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...
01 AUGUST 2012
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...
25 JULY 2012
Today one of my projects was added to the popular hacking site Hack a Day for the Raspberry Pi solar logging project.
Normally the blog receives on average 30-40 visitors and around 80 page views per hour.
Within minutes...
24 JULY 2012
The Raspberry Pi solar data logger project is now live and is the latest version of our previous data logging systems using Arduino and Android + IOIO board projects.
The data is used on a custom reporting website on home.briandorey.com...
20 JULY 2012
To make it easier to connect the various cables to the new Raspberry Pi ADC board we decided to make a second PCB with header pins to connect to the ADC board and take these to screw terminals. Also we wanted to have a temperature...
14 JULY 2012
The code sample below shows how to read the ADC values from the MCP3428 16-Bit, Multi-Channel Analog-to-Digital Converter with I2C™ Interface and On-Board Reference by Microchip via I2C on the Raspberry Pi using Python.
The...
11 JULY 2012
The original plan for the Analog-to-Digital Converter was to use the Dallas 1-Wire system and use the DS2450 1-Wire Quad A/D Converter which was advertised as being a 16 bit device but after buying two of the chips which...