Spontaneous Lamp Build

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Sometimes projects go from “whoo, that’s gonna be awesome looking, be fine built craftsmenship and I’ll be proud of it” to “yeah whatever, let’s get it over with”.

The results speak for themselves. Unfortunately.

And, no, I don’t care that it looks like a life hazard. It’s bright, that’s the only requirement.

Also, it IS a life hazard, so appearances don’t deceive here. How thoughtful.

But: none of the large copper areas are connected to the solder pads that carry the components. So it’s save to touch the “case”. It’s not save to touch the LEDs, though.

And, also, no, I particularly don’t care that I could have bought an 8W lamp easily.

I built it, because I can.

C64 Clock – Prototyping

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Second Prototype

In the spirit of this site, this would probably be the final cartridge (pun intended).

Currently my successes on etching double sided PCBs are a little nonexistent. So I “quickly” milled a “few” slots in a raw PCB board with a Dremel. I did the rest using variboard.

…

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Test Site

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Prototype investigation.  … of an unfinished project … naturally.

That’s 2 NAND-JK-Flip-Flops built in DTL-Logic, making up a 4 Bit Johnson-Counter

To clear up some details and anwser all possible question about that circuit, here’s the carefully drawn schematic.

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One Day Build

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DMX512 Data Rate “Limiter”

Final assembly on variboard

The Problem

You get what you pay for. So if you pay squat, you get squat.
In my case, we bought super cheap LED spots to light our small-ish techno parties via DMX512. The money saved went into a pretty neat and modern lighting console. The result is that the cheap LED spots can’t keep up with data rate of the not-so-cheap console. Which causes the LED spots to do exactly … diddly-squat.

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New Toy

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The ARM-Cortex SoC Microcontroller from Cypress.

To be precise, I got a prototyping board with that µC. It’s almost weird to call it a microcontroller. But that’s what Cypress calls it, so, whatever.

Big thanks to a good friend of mine who sent it to me.

That’s the thing:

PSoC 4200M-Series Prototyping Kit

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