Goggles for Halloween.
I modified the Adafruit goggles so I can stills see out of them. And I added buttons for cycling through red green and blue, as well as setting the brightness to low, med, and high.
Goggles.
These are some goggles I made for Halloween. They are based on the Adafruit Kaleidoscope Eyes but I made a few modifications. For the diffuser I 3d printed some inserts that keep the light from spilling around the side because I wanted to be able to see out of them. That meant changing out the battery and controller options as well. Instead of using the Adafruit trinket I put an ATtiny85 on a breakout board and programmed it with an Arduino Uno, a breadboard, and some pogo pins. I also modified the sample program so that it only does the spinning animation. And it looks for button presses on some of the spare pins to change the color and the brightness. The goggles did require quite a bit of hot glue to pot all the parts so they wont short out (mostly the pull down resistors).
but you can still wear the goggles and see out of them. Becky wasn’t lying it does cut down on your vision and basically removes peripheral vision. so I wouldn’t recommend walking around with them on.
but I think they came out pretty good. They were a fun day project.
RTC Light Timer: So keeping in line with being broker than usual. I went rummaging through my parts hoping to put together something to handle turning lights on and off at a set interval. (still hoping to put that garden in my spare closet)
So here I have a cheap knock off Arduino pro mini, a ds3234 real time clock, and a mosfet on a breakout board. These were all spare parts I had in my “junk” box. And I mounted them on some protoboard just to keep it together. (led is just for testing)
I want to thank Kalle Hyvönen becuase I googled around first to see if someone had done the coding work before I bothered, and he offered almost exactly what I was looking for. I took his aquarium lighting code and modified it a bit to suit my needs (fixed an issue with it not setting the pwm level to zero when turning off, removed the fade effect, and modified the menus). But it saved me a lot of work I didn’t really want to do.
I still need to open up the light fixture in the closet and splice the mains lines to add an outlet. But its looking like that might be last on my list since I’m getting all the other bits in order first.
So I’ve been trying to think of how to put a garden in my apartment. I have some left over high power LEDs in the right wavelength. But I need to find a good way to heatsink them. Being broker than usual means being a bit more creative. After kicking around a few ideas I think I might use some heatsinks generally used for solid state relays. The wattage on the LEDs is much lower than these should be able to handle but I can get a decent price on these in the quantity i need.
In the pictures Ive got a blue LED hooked up to a bench top power supply feeding a constant current of 0.6A (which given the crap quality of the power supply readout is usual about 0.1-0.2A shy of actual output as measured with a multimeter)
After a few minutes at this current level the led modules are too hot to touch. But I put one on a spare heatsink I had sitting around and after a few hours it was barely above ambient.
Just wanted to show that the desks are all done and working great.
So classes have started which means I wont have much time to work on the Pow-OR board. But I’ll still try to work it in. Here I’m trying to get a 10k digital potentiometer to work so I can build a bed of nails to test boards. I’ve already got some pogo pins so hopefully I can get this together soon.
Non electronics project- The Desk
This is still a work on progress but I’m moving and I’m going to need a new work bench and desk so rather than buy one I decided to build one. This is a Red oak top with pine supports. It should be stout enough to hold up to anything. The top is laminated red oak with 1x12 pine boards making it 1.5" thick. The support legs are 4x4s and the crossbeams are all 2x4s. it should only be holding my computer, monitors, scope, rework station, 3d printer and the like. nothing terribly heavy. But I want it to last.
Pow-OR v14
Hey everyone I know I haven’t posted in a while. I’m in the process of moving and so things are a bit busy with non electronic projects but I don’t want you to think Ive stopped working on the Pow-OR board.
Here is a sample of the v14 that incorporates the directionality that Dave Jones over on the EEVBlog recommended.
I have also been looking into switching out some parts like the trimpot. I like that it comes with the knob but Dave was right that it makes it easy to know out of place. and I think I should be able to source some smaller (and cheaper) ones from digikey.
as for moving the caps and resistors to the bottom like he suggested Its a possibility but since I make these by hand right now I kind of like that they are basically one sided parts wise. But that might change in the future. if people want it smaller.
I’ll add this to the GitHub soon.
Pow-OR-345
The same Pow-OR but with two switch selectable set points. One for 3.3 volts the other for 5volts. The dropout points are 3 volts for the 3.3 side and 4.5volts for the 5 volt side.
It worked great in testing. This might be a bit more newbie friendly in that It does the voltage divider work for them they just need to know what voltage their system is working at. But I’m not sure I like locking people into specific crossover points.
Id like to get some feedback on what people want so I have some direction going forward.
Breakout board for the LTC6907. A 40kHz to 4MHz resistor set Oscillator. I’m using an 80.6k resistor in series with the 10k pot to give a selectable range between 2.19-2.47MHz