A few years ago, a friend of mine was trying to build a solar-powered device to automatically photograph the sun in the sky at exactly noon every day through a whole year – the aim, purely for interest, was to create an analemma photograph showing the figure-of-eight that the sun follows as the months progress. At the time, getting a ...
All credit to Thomas Langewouters for an unusual reed switch ladder circuit for liquid level sensing. You can find it on his website here. He went on to use a more traditional two-terminal design, but this four-terminal circuit, as he points out, can be used to get a little more information. Fluid level sensing with reed switches involves a fixed ...
It is spring time, so it must be time to contemplate once more the many challenges of Cuk converters. And this time it is the question: how does one turn on and off a load when the output of a Cuk converter is of the opposite polarity to the input (right). The obvious thing is to hang a p-channel mosfet ...
One of the monomaina’s in Wonderland is ‘building a better pulse generator’, for want of a better phrase. It should be so easy with all the Arduino-esk microcontroller boards out there that have lovely timers inside, but a recurrent drawback is that it is hard to find one that runs at a ‘nice’ frequency – one with a clock period ...
I had no idea that it was possible to buy people-detecting radar modules for under 10 quid, but you can. There is a bunch of different models, all doing roughly the same thing in the same way: detecting moving people and other conductive objects up to a few metres away – RCWL-0516 is an example. In behaviour, they are much ...
I finally found time to try out the home-modified 1610Pro desktop cnc. And here is the result: routed from 4mm thick cast Perspex with a 1mm deep letter ‘h’, all edges machined. The routed rectangular base is 27mm tall (as I remember) and is accurate to better than 100μm. The only error was 200μm in the total length of the ...
may2024 How to disconnect loads from a Cuk converter apr2023 Synchronous Cuk converter with totem pole driver july2021 Trying to drive a Cuk rectifier mosfet – a better solution? july2021 Trying to drive a Cuk rectifier mosfet – a solution? July2021 Trying to drive a Cuk synchronous rectifier mosfet jan2017 ‘Cuk-buck 2’ dc-dc converter – more fine art from Slobodan’s ...
With lovely spare time over Easter, there was an opportunity to finish the little cnc project, and (give or take) that happened (right). Index to CNC-related Engineer in Wonderland blogs It started life as a ‘1610Pro’ cnc (left), bought to learn about cnc cutting, which revealed its slack and flexibility as soon as it was assembled. Not that it wasn’t ...
Adding linear rails to a length of aluminium extrusion is a common way to make a fairly rigid guiding structure, and I have been doing just that in the workshop. But things were not working quite right, and (very) eventually a subtle misalignment was discovered. An earlier version of this blog contained an error – see ‘False start’ below This ...
Back in 2021 I bought a little 1610Pro CNC machine (right) just to see how they work – it was just over £120 as I remember. It was great fun to play with, and a complete bargain, but let down by considerable slop and flex in its components, which must be much worse in the larger more popular 3018 version ...
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