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...
18 MAY 2014
Things have been very busy with both work and hobbies and there doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to get all the planned projects finished and keep the blog up to date.
At the start of May my sole...
23 MARCH 2014
Alongside our electronic projects another long term hobby has been model making and more specifically model railways. We have had a model railway in our loft workshop for many years and it has always been a way of...
18 MARCH 2014
I am trying to get fit again after a long wet winter of not using my bike and I decided it was time to replace my old halogen bike lights with a modern LED system so we can go out for night time rides after work. My old...
15 MARCH 2014
On our Virtual Swanage website we have a section with cycle routes in our local area.
We purchased a GoPro Hero 2 camera with a bike mount with the intention to use this to record videos of the cycle routes and then put...
04 MARCH 2014
Since building the DIY Pick and Place machine we have had a problem with the Atmel processor powered component selector which was using the AccelStepper library which would randomly push the selector ram down...
27 FEBRUARY 2014
For a few years now we have been using a GW Instek GPC-1850D power supply in our workshop and while it has served us well over that time there has always been one issue that has annoyed us, the loud cooling fan in the back...
24 FEBRUARY 2014
I have decided that I will no longer have any google adsense adverts on my blog or my virtual-swanage.co.uk website or on my YouTube videos via their monetise system.
In the past I have never had any complains about...
20 FEBRUARY 2014
To program the Atmel chips in our recent PNP controller board and for our planned expansion boards for the solar power data logger we needed to be able to program the Atmel chips used on the boards. After looking at various...
08 FEBRUARY 2014
After completing our DIY Pick and Place machine USB Controller Board we needed to rewrite the controller software to drive the pick and place machine.
The new Pick and Place software is written in C# and we used...
28 JANUARY 2014
After completing our DIY Pick and Place machine we soon found a limitation with the SmoothStepper Ethernet board when using it to switch the various relays and select components from the Arduino Mini controlled component...
16 JANUARY 2014
One of my hobbies is Amateur (Ham) radio and it is useful to be able to check the outputs on the radios transmitters to check that the signal is transmitting on the correct frequency and not causing spurious frequency...
14 JANUARY 2014
While soldering boards today one of our Metcal SP200 solder stations stopped working with a quiet pop and some magic smoke* came from the case.
We removed the case of the power unit and found that the internal fuse had...
23 DECEMBER 2013
When using our high level photography mast we have always used a series of USB expansion cables to make up a 20m long cable to remote control the camera and view the live video feed from the camera in real-time on an Android...
05 DECEMBER 2013
After finishing the automatic pick and place project we soon found that we needed to be able to place components manually when working on prototype and very short production runs of pcb boards.
As the space in the...
25 NOVEMBER 2013
This demo app allows the user to send Gcode commands to Mach 3 to control a CNC mill, lathe or other cnc hardware.
The application was made using Visual Studio 2013 and the demo app can be downloaded here.
First create...
23 NOVEMBER 2013
The DIY pick and place machine project is now finally running and is able to place the components for our Raspberry Pi expansion boards. This project started in July 2013 when we began to order the various components, bearings,...