Aw yeah, CNC day. Pretty simple parts, I guess it wasn’t strictly necessary to use a CNC, but hey, it was there. Here it is coming together. A spaceship! ~~~~ Brief interlude ~~~~~~ Laser cut Piccolo parts. And the rest of it. Rough-ish final box. And it flips… Read More: CNC Day »
Hell yeah, acronyms. Restartin’ dis. I’ve got the old working SHA1 encryption algorithm going. It’s up on GitHub, here. I was waffling between parallel and serial loads and outputs. SHA1 takes a 512 bit input and outputs 160 bits, and no FPGA that I have access to will have that many pins. Here’s a fallacy I got stuck on… Read More: WPA2 HMAC SHA1 PMK FPGA VHDL »
I got handed a box of old gimbals from a movie set! I love gimbals! Most of them are very slightly broken in very repairable ways. I left, like, 5 for other people to fight over, and grabbed two for myself. One of them was in great shape, the other had some loose… Read More: Imbles of Gimbals »
During my research on how others have handled the sparking circuit in an EDM, I’ve been fairly unimpressed. Off the top of my head, there was one 555-based pulsing EDM circuit, one purely analog circuit that was never built, and one hand modulated system attached to a drill press. It’s hard to tell exactly what… Read More: First Burn »
Other than wanting to spend very little money on this project, the scope of it is huge enough that I’ve been trying to use as many prebuilt components as possible. If I have the majority of the project build with discrete, modular components, then I can start drilling down and replace the weakest links, one… Read More: Start small. »
I’ve posted here before about my troubles with flexible flat connectors. Well, not directly, but that always seems to be a tangential obstacle in the already perilous minefield of hardware hacking. Basically, I hate them and I want them to go away. The answer is, obviously, a breakout board, but I was having trouble finding… Read More: FFChkMate »
With the huge popularity of Arduino in the past few years, everything that can be advertised “Arduino-compatible” is being commoditized to such a huge degree that it can be hard to find price-competitive components that do not have that distinctive Arduino pin layout. An example is this TFT touchscreen LCD. It’s like, 6 bucks, which… Read More: Travel-PIC »
One of my theories for rapid PCB prototyping is EDM, or electro-discharge machining. The idea behind EDM is that you have an electrode hooked up to negative voltage, dunk the system in a high impedance fluid, and then put a potential on the metal workpiece. When that electrode is close to the metal and the potential is high… Read More: EDM Prime »
Quite a while ago, I did some experimenting with laser etching on glass. The intention was to backlight it and make a large lamp with some LEDs behind a large sheet of laser patterned and frosted glass. Material costs pushed me towards scaling it way down and designing around a small glass tile that I… Read More: This is a test »
After pulling apart a NDSL, I know a lot more! Tracing out the connections, a lot of the LCD pins have a designator silkscreened on, which is totally awesome. I spent a bit of time tracing as many as I could, and then I internetted what I had. That led me to this amazing page, which… Read More: Knowledge is Power »