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Hurrah! The laser cut acrylic for my NIXIE tube clock case arrived this morning, and amazingly all the parts fit together nicely. The screw holes even matched up with the PCBs!
I’m pretty happy with how this turned out, and I can finally say the nixie clock project is finished. I definitely learned a lot for the next clock – like use the RTC with an onboard crystal! I’m thinking of perhaps making a wordclock.
You can check out the Inkscape files I sent to Ponoko for manufacture here (they are released under CC BY-SA 3.0 if you are interested).
In unrelated news, design on revision four of my motor controller is nearing completion, so hopefully the thing will be flying soon!
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As briefly mentioned in my last post, my next project is an autonomous quadcopter. That is, a four-rotored flying robot.
After a couple of weeks of waiting around, I’ve got all the parts I’ve ordered so far: a basic aluminium chasis from MikroKopter, four 1040Kv/14A brushless motors, four propellers, some 3000mAh 3S lipo batteries, and a [...]
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I found an old RC car – the kind of thing you get for £5 from Argos – lying in my cupboard, mostly untouched since I got it as a birthday present. Still, it has wheels and motors, what more could you ask for?
I proceeded to rip out all its electronics and battery contacts and [...]
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I used an STM32 for the first time in Robot2, and soon discovered how cool they were. Each one is packed full of neat peripherals, runs really really fast and can do all sorts of cool stuff that simpler µCs like an ATmega simply can’t pull off. With this in mind, I asked ST for [...]
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While I don’t consider the clock entirely finished, I think it’s been around for long enough to write up.
Everyone has to make a nixie clock at some time, and as I had 12 IN-14 type tubes lying around for quite a while after ordering them from Russia, I decided I should go ahead and make [...]
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(YouTube video)
I’ve finally got around to writing up this project! What you see above is a small robot with a gooey ARM Cortex-M3 STM32 core, a teensy embedded camera from SparkFun, an OLED and an LCD screen, three LiPo batteries, some modified servos and a one-piece (unibody!) aluminium case. The robot uses the camera to [...]
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It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, so I’ll drop a quick update. Hopefully by the end of the coming week I’ll have finished on my current great big time-consuming project and will be able to write that up.
I’ve been playing with a few things besides that project, though. The first is stress testing [...]
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Macro lenses are great fun for electronics:
I’ve also nearly finished the current big, time consuming project that’s been stopping me from working on anything else – so expect a big post on it some time soon!
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I’ve been trying to make electronic fireflies for ages now, and most of my previous attempts involved RGB LEDs, and one of them per ATtiny13 with code to flash a random colour now and again. This was always going to be a pretty expensive method, but after seeing http://www.instructables.com/id/Jar-of-Fireflies/ I realised it would be a [...]
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I guess my new project has officially started! The PCBs I ordered from Golden Phoenix arrived today, a day short of two weeks from when I placed the order.
They’ve turned out really nicely, and I especially like the black soldermask. I plan to reflow solder the components on these using the grill in the oven [...]