- Up to two months of logging with a single coin cell battery.
- 30 000 timestamped temperature measurements.
- Logging period from every 5 seconds to every 24 hours.
- 0.5°C accuracy, 0.06°C resolution.
- No driver, no software and no admin rights needed!
- Compatible with any computer with USB port.
- Automatic time synchronization with the computer.
- Low cost design.
May 152012
Mar 202012
We get old. It’s a fact of life that smacked me in the face recently. Until about a year ago, my eye sight has been excellent. Not any more. I can’t work on electronics without glasses and/or a magnifying glass.
I have discovered help from an IP camera that recently stopped panning and tilting. The camera housing was exposed to an atmosphere that fused some of the plastic housing parts together. Oops. Time for a tear down. I took the two stepper motors out (more on this later) and left the rest of the camera intact. I screwed the lens in so that the point of focus is very close to the lens. I know have a close-up camera.
In this photo, the lens is pointing at a penny. The penny is held by a paper clip and the DVDs are used to position the penny vertically. Notice the antenna. The camera is connected to my network and I can view the closeup picture on my computer.
Here is the camera from the other side. The penny is being illuminated by my tiny light.
Screen Shot - Click for larger view
Mar 192012
Tonight’s project took less than 5 minutes to put together. It’s a tiny light. This light was inspired by the “throwy“. The only difference is that I used two magnets instead of tape to connect my LED leads to battery. I wanted the option to turn it off.
It uses a high powered LED($0.58) with two 30 AWG wires soldered to it, two magnets ($0.62 each) and a CR2032 battery($1.00). The total cost is $2.82.
The battery provides 3v when it is fully charged. The LED is rated for typical forward voltage of 3.6v. At 3v, the LED will draw about 125 milliamps and put out 80% of the light that it is rated for. The LED will dim as the battery loses juice, but it will stay lit for days.
The only tricky part to the construction is soldering on the wires without frying the LED. Use a small tip and work quickly.
WARNING: 115 volts can kill you
My garage camera works great…unless it is dark. My old camera is not fitted with IR vision. I need to light up the garage remotely and to accomplish this, I’m going to need a lot more power than can be provided by the camera output ports.
I dropped by Home Depot today and picked up a cheap power strip. This one had no protection from spikes or over current. It’s basically a switch and three strips of metal. My plan is to take out the switch and replace it with a relay.
There are 5 screws on the back. 3 of the them come right out with a Phillips screw driver. Two others are tamper resistant. I guess they don’t want people messing with their products. Too bad. I drilled out the plastic around the heads and split it open.
Watch the Power Strip in Action
Last year, I posted my Internet Garage Door opener. I was able to open my garage door (and see it open or shut) using my cell phone and an old TrendNet IP camera.
Jan 242012
I had an old laptop running in our machine shop. The only application ever used was a web browser. It was painfully slow and the laptop screen didn’t work. So when it got a infected with a the System Alert virus, I certainly wasn’t going to spend hours fixing it.
Instead, I pulled the hard drive and installed a tiny 4 GB USB thumb drive with Linux (the Ubuntu distribution). It took less than an hour and most of the time was consumed by computer working in the background. The laptop now runs much quicker as a browser.
Now the big question will be answered. Will the guys in the shop resist using it because it is not Windows/Internet Explorer?
The brightness of an LED is dependent on current, not voltage. Here is a simple constant current circuit:
Create a DC Power rail with Zener diodes. Change the Zener diodes for the voltage outputs you need.
Circuit taken from a Zener Diode post by EvilMadScientist.com
For a lot more about power supplies, check out the EE Video Blog
Jan 032012
Success! I have replaced an old floppy drive on a CNC machine.
I thought it was going to be easy, but it turned out to be a bit more difficult then I thought. Keep reading if you are having trouble installing your emulator by PLR Electronics.
A floppy emulator is a piece of hardware that replaces an old floppy drive. I run CNC machines that use floppy drives for data transfer. The floppies consistently go bad. Not only do I waste time dealing bad disks and formatting, I also find myself not backing up the CNC catalog as often as I should.
Open Comments
I’m going to try something new. I just changed blog settings to allow comments without a name and email address. I will keep it that way unless I start getting a ton of spam.