Sometimes I feel that my geek credentials are lacking given the lack of code I write, yes I make cool things occasionally, I work as an EMC Engineer for a small Stockport Company, I am a Director of Squashed Fly a small independent Hosting and General Geeky company with Tas, […]
Maker
109 posts
A lot of Chinese Arduinos come with the ch340 as the replacement for the FTDI or other serial bridge. I have nothing against the CH340 / CH340G however it is a PITA (BREAD – Pain In The Arse) to use under OS X as well there is a fuck ton […]
I found MCN Gerber Viewer, at this site, it is an OS X application for viewing and printing Gerber files, the zip of the app is Mirrored here. I have been working on PCBs more frequently, and along with Eagle this is a useful tool.
Normaly I would use a cheap chineese clone, but I had an official Arduino Uno available, The process should be the same no matter which you use. Now given that an Chineese clone of the Uno is about £3 you may wonder why you would want to use a £1.20 […]
Today like last year I went to Bristol for the mini maker Faire (unlike Manchester and Liverpool Makefest this one still pays the silly amount of money to use the make branding). Unlike last year @Bristol charged at the door (£3 pp which may not sound like a lot, but […]
I downloaded Random Nerd’s Build a Home Automation System for $100 and started testing it out, A while ago I aquired a Fish Dish (not sure where from), It’s a small PCB that fits on the GPIO header of the Raspberry Pi. I set up NodeRed and MQTT on the […]
A while ago I backed the kickstarter campaign for Particle (formerly Spark)’s Electron board, a IOT (internet of things) with a built in 3G modem (2G are available) with global data coverage, recently they shipped, Setup was as easy as getting it out the box, wiring it up and following […]
This is an update from a previous post, since there have been some changes to getting them to work under OSX. I found these Arduino Uno clones (link) on Ali Express for £2.16 each with free shipping from china, I can’t even get Diavolino for that little (Also a Diavolino […]
Following on from playing with the Hi-link HLK-PM01 I got this generic even cheaper board from Ben Dooks, after carefully wiring it up, I shoved it on the Kikusui TOS 8650 Withstand Voltage Tester: This shows the cheap chinese powersupply breaking just below 2 kVac. The following photos are from a Chinese seller […]
More than a few years ago, I bought myself a Remote Control boat, a Kyosho Wave Master: The WaveMaster is a semi scale model of an F-1 tunnel hull racing boat. Tunnel hulls work by trapping a cushion of air between the hull and water to reduce friction which allows […]
Following on from trying to program the LinkIt ONE on Mac, and Windows, I went looking for further information, I managed to find some information on the IDE GitHub page, I will compare how easy it is to program each of them with Blink.ino. My mac is set up as […]
Tas, Bob and I headed over to the National Model Engineering and Modelling Exhibition 2015 in Harrogate.
Following on from the Mac instructions, I have also set up MediaTek’s LinkIt™ ONE on a Window Machine, Setup Download the MediaTek LinkIt SDK for Arduino Windows. Unzip the downloaded zip, right click on the installer “mediatek_linkit_sdk_(for_arduino)-1.1.05.exe” and “Run as administrator” Change the location on Screen two to the location […]
A few weekends ago, HACMan, Tas and I were at MakerFaire New Castle. One of the exhibitors there was MediaTek, showing off their range of LinkIt Wearables / IoT (Tnternet of Things) development boards. I have managed to snag myself a LinkIt One development board kit: Optimized performance and power […]
I have finally got round to trying to Automate the hot water pump on the boat, using what I found out about the DS18B20 one wire Waterproof Temperature sensors from the Arduino Data logger I wanted to try out controlling the pump, (the same PCB will be used for other automation […]
The Arduino IDE serial console sucks! (the entire Arduino IDE kind of sucks, but one fix at a time). I first tried to use the native Minicom package, the most up to date one I found was version 2.2 (compiled Mar 16 2007), it can be installed and set up […]
At work we had need for a multiple temperature logging device. Using one of my cheap Chinese Arduino Uno clones, some DS18B20 one wire Waterproof Temperature Transducers (like these ones), a cheap Ethernet / SD card shield (like this), and a DS1307 RTC (Real Time clock) (link). The DS1307 RTC […]
I found these Arduino Uno clones (link) on Ali Express for £2.16 each with free shipping from china, I can’t even get Diavolino for that little (Also a Diavolino needs a RS232 / FTDI or something as well). These clones come with something different, rather than the usual FTDI they […]
A Stevenson screen is an outdoor enclosure to shield meteorological instruments against precipitation and direct heat radiation (sometimes called a radiation screen) from outside sources, while still allowing air to circulate freely around them. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) agreed standard for the height of the screen is between 1.25 […]
Similer to how I deal with keeping Eagle in sync between multiple machines, I try to do the same with the Arduino IDE and Processing. In my dropbox folder I store my projects in a sub folder called Projects, and in there I have a folder called “_Vitamins” (the _ […]
To facilitate remote tech support, we need a server some place safe, like this one. We also need to give the Raspberry Pi a username and password so it can log in (this article was used as a guide). But why would we want to do this? I am looking to […]
A while ago work bought an Ultimaker 2 to produce cool things at work, A Raspberry Pi B+, and Pi Cam were also acquired for it with a view to using OctoPi (a copy of OctoPrint developed for the R-Pi). OctoPi can be downloaded from the official mirror, and burnt […]
What Do I Need? Raspberry Pi unit with Raspbian installed Ethernet connection to R-Pi USB Wi-Fi Stick In addition to the above items, you will need to check the configuration of the Wi-Fi network you plan to connect to, you will need the SSID, password, and encryption type/method (e.g. the […]
The Raspberry Pi is an awesome little computer that can feed either a composite video feed, or a HDMI output, however most of the time I want the thing headless, If you set up Rasbian the same way as I showed in the last guide then this will work for […]
I have used a number of Raspberry Pi’s for things, and despite there being more than one linux distribution available for the R-Pi I have not tried anything other than the Debian based Raspbian “wheezy”, These instructions are written assuming that you are using a Mac Running Mountain Lion. Raspbian […]
I have a MacBook Pro, and a Windows XP Virtual machine, and use Eagle at work on another windows machine, The work machine and my mac are both sharing a Dropbox folder, (Alex Lang has instructions on how to install Eagle on Windows). (If you use Eagle 7.1.0 you can […]
My test print of the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) No. 37 profile. The Kort nozzle is based on the one from Tomi Salo put on Thingiverse, I didnt make any alterations to the .dxf file, and a few alterations to the .scad file. I have sized the nozzle to […]