browser for links when opening from Google Talk. Even when the Defaults control panel was showing Google Chrome as the default browser any links...

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New Raspberry Pi Analogue to Digital converter

Posted Tuesday 20 November 2012 23:15 Page View Counter 641

Following feedback and supply problems with the 16 bit ADC chip we had been using on our popular ADC Pi board which we sell on www.abelectronics.co.uk we have been working on a new version of the ADC board and we have now launched version 2 of the ADC...

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Panasonic Pick and Place Feeder Hack

Posted Tuesday 13 November 2012 19:02 Page View Counter 876

To replace the diy surface mount component feeder used on the pick and place part 1 & pick and place part 2 posts, I was able to source 11 x 8mm Panasonic Ratchet Type Component Feeders (part no 10488BD059, specification 8WX4P Emboss) from eBay for...

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Diy Manual Pick and Place Machine part 2

Posted Sunday 28 October 2012 19:18 Page View Counter 1529

Following from the previous pick and place part 1 post we have completed the initial build on our semi automatic pick and place machine. The air / vacuum supply nozzle was made on the lathe using a section of 10mm steel and has a 4mm hole approx 3/4...

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Diy Manual Pick and Place Machine part 1

Posted Friday 19 October 2012 00:04 Page View Counter 1329

After discovering the cost of buying a ready made manual Pick & Place Machine was over £5,000 and an automatic one well over £20,000 we decided to try to make our own manual pick and place system with a motorised component pen. We sourced...

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T962 Infrared Reflow Oven Vent Hack

Posted Tuesday 02 October 2012 20:17 Page View Counter 724

We purchased a T-962 desktop reflow oven from China on eBay a few weeks ago and found the results from the oven to be very poor compared to the specifications on the area which it could process. We found that it would only reliably solder 4 small PCB’s...

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Surface Mount Components Dispenser

Posted Friday 21 September 2012 14:37 Page View Counter 817

While building the new ADC Pi circuit boards we found dealing with the surface mount resistors and capacitors to be time consuming when taking them from plastic trays as many of the components would be upside down and in different directions making the...

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RF Shielding on a Mains Inverter

Posted Wednesday 19 September 2012 14:24 Page View Counter 564

The mains inverter we have for our solar system generates a lot of RF interference on our ham radio transceivers and also across the entire HF spectrum. The inverter body has plastic ends and very little filtering for the mains output and also on the...

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ADC Pi Raspberry Pi I2C Analog to Digital Converter boards available to buy online

Posted Friday 14 September 2012 00:31 Page View Counter 2636

Update April 2015 Since the launch of this first ADC board for the Raspberry Pi it has been replaced with the ADC Pi models and we have also mde variants of the ADC board with a ADC Differential Pi which is a 8 channel 18 bit analogue...

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Axminster SIEG Super X1 Micro Mill Z Axis Ballscrew Upgrade

Posted Wednesday 05 September 2012 21:00 Page View Counter 1019

Following the ballscrew upgrade of the X and Y axis of our Micro Mill in 2010 we decided it was time to try to improve the accuracy of the Z axis on the mill which had been using a basic lead-screw which had a lot of excessive movement. We source a...

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Cheap Sources of Components

Posted Sunday 19 August 2012 13:35 Page View Counter 365

One major factor which affects many electronics hobbyists is the cost of purchasing components and associated fixing hardware. Very cheap sources for used parts which are normally still OK to use for your own projects are electronic fairs and Ham Radio...

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XBee Central Heating Control via Raspberry Pi

Posted Friday 10 August 2012 21:14 Page View Counter 563

XBee Central Heating Control via Raspberry Pi Following from the previous post detailing the plans to build an XBee & Raspberry Pi central heating controller we have now built the control board and written the Microchip Pic code to connect to the...

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Raspberry Pi central heating controller

Posted Wednesday 08 August 2012 21:21 Page View Counter 859

Now the solar monitoring and logging system is working we are going to build the wireless remote control for the hot water and central heating boiler and controller/programmer. We currently have a variant of an ACL Drayton Lifestyle LP522 5DAY/ 2DAY...

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12v iPad Charger

Posted Wednesday 01 August 2012 16:47 Page View Counter 1317

Following the 4th Apple iPad charger failing and not wanting to spent even more money with Apple to replace them we decided to try to make 12v powered chargers to make use of the excess PV power we now have during the daytime to charge the iPads and other...

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