Custom ThingM Pixel
An I2C RGB pixel on custom hardware
I designed a custom RGB LED board based on the BlinkM from ThingM. For this project a specific high brightness RGB LED was chosen, and the rest of the components were selected around that and the Microchip ATtiny85 chip that runs the show. To keep costs low, parts I had on hand were used, hence the mix of tiny surface mount and through hole components. The board has a voltage regulator on board so you can daisy chain multiple boards together with a single DC-DC power supply. The ribbon cable…
Tube Guitar Amp
Custom PCB for a tube guitar amp
A few years ago I made a couple of Tube Amps based on the FireFly design I found online and gave them as gifts. I had only the schematic to work from but was able to source tubes and sockets for the tubes from various online vendors, with the rest of the parts coming from Digi-Key. Taking care to route signals to avoid interference, while maintaining appropriate trace width for power and grounding, I came up with a somewhat compact board layout in board layout PCB123. As a side note, I didn…
Bubbles?
A game for the original Microsoft Surface
In 2009 I took a class in MultiTouch Computing at the Umass Lowell Robotics Lab that featured the original Microsoft Surface Coffee Table (Which is apparently now called PixelSense 1.0). For my final project in this course I decided to make a game and focused on keeping the interactions straightforward so that anyone could play. The concept was simple: there are Bubbles that appear on one end of a map and you need to get them to the goal (the circle at the end). The only interaction is…
CNC Mill Conversion
I converted a small milling machine to computer control
Circa 2006 I acquired a Harbor Freight Micro Mill. I spent time on and off converting this mill so that I could control it via computer using a variety of parts and kits found online. The 2 biggest parts of this was finding a set of mounting adaptors to replace the hand cranks with stepper motors and finding a stepper motor driver. This was right as the RepRap project was taking off, so options were limited on how to drive something like this. Fortunately I found a kit designed for the micro…