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. »
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 »
I like acronyms. They make me look smrt. Designing a board to mate with the Raspberry Pi is pretty straightforward. It’s mostly just a pass-through board. We need a footprint, though. As far as I know, there are no available PCBs out there that people have used the (nonstandard) Nintendo DS connectors on, so no… Read More: NDSL LCD FFC Design (OR: Working with an unknown TFT… »
Recently, I got given an FPGA development kit to continue working on my SHA1 system. The end-goal is to eventually integrate that into a PCI-E card, but we’ll see how that works out. The FPGA kit I have is the Digilent Basys2, and it uses a Xilinx Spartan 3E chip. The lowest-tier, 100k gate model.… Read More: I need another dev kit »
A few years ago, I designed and simulated a SHA1 encryption machine using CMOS logic. I actually built everything using Altera’s FPGA tools, Quartus. With standard propagation of the 7400 series, it worked out to about 1.8MHz max clock speed to prevent race conditions. Implementing the system right in VHDL and running it on… Read More: Further adventures of implementing SHA1 encryption on an FPGA »
There isn’t really any story behind this. I have a joystick module, and it would be pretty simple to hook it up to a motor and use it for a remote control car. I decided on a few parameters: No microcontroller. Where’s the challenge in that? Joystick wired directly to the car. Wireless… Read More: Vroooom »