Update: Weller solved the problems I describe in this article with a new design of the retainer. This new retainer solves all the problems described in this article. The new retainer looks very different and uses a spring to pull the tip to the heating element. A little bit more than a half year ago…
Category: Common
12 Time Wasting Issues in Autodesk EAGLE
I am a machine engineer and very used to work with CAD software. The abbreviation CAD stands for Computer Aided Design. I personally think, Autodesk Eagle fails with the ‘A’, because often it does not give you any aid. On the contrary it often puts a spoke in the wheel and makes your life horrible….
Finished a Series of the PissOff Project
I just finished a small series of the PissOff project. After all work done, I probably would use a stencil and solder paste next time. For this series I used a slightly larger speaker to improve the loudness and sound quality. Tried some different ones, but the really good ones do not fit on the…
Video: Soldering Boldport Project “Touchy”
I made a short video how I solder the Boldport project “Touchy”. It is a SMD project with a quite difficult to solder chip. For the first half of the assembly, I did not notice that the solder tip was no screwed tight, so the heating of the tip was not optimal. Click the link…
Boldport Tap — Second Try
If you already saw the soldering video, here two photos of the result. To get this result, I was inspired by the way Saar from Boldport was soldering his own projects, I adapted his technique. After initial soldering, I flush cut carefully the wire as close as possible to the board. Cutting off any solder…
Soldering Boldport Tap
Here a short video soldering the Boldport Project “Tap”. Here you can see the PCBite PCB holder in action.
PCBite Arrived
I recently ordered a set of “PCBite”. These are special PCB holder as shown in the images in this post. To solder components into PCB I sometimes used one of this many “helping hands” products with two clamps, but they are no real use in most cases. PCBite seems to solve some of the problems…
Everything That Went Wrong
As expected, there were many things that went wrong in the process from the prototype to the first PCB version of the project. I would like to share them here, maybe it will prevent similar mistakes in one of your projects. Wrong Values While drawing the circuit diagram, I copied all values from the components…
Table Light Demo Video
Today I shot a short demonstration video, which shows all 50 modes of the table light visually. The video can not replace a real table lamp, but you will get a first impression. And you can obviously implement your own colours and effects with own code. Enjoy! Lucky Resistor
Compact Text Based Driver for Sharp Display
Update 2015-09-10: I also added a timer 2 based version of the driver which does not need any manual refresh. I created a fast and compact driver for the Sharp memory display LS013B4DN04. The driver is text based and uses 8×8 pixel characters on the screen. The screen can display 12×12 characters using this size of…