What are you building right now?

Excellent, that’ll be great. I don’t imagine I’ll be any good at it either, but I’ll appreciate the effort either way. I’m going to see if I can figure out how to set something up to try and make a video myself, but I don’t even know where to start, so you’re ahead of me.

I am working on:

  1. WIP - The Teensy Breakout/SensorBoard for CE

  2. Wrapping up a bike location monitor. I am trying to address the age-old question of how not to nag to get bicycles put away at night. I am using an attiny85 to trigger a transistor that “pushes” a button on an Adafruit FM keyfob. That happens about every 25 minutes. I pick the signal up via a Raspberry Pi talking to the FM receiver. I started with perfboard, but have spun boards for both the TX and RX side. The project also required 3D printing a bracket that would hold a water-tight box to the bicycle seat brackets (for the TX). Finally, I wrote an app that runs on IOS/Android, using Delphi, which talks to the Raspberry Pi via JSON to show icons on my phone of where the bikes are - in or out.

  3. Todo - need to come up with something interesting to add to a Halloween/Christmas lighting display - thinking about something along the lines of a motorized trolly/carriage that moves along a cable carrying a display which is lit up.

Getting back into CE after a roughly two year hiatus.

I’m looking at finishing my bike signals that are hooked up to buttons under the hoods. One variant is wireless for my bike and a wired version for the wife’s bike.

Also working on my wife’s steam punk outfit using LEDs and small servos.

I think LED projects are a great way back in. It’s all about momentum! Get one thing built (preferrably wired first for simplicity’s sake) and then move on to the next level of integration/difficulty. Have you started a built log yet, @mikef?

No build log yet. I need to get things organized around the house first.

A post was split to a new topic: Building out your lab

So @ChrisGammell, did you cobble something together?

Ended up only having time to cobble together the talk I had to give, not a hack

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It looked like there were some pretty cool hacks, maybe next year.

Did they record your talk?

Sadly, we did not record the talk. I plan to give this particular talk again in the future though.

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I can relate :slight_smile: My hack also suffered from having to do an unplanned Maker Faire talk.

I’ve finally got some documentation in place for it and will write a blog post soon. Here’s the shared project:

E-Paper Badge with Teensy LC designed in KiCad
Photo of E-Paper Display

I’m glad Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Chicago is next week, so I’ll be able to show my improvements since Bring-A-Hack.

-Drew

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I just finished building an 8-bit computer based on the Hitachi HD6309 microprocessor for the Retro Challenge 2017/04:

The design, layout and debugging was done in a month, mostly during the weekends. A full blog is here: https://namoseley.wordpress.com/category/retrochallenge/

I’m currently writing my own Pascal compiler + virtual machine so I can move away from assembler-only program development.

Other things on my bench include an RF mixer based on a diode ring and a discrete audio amplifier.

Regards,
Niels.

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Wow, that’s an impressive project!

Thanks! I highly recommend taking part in the Retro Challenge. It’s a great excuse to work on something completely “useless”. The next one is scheduled in October 2017.

Currently I’m working on YANC (Yet Another Nixie Clock). It’s a IN-16 based nixie clock, time sync via WLAN/NTP, alarms, timed night mode (switching off HV / tubes to preserver lifetime), alarm melodies from arbitrary .wav files. Display dimming with environmental brightness. Tube backlighting. Settings via webpage (each unit has its own), or per IR controller that comes with the unit.

Here’s what it will look like.

Dimensions: 12cm x 7cm x 2cm (case heigth) / 6cm (incl. tube height). So it is really small. Every body seeing it till now exclaimed “OH, sooo cute. Can I have one?”. Would be a nice marketing punch line. Only that I do not intend to sell it large scale. Or at any scale. However, the product was designed ready for professional manufacturing and assembly, test points, test rig and all, just for the fun of it. I’m still looking for an affordable manufacturer for the Aluminium body, with is machined from a solid block.

I will post pictures of the boards. As I am a new user here (although a regular in Kicad forum) I am restricted to 1 pic per post, so there will be 2 follow up posts.

The project was started with EAGLE and then migrated to KiCad.

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And here is the promised glimpse on the inner workings, part 1: two tightly stacked boards, one for the MCU and stuff and the other for tube mounting and the HV drivers.

[EDIT] Oh yes: the missing 3D models for some parts are due to my lazyness. Simply wouldn’t go to the trouble and create them :slight_smile:

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And here is the promised glimpse on the inner workings, part 2: two tighly stacked boards, one for the MCU and stuff and the other for tube mounting and the HV drivers.

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Wow, that looks great! Did you end up needing to model a lot of the 3D yourself?

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No. That’s why some models are missing: too lazy :slight_smile:. Those that are here are either KiCad (thanks to Shack, Maui. and some other giants) or from GrabCad, 3dConentCentral, available manufacturer models atl.

As I earned “Basic” right now, I can afford another post. Backside of the MCU board. At left is the SD card holder (you have to imagine that in your mind’s eye. Lazy, remember?).