Doing better next time: In the year or two since I finished the Mark 3.5, I’ve had time to give it a good workout and to have a think about what worked, what didn’t, and how to do it better.
Doing better next time: In the year or two since I finished the Mark 3.5, I’ve had time to give it a good workout and to have a think about what worked, what didn’t, and how to do it better.
Debugging: You wire it all up. You plug it in. You turn it on… and nothing happens.
Tips for making circuit boards – (tiny, dense, double-sided boards in your kitchen): Like a fool, I tried to pack far too much into far too small a space. Hence the PCBs had to be equally dense and tiny. But then again, fitting electronics into a 25 mm tube is never going to be easy.
Sensors: Pic by Marla at Kiwiburn 2009 I don’t like dumb objects. I don’t like noticeable user interfaces. I want shiny things that just do what I want, without me telling them what I want. And anyway, given that any physical connections to the outside world will have to come out through the tiny, busy …
Power and output: Photo by Loki Gash for Filament Magazine LEDs For the purposes of shiny toys, LEDs come in two kinds: bright ones and painfully bright ones. The painful ones draw 350 mAmps or more, need fancy constant-current power supplies for each LED and will melt without proper heatsinking. I went for the bright …
Picaxe Microcontroller: Photo by Loki Gash for Filament Magazine Knowing nothing about microcontrollers, I chose something easy to start, the Picaxe family. The learning curve is easy, it’s designed for schools. Of course, something this simple is going to have limitations and by the end of two years of development, I’ve bumped up against most …
Physical structure and layout: Photo by Loki Gash for Filament Magazine
Vidcap by Craig Bellhouse Firespinning is fun, but I thought to myself: 1) It’s been done 2) This is the Twenty-First Century and we have semiconductors 3) This is the Twenty-First Century and burning fossil fuels for gratuitous reasons is just so Twentieth So a plan formed in my head to make a glow staff. …
For those of you who are not Antipodean, the Triton workcentre is an Australian icon. How many other power tools have an owners’ club? Each one mounts a circular saw onto a carriage, mounts that carriage onto a table, and lets you cut wood across and along. In 1975, that was all any man needed …