Fat and slow. And here's my guage.

Oh Strava, how you pain me.  This time last year I was putting out 123 watts.  This year?  110.  Ow.



This is my "climbing" loop.  It includes two overpasses.  It's pretty painfull.

I have a time trail loop I'll post later.  Which just so happens to include another strava segment.  That I was not slowest on!

A Cubists Interpretation of the Blinky LED - 4x4x4 LED cube

A few weeks ago, Loclhst suggested he wanted to make a LED cube.  After a little research, I came upon this instructable: http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-4x4x4-LED-Cube/  

Localhst and I finally managed to scrounge some time up, and we met at PumpingStation:One for a bit of a hack session.  We made some jigs, and started soldering.  

This is James using my jig to make his own LED cube:

Here's a little bit of Loclhsts handywork.  He's really picking up this soldering thing.

Here are two of my LED layers.  It was about this time that I figured out that I'd need to have some method for bending over the LED legs.

And here's all the LEDs built up into a "cube".  It's more like a big parallelogram.  But who's counting.  ... and get that protractor away from my CUBE.

The legs that stick out the side are the ground pins.  Those let us address each layer seperately.

 Nothing like building a wiring harness at 12:30 at night.  And doing it neatly.  And cleanly.  There's heatshrink tubing and everything!

This was testing the first layer.  You can actually see the arduino board in this shot.  Once it's fully hooked up, there's 20 IO pins in use.

Lets play find the Duemenilove!  It's in there.. I swear!

Localhst didn't finish his.  But he did make a 12v regulated power supply for a soldering ventilation solution.  Ideapdish also gave me the parts to build a box to put my led cube in.  I'm excited to assemble it and get this into a displayable condition!  

Making math sane - PrototypeMachining to save the day.

http://www.prototypemachining.ca/Articles/ElectronicsMathSimplified.html

PrototypeMachining went ahead and started pulling apart the eccentric symbols and letters used for electronics math.  He's put real words, and layed them out like you were taught to write equations in math class.  This, is seriously useful stuff.

Making in. Breaking in. Making a sheet metal brake.

Tonight, with the help of Steve Finkelman, I built a 12" sheet metal brake. 

It's made of 3/16" thick 1.5" angle iron.  The two base bits, are 14" and the folding blade is 12" wide.  The whole project was made of one 48" long peice of angle iron.

The hinges are gate hinges, and were chosen because they fold flat. 

More samsung caps. Dell monitor repair

Well I found a dead monitor at work.  I cracked it open and found three dead caps.  I replaced them, and viola, working monitor.  Now... I need to ask if I can keep it.

A minty boost.

A few months back, I brought some friends to a Mitch Altman soldering class.  He brought kits, and while my friends were doing theirs, I decided I'd make something. 

Thank you ladyada.  Well, her company provided the kits.  And here's the kit I built Minty Boost. I assembled my minty boost into an altoids tin.  There's room for a spare set of cells in there too.

How fast can an arduino switch?

Using blink, set with 0 delay, my o-scope registered 62khz. 

Now I have done a little programming with PIC.  And if it takes 4 clocks to run each command, a 16mhz PIC should be able to output 2mhz.  I was told AVR can do most things in two clocks, so it should be able to pump out 8mhz!

And we're getting 62khz.  It says something about the arduino overhead, and the compiler.