05 JANUARY 2013
After seeing other blog posts about people’s workshops, I thought I should add a post about our small home workshop which is in the loft of our terrace home.
The loft space is 4.1m long, 3.2m wide at its widest point...
01 DECEMBER 2012
Following from the Panasonic component feeder mods and the build of our manual pick and place machine (pick and place part 1 & pick and place part 2) we have started to build an automatic stepper motor driven controller...
01 DECEMBER 2012
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...
25 NOVEMBER 2012
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...
20 NOVEMBER 2012
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...
13 NOVEMBER 2012
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...
28 OCTOBER 2012
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...
19 OCTOBER 2012
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...
02 OCTOBER 2012
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...
21 SEPTEMBER 2012
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...
19 SEPTEMBER 2012
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...
14 SEPTEMBER 2012
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...
05 SEPTEMBER 2012
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...
19 AUGUST 2012
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...
10 AUGUST 2012
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...
08 AUGUST 2012
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...