Category: Hardware

  • Bad day at work? – How I destroyed a £2300 piece of equipment

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    It’s been longer than I care to admit since my last post, but sit comfortably because this is a tale worth telling. It is about all the planning and thought in the world can be let down with one careless oversight. We use a fairly inexpensive HiPot tester (Clare H101) at work to check that some…

  • Everyone plays guitar, but more people watch TV

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    Guitar pedals are harder than they look – at least this one has been. I’ve learnt some valuable lessons that I’ve never had to worry too much about before. The most valuable lesson is that noise is not fun. Living in the digital domain is brilliant because is it far less affected by noise. Analogue…

  • Everyone plays guitar…

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    It has dawned on me that whilst I don’t pay a lot a month for hosting, I do actually pay something and so not keeping this blog up-to-date could be construed as a waste of money. With that in mind I have an update – hooray. I built my first guitar more than 10 years…

  • Obscene Monitor for FREE!!!

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    A few months ago my place of employment and enjoyment suffered a catestrophic electrical failure. We recently installed some power factor correction equipment on our three phase mains setup – presumably to save money when powering running some of our more inductive loads. For those that dont know, power factor is the ratio of real…

  • Stereotypical beginners electronics project pt3

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    The LCM7215’s arrived as I was writing the last post, so I need to get the PCB’s cut. As I have access to a LPKF ProtoMat C60 PCB cutting machine I have designed a number of boards that fit together to give the case. The idea is that the first board sits on the underside of…

  • Stereotypical beginners electronics project pt2

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    I’ve got some LCM7215’s on order for a work project so I’ve got some downtime until they are due to arrive. I’m going to run through the LTSpice simulation process, and look at the alternative solutions available. Assuming you haven’t already, you will need to download LTSpice. This is a free Spice simulator provided by…

  • Stereotypical beginners electronics project

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    The In-Laws have just moved house. I say move house, but what I mean is sold their old self-build, bought a field in deepest darkest Norfolk and are planning to self-build again. This is great news because it means they’ve got a blank canvas to fill with numerous eco-build projects. The first of which is…

  • Free Day recap and blasted Android

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    This post will be a shadow of the one that I had originally composed using the WordPress for Android app that I installed last night. It had wit aplenty, but my phone decided that it had a better idea – and managed to lose every character. With that aside, let me get started. I completed…

  • Excuses

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    I made a promise that I would have some extra info on stepper motors, and clearly this isn’t it. I got very distracted with the parallel port work. Parallel port stuff used to be easy in Win98 and earlier, but got more difficult in XP. By more difficult I mean I had to install “inpout32.dll”…

  • Hello Caller, You Are Through To The Helpdesk Part4

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    If you remember my last post, I had finished sorting out the hardware, and had just taken the plunge with fishing around for working embedded software. I’ll be honest, it didn’t take many attempts to find a “working” solution, but each attempt felt like an age due to the switching between programs to use XMODEM. For…