Jul 07 2024
After 5 years I went to the radio flea market in Bladel again. The market is now outside, luckily the weather was good. It felt like a radio market like they were a few years ago again, lots of stuff at reasonable/low prices.
What I bought:
Jun 16 2024
Today I went to the radio market in Diest.
What I bought:
Apr 01 2024
Today I went to the radio market in Diest.
What I bought:
240GB SSD
2 tubes of SMD connectors
1 tube relay
2 tubes of potentiometers
Dec 16 2023
For some time I had project boxes and storage boxes loose on the floor. Therefore I decided to build 2 cabinets to solve this problem.
First for the sorter boxes I build a cabinet with drawers on the bottom and on top shelves for the boxes. In the big space I put some old drawers.
For my project boxes I made a cart that sits next to my desk. In this I have 5 project boxes. (I will now try to finish my running projects and then limit to 5 projects at the time.) Next to the project boxes is space for SMD storage containers, These are placed on an angle because the cart would otherwise become too wide. On top there is space for 12 storage boxes for frequently used components and parts (Heatshrink, AMP connectors, ferrules, etc.).
Nov 04 2023
The switch that I use to switch off my hobby desk broke again for the second time. The contacts where welded shut. After replacing it again it was time to fix the cause of the issue. To limit the current I used an altered schematic from CircuitsOnline.
After my incident on my safety transformer project where the resistors burned I did not fully trust this circuit. Therefore I have added a thermal protection that switches the output power off when the resistors get too hot.
I build the circuit in a remote controlled socket enclosure. To mount the parts I used some glue and tyraps.
Mar 19 2023
After 3 years of not being able to go, or no flea markets happening, I went to a radio market again.
What I bought:
Apr 29 2021
Some time ago I bought another 3D printer, this time one that uses resin to print. However after printing the parts are not full strength yet. To solve this the parts need to be put in UV light. This can be done outside in the sun or in an UV curing device. Since the sun does not always shine when I’m printing I decided I need a UV curing device.
I did some research on this, but only saw devices that where either much too expensive, or the quality too low or very unpractical. At this time I was thinking why not convert an old microwave oven. It has a rotating disk to put the prints on, it has a timer and it is nice and enclosed.
After asking around I got a defective microwave oven. The tube was defect. However this does not matter for my use-case since I replaced the MOT and tube with a LED driver and UV LEDs.
Now in theory it should already work, but I wanted to make it more custom. I saw that the driver board contained an old PIC16C65B microcontroller. This is a one time programmable, so I replaced it with an (also old) PIC16F877A. Now the timer can be equipped with custom firmware.
Only now the difficult part started. The pins that go to the 7 segment displays do not only drive the displays, they also read out the switches. This took a lot of searching and reverse engineering of the circuit board. I do not have a full schematic off it since I only did what was needed. But I did make a sketch to make this more clear:
The code I wrote for the microcontroller:
The result:
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Mar 27 2021
In the previous part I described how I made my soldering workbench. The part that was still missing was the lighting. For this I first wanted to buy a standard solution, but could not find anything that was fully to my taste. So time to make something myself.
To mount the light it was easiest to use the same system as the shelves. I used 2 hooks, shortened them and put an aluminium U channel in between.
In this U channel I placed a LED strip that is connected to my desks 12V power supply.
Nov 13 2020
I was not really happy with the logging of the SMA solar inverter. The site was always a few hours behind and the graphs are averages, so I do not realty trust the data. I searched a bit on the internet and found SBFspot. This program runs on a raspberry pi and reads out the inverter and sends the data to PVoutput.
I had an old V1 raspberry pi 1b laying arround. For 99% of the stuf it is too slow, but for this is was perfect. I installed it in my network rack. To save a RJ45 connection on the switch I added an usb network interface to the pi. This way it could be set “in series” with the cable.
The enclosure is one I 3d printed myself. At first I was searching for a din rail enclosure for the pi, but I could not find anything for the old version. Luckily I found these STL files.
The uploaded measurments can be found here:
Today:
Overview last few days:
Sep 04 2020
In my new workshop I needed a workbench. The one from the old shop was wallmount and too small. This gave me 2 options: buy a workbench or build a workbench. After a lot of searching I did not find what I was searching for. It was either the wrong size, or too expensive or both. So the only option left was to build it myself.
First I made a drawing of how I want to build the frame:
To start the project I harvested the ugly ceiling trees that where in my living room.
I used a table saw to saw of 3 sides of the beams to clean them of glue and make the corners square. This gave me these beams:
To connect them together I used mortise and tenon connections in combination with wood glue.
Test without glue:
After this I could glue them together one section at the time beceause I did not have enough clamps to do more at once.
Section1:
Section 2:
Section 3:
Section 4:
Test fit without glue of the front part:
Side piece glued:
Complete desk glued up:
Primer painted:
Painted Blue:
Time to make the desktop from MDF, also I installed the racks for the shelves:
Desk in place:
After a few weeks I came across an ad of a free desk frame with steel drawers. I dismantled the drawers and painted them black. These are now installed underneath the desk: (don’t mind the mess, the desk is in use for some time now).
On the next part I will show the LED desk lighting.
Dutch 