So at some point while I was working on my hard drive display, my trusty multimeter died.
It 866’d itself…
Out With the Old, In With the New
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Introducing ch00ftech Industries Forum
I got this idea a few weeks ago that it might be nice to make my website a little more interactive especially considering how cluttered and confusing the comments section of some posts can be.
That’s why I fired up PHPBB and made myself a forum! Right now, the forum has two categories: “Post Discusson” for discussing particular posts on the blog and “General Discussion” for everything else EE related.
I’ll do my best to keep up with questions, but if I can’t, I’m sure there will be some other users out there who can help out.
This is all in the experimental stage right now, so a lot is subject to change, but if you’d like to give it a shot, click the link at the top menu bar and create an account. I’m very open to suggestions, so feel free to shoot me an email if you have anything you’d like to see done differently.
Update:
Due to lack of interest (and incessant bot spamming) I’ve decided to take down ch00ftech forums. Maybe I’ll try it again when I have more visitors.
Ch00ftech Headquarters is Moving to Seattle!
So I just got an offer from my dream job today and will be spending the next few weeks moving across the country. I’ll try to keep updating the blog, but it might be a little sparse.
Everything should be settled by the 30th of July.
Reader Mail
I get emails every once in a while from enterprising engineers who need some help getting their personal projects off the ground. I love giving this kind of advice, and I always do my best to reply.
After doing this for a while, I figured that while I’m spending all of this time writing these replies, I might as well post them publicly so everyone else can make good use of them.
You can see a compilation of these emails by clicking the “Reader Mail” button on the top menu bar. I won’t be publishing every email I get (any more requests for a Chris Jericho jacket will not make the cut), and none of these posts will make it to my twitter or main feed (don’t want to crowd up the chanel).
So if you’d like to see what it’s all about, click the link!
No, I won’t make you a Chris Jericho jacket, but here’s how I would if I wanted to
I’ve done a few commissioned pieces for artists and musicians on this blog, but I would like to make it clear that my primary objective is to provide educational content for my viewers and to also catalog my work for my own future reference.
Basically, I’d be happy to make something for you as long as it is sufficiently challenging, new, and interesting. The DJ Jacket and ongoing EL Panel shirt projects are examples of this.
If it would make an interesting blog post, I’m all about it. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten numerous requests for something that I don’t think would make a very interesting project/blog post, so I’m addressing it briefly here to help those who would like to make it for themselves.
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Inductors for Beginners
All of this crazy talk about inductors and other magnetic circuits recently reminded me of a presentation I did back in college where I had to present some Electrical Engineering concept to a class of 9th graders. I think I did a pretty good job.
Details on the Radial Display
So, last night I posted a video cataloging my creation of a radial spinning disk display (that’s what I’m calling it anyway). It’s not really a new concept or anything, and wasn’t particularly hard to make. That’s why it was the perfect candidate for the video which I think turned out rather well.
I was so excited about finishing the video, that I decided to post it before I had a proper writeup. That’s what this post is for.
Because you can find details on how a radial spinning disk display (or “hard drive clock“) works all over the place, I thought I’d make this sort of a “meta” post and try to catalog not only the project but all of the design decisions (right and wrong) that I made along the way. If you’ve been bored stiff by my super technical posts recently, this should be a welcome departure. I made sure to include tons of photos.
Super Rapid Prototyping a Radial Hard Disk Display Proof of Concept
So, a friend and I were discussing hard drive clocks Tuesday afternoon, and I somehow got it in my head that I had to build something similar that evening.
I had enough supplies lying around to pull it off, and confident that I could, I decided to do a fun little video. Ironically, it took longer for me to edit this video than to make the display. Details on the project here.
The Follies of Driving a Capacitive Load with an H-bridge
Alright, so I had some post-publication weirdness following my last post, and it took me a few days to figure out exactly what was up, but I think I finally have all the details, and I learned a lot in the process.
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Dimming an EL panel is harder than it looks
So, this is a project that was nearly a month in the making. I set out to make a sound-reactive EL panel but found that driving EL in such a way is actually kind of difficult. If you’ve been following the blog, I’ve been working on this project in one way or another since my transformers article, and it’s actually the reason I wrote that article.
Again, a disclaimer. There are over 8,000 words in this post that document all of my design decisions on this project. It is not a how-to guide, but if you have some background in EE, I hope that you gain something from it.
Without further ado, let’s get down to business.