I found the ‘Picktor’ Pick and Place head for retrofitting on a 3D printer on Thingiverse (GitHub) As designed it uses a Nema 17 stepper motor, however I suspect that will be too big for my design. I got 3 x Nema 14 stepper motors from an old RepRap Huxley, […]
Tech
73 posts
…and other lies adults who should know better spread! On Facebook a friend of mine has joined the crazy Electrosmog people; I was first made aware of it when she posted outrage at an article in a small paper with the headline “Glastonbury Festival 2019 to be first ever music […]
A fair while ago Swindon Makerspace started a group project called LogoBot, a cheap, expendable and extendable easy to build robot for playing with. Even longer ago I bought a MiroBot from kick-starter, it had lived in a box, and parts of it had got damaged. Tamarisk showed me and […]
I have now been to Bletchley Park twice. In the gift shop they have a Build your own Enigma-E Kit: The Enigma machine was the German cipher machine used to encrypt their WW2 communications and systematically cracked by the Bletchley Park Codebreakers. This highly detailed replica design gives you the […]
Most of the stuff you will need to do the electronic projects I do on this site can be got by going to Amazon (I have affiliate links), I know I have mentioned the Oomlout Starter Kit for Arduino, However I fear that this is discontinued 🙁 The Oomlout Starter […]
A while back, I went on a Geek Walk to Bletchley Park, This time Tamarisk’s Uni Computing Society went for a Social. We didn’t catch up with them, but we went as a group anyway 🙂 Last time I thought it would be cool to make an Enigma Machine, this […]
Libvirt has finaly been fixed to work on OS X, LibVirt Manager is what I use to manage the Virtual machines on Sandraudiga. libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization […]
Today’s Makevember There seems to be very little consensus on the arangement of the colours of the buttons on the back of K-9, K9 has a 4 x 3 array of buttons on his back, I am using this image Binary kitten got me from the k9 at the Doctor […]
A while ago I made some videos of writing a Raspbian to a SD card for use with a Raspberry Pi, I am on a mac, which makes my life much easer as there is now an awesome tool called ApplePi-Baker that makes making SD cards much easer than DD […]
Bob found these ESP8266 based Wi-Fi Relays from china, the “Sonoff – WiFi Wireless Smart Switch For MQTT COAP Smart Home” and being that he is is kind of a geek he bought some, now in typical China fashion the difference between 3 and 5 was not all that much, so […]
A while ago I looked at the HLK-PM01, and amazingly it turned into a very well read post… (do not even touch the cheaper crap!) with a lot of people asking how to make it work properly. I also got an email from Tom at smart-sense.hr saying that he had […]
A LONG time ago I disassembled a Cheep Chinese Camera, I may have accidental blown it up by over volting it (apparently 12V DC was the wrong voltage). since then it has been sat in my desk in parts, for a while I had been pondering what the thing between […]
At CASS Industries we moved it from our old site to our new site, over a year ago, yes this post has been sat ‘in draft’ almost that long! While we were moving it across, we added the additional KX-T30865 Door phone card, (The building had a Videx DK8K-1/2 Door Intercom and […]
Every so often we see on line storeys of fake chargers burning down houses, and electric shocks. Normally these chargers are refereed to as ‘Apple’ or ‘iPhone’ chargers, however that is just because the small triangle chargers (in a variety of colours) are so prevalent. An official Apple 5W USB […]
Tas, MiniBoyGeek and I had a quick walk round the Steam Punk Spectacular at the Swindon Steam Museum (will have to do Photos of that some other time). Podpad Studios were there with some of their cool steampunk stuff, and some one (not sure who) brought a Caravan. The rest […]
This is the quickest I have got a camera onto my desk and working, This camera is a ‘Dahua DH-SD29204T-GN 2Mp Network Mini IP Speed Dome 4x optical zoom PTZ ip camera built-in MIC SD29204T-GN’ I can’t see it on Amazon, but it is on Aliexpress (SD29204T-GN-W Data sheet). Powering […]
This job has been sat on my desk at work for about 7 months, looking at Amazon it may be one of these (available in black too). After my luck with the last camera, I was hoping to get into this one too. Yep The CD is standard Chinese quality […]
Recently there have been people claiming that they can steal money from your pocket (up to £30) by skimming your credit or debit card info using a EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) or PED (Pin Entry Device). It said thieves could exploit a security flaw to steal key data from […]
I picked up a Hantek 6022BE USB Oscilloscope as sometimes its useful to have something more than just a multimeter for seeing what a circuit is doing. While the specification makes it more of a toy than a real instrument, however what can you expect for £46.00? The Hantek 6022BE […]
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, […]
Book 11 – Giles Andreae’s “Giraffes Can’t Dance“ Book 12 – Don Hale’s “Mallard: How the Blue Streak Broke the World Steam Speed Record” (book crossing ID 609-14374962) On 3rd July 1938 A4 LNER Pacific ‘Mallard’ achieved the world speed record for a steam locomotive of 126mph and in this […]
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 […]
At CASS Industries we were using Microsoft’s free Hotmail / Outlook connector for our group ware solution, howecver Micro$oft pulled that plug on us when they made changes to Outlook.com. As a solution we picked up a HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 and fitted it with two 1TB hard drives, I […]
With winter coming to an end (we hope) and the hot water on our boat coming from two sources; the fire and the engine, it was looking like the kettle was going to be the only way to make hot water. However after some random googling I found something called […]
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 […]
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 […]
Paul Waring organises Manchester Geek Walks, Yesterday’s Geek Walk was a trip to Bletchley Park, nr Milton Keynes; Bletchley Park is famous for code breaking during World War two and Alan Turing.
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 […]
