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When you are making DIY printed circuit boards, one of the popular methods requires UV exposure. Many systems use lamps that can give off lots of heat and be expensive to replace. Djhamer has provided plans to make a UV LED system that is double sided so that you can expose double sided PDBs without having to flip and repeat half way through the process. "A UV exposure box is an extremely useful piece of kit. It can be used to make proper PCB’s. It can also be used to make other things such as intricate photo etched parts (a subject for another instructable). The trouble is they can be a little pricey for the hobby enthusiast especially if you want the double side type. Why use LEDs? Via: Elektronika
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Remember the Glyph tracking technology that we showed you a few months ago. Well have a look at what BMW is now doing! BMW will allow you to design your car in front of your computer which isn’t anything special but now you can also virtually spin it around in a 3D environment and look at it from every angle just by moving a printed sheet of paper around. All you need is a webcam and a computer. "The new BMW Z4 in 3D.
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This project turns a old VHS Tape into a USB storage drive. It looks like a normal VHS cassette tape except for the USB cable that sticks out of the shell. All of the project guts are hiding in the areas around the clear windows so that when you have a quick look at the front of the tape all seems normal. When plugged into a computer the VHS Tape Storage Drive will act as a normal USB drive except when the drive is accessed the tape reel will turn and the windows will light up. This will keep at least one of my VHS tapes out of the landfill. The operation is quite simple, the USB cable connects to a thumb drive inside the device. The thumb drive has been cracked open to expose the circuit board, USB power and the drive LED output has been tapped into. These 3 points are wired to a small circuit board, there is a circuit that stretches the drive pulses into an on or off signal that is buffered by a transistor to power the internal motor and LED lights. The pulse stretcher was needed since the USB drive would flash when it was being accessed. This would have caused the motor action to be very jerky and the internal lights would also have flashed. The cost to purchase all the parts for this project should be between $10 and $15 depending on the deal you can get for the USB thumb drive and assuming that you have a few items in your parts junk box. Construction time should be 3 to 4 hours but it took me longer since I took a ton of pictures along the way and has some belt drive (or should I say rubber band drive) issues.
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Andrew Kilpatrick who is a member of the Toronto Hacklab wrote a good built log of the Resurrection of a Universal Laser Systems Laser Engraving Machine. No it wasn’t simply cleaning out the dust and replacing a few blown components. As it turns out the existing electrical control system was not repairable so a new electrical system had to be built from scratch. Building the control circuits that were needed allowed the $500 dollar purchase to operate once again as the $20,000 machine should be. If making the machine come to life once again wasn’t enough this laser engraver can now also play music! "Since the original electronics were deemed unrepairable, we figured that we should build something from scratch so that we could have control over all aspects of the system, and the ability to repair anything in case of problems. On the Saturday morning at the start of the project I went over to the local electronics store near the lab to see what they had in the way of power MOSFETs and PIC microcontrollers. I drew up some quick schematics for both a control board and a motor driver board. The goal of this design was to build the entire system from common parts that I could buy locally. This meant I could complete the boards over the weekend, and it would be easy for others to build similar systems easily in the future." |
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This Russian V8 Sidecar Motorcycle looks amazing. There is no gas miser engine here, the big beefy V8 engine is sure to provide all the power you can handle and then some! I have seen some huge bikes before and always thought how hard it would be to handle the thing even with the slightest lean. The sidecar solves this problem very well and provides a convenient place to hang the rad.
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I had mentioned in a few posts along the way that I would be getting a CNC machine shortly. Well as you can see it’s here and working.
This is the first piece that I made other than some basic testing. I used a carbide circuit board routing bit to cut the image, as you can see there is lots of room for improvement. I don’t have a proper hold down system yet, this was routed using some masking tape (and my hands) to hold the item in place. The alignment of the text is a bit off and you can see that there are a few letters that are not quite right. The letter deformation was caused by the board moving slightly when the machine hit some hard items such as chips and capacitors. If I ever make another one of these I would reverse the text being cut out so that the component side would be the normally visible side. I didn’t think the cut components would look so interesting. Make sure you have a look at some of the images below, the ones that have cuts through the center of a chip looks very interesting.
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I stumbled on this old Infotek Ad today. It really puts the prices of computers and computer power today in perspective. I wonder how hard it was to sell one of their Word Processing packages which even after the $2,100 discount was $10,850? If that price isn’t bad enough we have to remember that a dollar in 1977 bought you significantly more than it does today! I sure hope the $6,850 line printer came with a lifetime supply of paper to justify that cost. No wonder it took so long to replace the manual typewriter… |
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The CNC machine that I purchased is the 
