26 JANUARY 2015
In November 2014 my brother and I decided to buy a pair of Specialized CruX E5 cyclocross bikes to use in addition to our full suspension mountain bikes. We decided to buy cyclocross style bikes rather than pure road bikes...
21 DECEMBER 2014
Since starting to design and manufacturer our own Raspberry Pi expansion boards which we sell on www.abelectronics.co.uk we have found that the testing phase of the board production has always been very time consuming as...
22 NOVEMBER 2014
On our ecommerce shop we needed to be able to format customer addresses in the correct format and layout for the destination countries, to do this I have written a simple C# postal address parser to format the input address...
09 NOVEMBER 2014
We recently purchased a pair of Specialized Crux E5 cyclocross bikes from Primera Sports in Bournemouth which we plan to use for longer road rides and some off road and keep our full suspension mountain bikes for just off...
06 NOVEMBER 2014
On the 15th October 2014 I ordered a pair of Voltz 5300mAh 8.4v Stick Pack with Traxxas Connector NiMH batteries from www.modelsport.co.uk which they sent to me via Royal Mail at a cost of £76.90
When the batteries...
19 OCTOBER 2014
We recently purchased a Maynuo M9812 programmable DC electronic load to use on various projects and one of the features of the M9812 is a serial connector that can be used to connect the load to a pc for external control...
12 OCTOBER 2014
In July 2014 we modified the vacuum valves to try to improve the air flow to the picker nozzles by drilling the aperture to a larger diameter. This initially worked but the valve seat wasn’t making a very good seal...
02 OCTOBER 2014
We have now purchased a Maynuo M9812 Programmable LED DC Electronic Load rated at 0-150V 0-30A 300W.
We had planned to buy a DC load for to use for testing battery drain, battery controllers and for our new solar data...
04 SEPTEMBER 2014
Following from the Mastervolt Soladin 600 Inverter RF Interference post about the major RF interference problems generated by the Mastervolt Soladin 600 tie-in mains inverter we have now resolved the RF interference by...
31 AUGUST 2014
Since buying the GoPro Hero 3+ a few months ago we have found that the video suffers with washed out skies when it is sunny and poor contrast.
We use Lee filters on our other cameras and we found that Lee had released...
17 AUGUST 2014
A few weeks ago I ordered a Banana Pi board from http://www.pidirect.org/products/banana-pi-0 who appear to be based in Ireland. The board arrived a couple of weeks later and after initially trying it with one of the...
10 AUGUST 2014
I have finished the latest version of the DIY Pick and Place controller software to work with the new KFlop motion controller and our latest custom USB controller board.
I decided to build this application using the ModernUI...
18 JULY 2014
Our new Mastervolt Soladin 600 tie-in mains inverter arrived today and we have installed it in the loft with it connected via an isolation switch to the solar panel array and a fuse and electric meter to the mains circuit.
The...
15 JULY 2014
Last week one of our 125Ah 12 volt batteries on our off grid solar system failed after only 20 months use since we purchased the battery.
Batteries and Isolator Switches
Install Complete
Raspberry Pi datalogger
For...
09 JULY 2014
The DIY Pick and Place machine upgrade to use automotive vacuum valves didn’t work as planned as the automotive valves are much too slow and unresponsive to switch the vacuum feed to the picker needles fast enough...
09 JULY 2014
Following from the previous Pick and Place Controller V3 Part 1 post we have now built and installed the new control board for the pick and place machine.
While building and testing the board we found an issue with one...
09 JULY 2014
We use Anderson Powerpole connectors (http://www.powerwerx.com/anderson-powerpoles/) on our ham radios and other 12 volt accessories in the house and we had always used leaded plugs connecting to a central point with inline...
24 JUNE 2014
We have collated all the design files we saved during the development and build of our DIY manual pick and place machine and the DIY automatic pick and place machine and we have uploaded the files to our GitHub account...
15 JUNE 2014
The new solar data logger project is slowly progressing and a part of the project includes some Atmel based slave boards for measuring sensors in various parts of the house. The slave boards are connected together...
12 JUNE 2014
Since we built the automatic DIY pick and place machine, one aspect of the build which has always caused us problems is the speed in which Mach3 communicates with the SmoothStepper Ethernet board and the lack of ability...
22 MAY 2014
In the past few weeks we had an intermittent problem with two of the stepper motors on the DIY Pick and Place machine on the picker head where the motors wouldn’t always run at slower speeds when the head was at the...