Excellent article
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| Author | Content |
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| cr Dec 21, 2011 9:10 AM EDT |
About the only thing that's missing is a schematic of the hardware parts (treating Arduino chunks as modules) -- or was that design decision, to avoid scaring off the newbies? A few more hardcore hardware hacker hints: - are those Radio Shack "nippy cutters" in the picture? Those are LOUSY flush cutters. A brandname to look for is Xuron Micro Shear -- the right tool for the job for over 35 years. - got an electric pencil eraser -- the full-size kind, from Bruning or Mars-Staedtler? Get an Xacto double-ended pin vise (#7144). When you remove the collar from one end, that end will jam nicely into the nose of the pencil eraser. The end with the collar in place will close on thin drill bits, and the whole assembly is then a hand-held drill with just the right amount of torque for drilling component-lead-sized holes in circuit board without bogging down or snapping the bit. When I was doing a lot of homebrew building (hint: my latest candle could have been banded blue-red-black) it was worth my while to buy an extra eraser just for this. A bit of perfboard (0.1" spacing) makes a handy template for drilling some hacker room at the unpopulated edge of a manufactured circuit board. - a Grifhold #24 stencil knife is the best tool for cutting etch traces and turning solid copper lands on pc boards into new traces, in the course of repurposing old circuits. Get a whetstone and some oil, though, because cutting pc board copper will dull it quickly, especially on fiberglas-epoxy-composite (G10, FR4) board types. [edit: s/torgue/torque/] |
| tuxchick Dec 21, 2011 4:34 PM EDT |
Thanks cr. This really should have been a series, but all they would go for was a single article. A hardware schematic would have been awesome, if I get a chance to do any more of these I'll include one. Thanks for the tool suggestions. You realize that fueling tool junkie cravings is half the fun :) |
| cr Dec 21, 2011 7:38 PM EDT |
The schematics emitted by the gSchem schematic editor part of gEDA in PNG form aren't bad, though you might want to run them through GIMP to clamp them down to black and white. Maybe pump the small detail-view sections up to 2x2 dots-per-pixel to make them stand out on the webpage -- I've got a script for that (it runs the image through an XPM conversion so there's flat text for Perl to work with). gEDA is the closest thing to comfort I've yet found in open-source schematic editing, but then that's by comparison to the DOS-era OrCAD/SDT I started out on. Electric and Xcircuit might be fine tools for those who have no prior expectations. Tool junkie, huh... Okay, then, keep an eye out at swapmeets and hamfests for a Dytex work positioner. Apparently the firm didn't survive to the Internet present, but the Dytex bench vise is head-and-shoulders above PanaVise in quality, convenience and reliability. I picked up mine (delta base, double-action vise, wire holder) in the mid-Seventies when I got into electronics. Here's an idea (one I've been considering myself) tying Linux to hardware... An oil furnace is a constant-feed device, so fuel consumption is linear with on-time. Tap into the power to the fuel pump with a small SPST relay, run that dry-contact signal up to some signal conditioning (an LM311 or half an LM393 plus passives) to clean up contact-bounce and clamp impressed voltage spikes, then into a likely port on a Linux box (or into an MCU that talks to the Linux box by USB). Pick that up and log it with a script and you can generate LAN-local webpage graphs of consumption over time, daily consumption profiles, before-and-after comparisons of new insulation, cash costs of sleeping with the window open in winter... Watching for short and missing burns, you can also monitor and post alarms for downdraft-caused stalls before somebody screams that the bathwater's gone cold. If that sounds sellable, have at it with my blessings. [s/is/in/] |
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