70 Year Old Meter

A meter out of a tube tester with a hand-typed paper manual dated 1940. D3 created a new CPU USAGE panel for the meter in Inkscape. An Arduino micro-controller is driving a current source transistor for testing and interface.

Latching Push Button Switch

D3 innovative modification of industrial push button switch with the addition of a solenoid to create a magnetic latch that opens when the button is pushed.

Supercharged Weed Wacker Engine

Direct air injection at 70psi combined with opening the high speed jet for more fuel......runs very loud, very fast!

D3 Design for 600 Watt Audio Amp

Hydraulic Cylinder Test

Very Cool D3 Watch Design

New Cloud Controller

D3 1st custom built server with Foxconn mother board, AMD Athlon II X2 dual core processor. Walrus will be separated out and running on a separate server in this implementation of the cloud architecture.

100 Watts On The Go!

A fine modification of our earlier tuned speaker with the addition of a 100 watt amplifier, green pilot light and power switch at bottom, external 12v battery box, and cabling.

Radar TV

Zoomer

Juvenile Spider Crab, Libinia Emarginata

Quansoo Terror II

Substantially larger than last year's model.....

Quansoo Blue Crab

Motor Controller PCB

D3's first commerically fabricated PCB arrived yesterday....exceptional results....now loading devices and developing code for on-board AVR.

Going Mobile

New shock absorbing mount for radar dome on top of car....D3 power supply driven by standard 12vdc-to120vac inverter...first test drive was a success.

24KM 3KW Radar

Gracious gift from a local lobster man, lucky to have a 24KM radar with display (not shown)....D3 isolated fault to power supply board in display unit, and built temporary multi-voltage supply with PC power supply to drive system....works great, demonstrated good discrimination and tracking of paddle board user just inside a causeway at 200yards...clearly indicated large container ship offshore waiting entry into major harbor....plan to mount it on car shortly.

Chicken of the Woods

Laetiporus sulphureus in our backyard....currently, approximately 4"x9", we'll see just how large it will grow!

System & Network Management

D3 has Munin running and monitoring servers and virtual environments in our private cloud. Link to Munin by clicking on post title. Display is a 32" flat panel LCD TV obtained for free this week by chance, that D3 returned to service by repairing the power supply.

Application of Pressure Threshold Switch

Harvested from a very large, high power pump control panel, D3 integrated this pressure threshold switch into his large air cannon to control when the two valve relay's fire. Capacitors were added to keep the relays open longer than the brief contact period of the pressure switch.

D3 took a break from building virtual appliances for his cloud to make this water cooled heat sink for a high power H-bridge controller.

Very cool D3 design for steering drive; metal bar at top-center attaches to tie rod arm between front wheels.

New Robot Platform

New robot platform.....work-in-process photo... not shown: steering mechanism with stepper motor, battery box, control and communications subsystems.

New Motor Controller Design

D3 Design for an AVR controlled H Bridge motor controller based on high power FETS with complete PCB design.

More Progess....

D3 is now using an ATMEGA 164PV10PU programmed via an AVR Dragon board, with remote Zigbee communications for speed control (bottom)....a power supply out of a LCD display (center) provides circuit voltages and 24VDC for the motor.

Success !

Motor control circuit driven by Arduino with PWM code works great controlling robot drive motor!

Summer is Finaly Here....

Something Else to Save For....

Amazing custom shop, Perewitz Cycle...click on the title to this post for link to their site...great afternoon of bikes and burnouts!

D3 Robot Motor Control Module

High power IGBT's mounted to the heat sink with large clamping diodes on the first circuit board, and control logic with opto-isolators on the top board.

Trying to Keep Warm on a Cool Morning

Reverse Engineered Robonica AVR

D3 reverse engineered the schematic and used an Amtel AVRISP programmer (link via post title) to code an AVR on a board out of a Robonica (robonica.com) device.

D3 Design for an Optically Isolated Triac

Driven by a square wave, the light flashes at low frequencies followed by this unusual pulsing behavior in a narrow transition range as the frequency is increased beyond a few hundred Hz, and then returns to normal flashing at higher frequencies.

D3 Integrated PIC-XBee with LCD Display, LED, and Thermistor

DSO Nano

New very portable lab instrument: DSO Nano by Seeed Studio scope with upgraded third-party firmware (Paul). Great folks to work with, I highly recommend Seeed Studio. You can go directly to their site by clicking on the title to this post.

Guitar Pre-Amp

D3 pre-amp circuit for guitar amplifier project.

Peep!

15th Mass Infantry Company K

Hersey Estes, great-great-grandfather, served (1861-1863) in all the major battles of the Army of Potomac from Ball's Bluff through Antietam where >50% of his regiment was lost in 30 minutes when outflanked in the West Woods....no other regiment suffered a greater loss for the day....I'm lucky to be here!

Clicking on the title of this post will bring you to an exceptional research site on the 15MVI.

Ladybugs Like Grapes!

Frog Flash

D2 design for a sophisticated secondary flash-on-a-stick with optical slave circuit cobbled together with photo resistor out of printer and a high voltage triac from something else; works great....will use shortly for spring frog photo quest as peepers recover from recent very cold night....

35/100

Civil War reading; about of a third of the way through...

Web Server Audio Amplifier Interface Board

D3 work in process on interface board to be installed inside web audio amplifier chassis: includes 6 gain controlled amps, 2 shift registers, 12 bit ADC, 10bit DAC, 3 volume/tone control ics, 44amp HEXFET and connector (on right) for PIC-WEB.

Eprom Array Out of GPS

D3 prototype board with a pair of eproms out of a handheld GPS, interfaced through shift registers to Arduino processor with relays for switching programming voltage.

Web Server Audio Amplifier

Snapshot of work in process....D3 concept and design for a high power audio amp controlled by a PIC-WEB board (not installed yet).

Arduino & New Prototype Box

Arduino controlled dot matrix LED out of an exercise treadmill; D3 is creating a font library, and has also connected a 1Mb flash memory IC to store and read fonts from directly. Also showing new prototype box with breadboards, LCD display, and heatsink.

Arduino-Shift Register-Stepper Motor Control

D3 work in process....an xy stepper motor board driven by high power transistors with signaling supplied by a shift register sequenced by C code running on an Arduino micro-controller. Will add power transformer, mount heat sinks, and circuit board with Arduino, finish wiring, and complete coding. Black & yellow wiring is out of IBM 3274-see earlier post.

Server Farm

KVM Switch PCB

D3 PCB layout for new KVM switch.

KVM Switch Schematic

D3 design for a scalable KVM switch.

Arduino

D3 connected a touch screen out of a Palm to an Arduino microcontroller feeding real-time xy coordinates via usb to a pc. C code also developed to drive external LEDs based on stylus position on touch screen. Other connections include an LCD display, IR receiver from a remote, an MC74HC4094 latching shift-register, accelerometer, ultrasonic transducer, 7-segment display, and rotary encoder.

Mt. Mansfield Morning Frost