Plausible Deniability

I have no idea if his political opinions are at all useful, helpful or realistic, but you have to admire the governator's style.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/28/arnold-schwarzenegge.html

Motor Turns

The motor is turning, have gone through program and am starting to remember what it was I was trying to do. Next step will be too pack everything up as I am moving at the end of the month. I will however have some time to work on the program.

Woot.

Progress

Getting there. Motor is turning. Can't seem to control speed though. I don't remember my program.



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Progress

Woot


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Vegas knows how to take your money

Last night I went to find dinner. I found a little chinese noodle shop, ordered a beef brisket noodle soup and an order of gai-lan. Bill - $38. Same dish at Taiwan Beef Noodle house (I think it is now called Wang's) on Granville in Vancouver - $14.

On the plus side, there didn't seem to be too much MSG as my dreams were fairly normal, at least for me. You know, motors, lithium batteries, blinking LEDs. Good dreams.

Have to wait until the weekend.

I'll be out of town all week, so there will not be any progress until the weekend, but I did pick up all the bits to populate the cards today. Progress should be pretty quick when I get back.

Double sided card done

The challenge I ran into was I had made a double sided design that really requires good alignment, and also had not aligned full spectrums template exactly square. So I redesigned the board to minimize the top layer and be forgiving to misalignment, and very carefully realigned the template. I believe this will be functional.





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Marathon time

4:13. Woot.


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follow up

So the double sided input card didn't work the first time. I guess I installed the stencil slightly off square which didn't impact the single sided cards, but made the double sided card goobered. I probably wont have time to try again until next week.

Why double sided pcbs are hard

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switch card

woot.

Progress

Here are the designs for the cards I am making.

The first I call "Input" which has some protection for the 15V inputs for the Concept Card. This will be the hardest to make as it is two sided and may be difficult to line up. I haven't made this yet.
The next image is "Switch" which takes the 5v from the sanguino and switches it to 15V and also takes the 15v status signal from the concept and knocks it down to 5V. I made this last night, and it turned out pretty good.
On both these cards I tried to keep the power rails on the outside and signal wires in the middle. Hopefully they will be pretty robust from a noise perspective.
The picture on the previous post was "Output" which takes the output from the Concept Card and interfaces to the IGBT's.

I also need to make a 10-15V input to 15V output regulated power supply for up to 20 amps, but this can wait for now as I have an old mac power supply kluged with a 7815 dangling from my desk.

If anyone is wondering, I'm using the free version of Eagle 5.6 for layout, and the reason I did three cards is I am limited to 2.5 by 3.5 inches on the PCB because that is all that will fit through the epson printer in the CD tray.

first succesful inkjet printed PCB

I bought a kit from Full Spectrum Engineering to do PCB's direct from an Epson R280. The first two didn't turn out very well, but the third worked okay.The trick was to print it 3 times, not the 2 that the instructions say, cooking the ink each time and being Very careful when re-aligning the circuit board.

I think the double sided boards are going to be very tough.