Ramsey ts1 kit - Touch Switch

Another awesome kit from Ramsey. Useful too. I'm using this one with a relay to switch a floor lamp that gets used quite a bit, as well as switch on/off the opposite end table lamp. That's right it's a dual switch. It also has the capabilities of doing duty as a momentary push button switch, or as an acutal toggle switch. Bloody brilliant guys. Kit comes with a pamphlet that has all the numbers/parts you need so you can check them off as you go. All through hole components, board is small and goes together really well. I highly recommend this for beginners who are looking to get into electronics, or for old hats who need a quick touch switch solution. Totally hackable since the pamphlet gives a rundown on how the circuit works and everything, Ramsey comes through again.

Happy whatever-the-heck-you-celebrate!

As the year ends people need to blow off steam a bit, and so there are several occasions that all occur around the end of the year. So no matter what you celebrate I hope you enjoy yourself. Unless your an ax murderer in which case... consider therapy.

So I picked up one of these for my desk at work, put it together while on staycation, thought my readers would like to check it out. Vellman has some great kits, this is one of them. Based on a two transistor multivibrator (calm down ladies) this kit blinks LEDs. (whoo hoo) but blinks them on a tree shaped PCB. For the price it really isn't a bad kit to put together for a little bit of festive. I will warn you that there is a +/- pins at the top of the tree, these connect to the input voltage. So if you put a LED there it will try to take the full input power. At 9V that's bad 'k? That's there so you can attatch your power wires there, into a 9v and hang it in the tree (cleverly hiding the 9v battery under a sign that says 'not a 9v battery') Typical Vellman kit with pamphlet explaining the circuit and checkoff as you go parts list. GREAT for beginners. Highly recommended.

Transistor Tester M328 H11888|26501

Here is another kit I got from Wish.They have a link to some directions, but It looked pretty suspicious being a dropbox and all, so I skipped that. The board itself is really all you need. The silkscreen has all the values on it, if your a novice the resistors are going to flip you out a bit. Not often you see .05% in kits like this but From what I can tell of the circuit it's warrented. The system itself can be powered by 9v or by an outlet, and you put a device on the test pad, or screw terminals, and it analyzes the device, telling you the Uf, and the B value, as well as the pinout, and if it's a NPN or PNP. I'm not positive what I tossed in there to test it with, I”ve a crap ton of transistors right now. I bought two of these, one for me and one for the local Makerspace (they need one fo-sho) Looks like a handy little tool for the shop, cheap enough if I break one I'm not too sad, and it's easy to put together if you pay attention to what your doing. As for Hackability, it runs on a ATMEGA328p and standard LCD screen. I'm sure with some clever Googling there is some code for this somewhere, I'd say, hack away. When I first put it together it didn't look like it was working. I adjusted the contrast till I saw 'timeout' tested again and it worked fine. It doesn't leave the values up for very long. I'd snap a pic of it so you can look at it later for reference. I'd love a pot that you can adjust the hold time on the results.

 

soundbox 16 / 120106 / BOX-16

Picked this up on amazon. The Silkscreen was awesome. Went together perfectly, and it worked the first time. The only thing I would change about this is add an actual power port, to the kit and a friggen OFF BUTTON. The power for module is a + and - on the board. I mistakenly put a capacitor there, which should be fine The switches on the side select which noise you are pissing people off with it. and there is control pins on the board you can hook into a uC and automatically piss people off. Very hackable device, and the circuit is mostly a bilateral switch chip and a quad nand gate some switches, and of course, a black blob. Black blob is the massive detriment to this kit. Perhaps sometime I'll take a look at the inputs and outputs of the blob, but not today.

0000: Machine gun voice
0001: Fire truck voice
0010: Ambulance voice
0011: The police car voice
0100: Crickets sound
0101: Alarm
0110: Electronic signal sound
0111: Koh
1000: Insect song
1001: Whistle
1010: Telegraph sound
1011: Bird song
1100: ChongJi gunfire
1101: Car sirens
1110: Bass instruments sound
1111: Racing sound

YSZ-4

This was a quick build and worked gloriously until I accidentally hooked it up to 12V. Don't do that. All the parts came, silkscreen was super helpful, I think I'll order another one, to put in as a clock at the makerspace. I didn't get to see long term usage, cuz well... me. but that was blatantly my fault. If your a beginner solderingerr go for it. Not much to it, and could use a regulator of some sort, but all in all a good kit.

SH-E 879 clock

This is a simple seeming setup. the SH-E 879 has an informative silkscreen and all the parts arrived, but I just can't seem to get one that works. The first one the display was quite confused, I tried to troubleshoot, but I think it was bad firmware on the chip. the second one, most of the display works one of the 8 segments for the hours never came on. neither did the leds I may troubleshoot, but likely I may cut my losses and move on. it's perfectly happy with 5v is quite hackable would be simple to work into a project, but I think you would spend more time fixing it than it's worth. As dad says, it's easy to make a bad pie.

NE555+CD4017 kit

Last weekend I spent Saturday at a Renaissance festival. I didn't make anything of note for it but it was great to get away and enjoy a beautiful day of geekery. So I didn't post, but I am this week, on a nice little kit I found on Wish for a buck. This is a great beginner soldering project, there is no programming, just some relaxing soldering on a very simple circuit. It came with the schematic, all the parts were right, numbered and easy to get to. Power it up and it is going. Honestly it's a hard circuit to screw up, and adds a bit of geeky decoration :). I put it together rather quickly so relax, heat up an iron and enjoy.

SainSmart DSO138

This one isn't for a beginner. I ordered the DSO138 from Amazon the reviews were stellar I thought it would make a good blog post series. Took quite awhile to put together but I "got'er done". The silkscreen could have been a bit more helpful, but all of the SMD parts were already done. Also this requires a 9V power supply. Easy to find on Amazon, but letting you know, it's not included. The other big gripe I have in putting it together, is... the incorrect resistor values. There were a few I had to guess at. Once it was all together, I booted it up, and ... nothing. reading the troubleshooting secton, I needed to short J-something or other. After that is done, I boot it up and lo and behold its running. I hooked it up to it's calibration waveform and let it sit there. Ran like a champ for several hours, then locked up to a white screen. Now it may stay active for up to a minute before switching to the white screen of death. I've set it aside for now, but I may try troubleshooting it sometime to see if I can get it working. All in all, when it was working it was a pretty good little scope. I didn't look at the input impedance or anything like that (because it locks up too fast)  but it's easily hackable, and it would be simple match that back to 50ohms with a few cleverly placed components. So yes it's fun to put together, and yes it's a decent scope, but mine quit on me after awhile. Oh and be careful and make sure you keep the 7805 and the 7809 differentiated. I narrowly
missed that calamity.

EC1204B V1.2 kit

This is a fun project. I picked up this clock module, a EC1204B V1.2 ,from wish, so it wasn't expensive. Few things you will need. Some warnings, there are small parts, so be careful opening this up. Also there are quite a few surface mount components so I don't recommend this for a total beginner, unless they are super patient. There seems to be quite a bit of support on the Internet and the device appears to be highly hackable, and cheap enough to screw one up. The transistors (or triodes according to the instructions) can be tricky to solder. I tin one pad and then mount the transistor on that pad, then solder down the other two pads. Actually, I do that to the caps and resistors. I did have a few LEDs that weren't working, but there were leftovers. SMDs were 603 I think. It took me several hours, but then I'm pretty unfocused and had a grandkid getting into stuff too :). Stock, it has several modes. Tells the time, date, and temperature. Best of all it looks nothing like a bomb. I set this up in my workspace to keep an eye on it for the week, (I needed a clock anyway) after several days I got an ERR1, or ERRI I suppose. Hard to tell on a 8seg display. It required a complete reset of the clock to clear. There is a lot of leakage too, so there is a lot of half/on led. But for the price, if you have done a few through hole component projects and are ready for a decent challenge this one may be for you. Oh and one other thing, the hourly chime sounds like my microwave, so don't go running to it for food. I had some sort of weird Pavlovian experience one night. I enjoyed it, and ordered another one to hack into something for my desk at work. I'll post that process when I'm done I promise. For now though, I've other things to do.

Update and some news

Lately I've been starting several projects. My intentions is to move this to a wordpress site that I would host myself. It is proving to be quite challenging ergo, I've been quiet. I do want to do more with this site. So I invested into some soldering projects a question I get asked a lot is "my (family member pronoun) likes electronics (probably video games on some console) what is a good project for a (random number)yr old? Also there is a certain zen to soldering. Put on some Floyd, climb into your head space and put iron to copper. It's a beautiful thing actually. SO, hang tight as I start sharing my soldering adventures with you dear readers, and perhaps you will get excited enough to be a soldersucker too. Remember too, cp horse /water but you can't sudo drink horse.

Fresh OS

That was adventure.

My laptop is my life. It's my Hal to my Dave, but also my Gerty to my Sam, and R2 to my Luke, my Data to my Picard. My experiments with Raspian convinced me to dual boot ubuntu with xfce desktop. The problem was that my dear R2 is an HP. and HP saw fit to give it for partitions, a common problem. The HDD can only have four actual partitions. HP has a tools, windows has a windows, a recovery image and some other image... I decided to delete the hp tools partition and shrink the windows partition and install kubuntu. Here is where I went wrong. I moved the partition for both the windows and the recovery. Boot couldn't find it. I had frelled my windows install. What does one do?



One wipes the drive and starts fresh.



Ubuntu, and Xfce, conky and now my machine is quite zippy. BusPirate is back on line and the Arduino environment is working better than before, I must say I am quite pleased with the results. Needs some screws in the case, but then perhaps not. Perhaps it's OK if it has, like me, a few screws loose.



Let's make some trouble.

It's been awhile let's catch up

Lately I have been working with command line Linux through Raspian. I've learned some things. I use the pipe more than Gandalf. if you ls -al on a 2.8in screen (from adafruit) you will want to pipe that to less. More importantly let's talk networking.

Plenty of tutorials out there on getting a Raspberry pi up on a network various ways. I rather enjoy the command line so I simply

sudo vi /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

move to the bottom and i something like

network =

     {

     ssid="networkname"

     psk="passwordfornetworkname"

     }

esc :wq and if you spelled everything right your in like flynn. If you don't know the wifi name you can scan with

sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

(sudo stands for superuser do I think, what it means is "I made you and I have a hammer above your hard drive so do what the heck I tell you to" in linuxeese. The windows equivalent is only known to bill gates and hackers.)

but what if you don't have the password? Well that is a bit more involved. I don't have the whole process down yet but I'm starting with Aircrack-ng.

you'll need some libraries.

sudo apt-get -y install libssl-dev

sudo apt-get -y install build-essential

not a bad pair to have around anyway. now we need aircrack itself

wget http://download.aircrack-ng.org/aircrack-ng-

in ended up with aircrack-ng-1.2-rc1.tar.gz so that means I have to 

tar -zxvf aircrack-ng-1.2-rcl.tar.gz

makes a folder called aircrack-ng-1.2-rc1 so cd into that and type

make

then go get a sandwich, watch tv... come back later... when you have a prompt again (after a refreshing nap)

make install

you should successfully install aircrack. What to do with it? well we will figure that out in another post.