Various ramblings – Electronics, Radio, 3D Printing & CNC
While work and other commitments have been sapping a large amount of my time I have been making slow progress with the milling of circuit boards for the 6502 computer project. I have added some pictures of progress below. I am slowly getting the hang of repeatable and reliable results on the mill. Most trouble stems from the height at...
After much tweaking, fiddling and procrastinating I have finally been able to successfully mill a PCB! The only minor issue I had was with the drill file created by the PCB-GCode script which would not load correctly into LinuxCNC. Luckily this is a step that I can complete manually using my PCB drill. The results are excellent, the finish is...
While waiting patiently for the mill to finish running a PCB isolation route job I stepped away for a few seconds to skip a song on my music playlist. As I was fiddling with the music I heard the spindle motor starting to bog down and turned around to see that the cutting tool had started cutting deeper and deeper...
While working on a small PIC project as an addition to a larger project (a JUMA RX1 DDS LSB/CW receiver) I had the displeasure of using Microchip’s IDE MPLAB. MPLAB looks like it was designed in the mid-90’s, and while it does let you piece together code and compile it into PIC compatible hex, it’s not the most user friendly...
With the case finished, there was only one thing left to do… Jam the radio in the case and make it work! The digital dial kit and main board are secured to the case using brass stand offs (used for securing motherboards in PC cases), once cleaned up they solder rather nicely to the PCB cladding. The lid is secured...
My relatively new BK Precision multimeter got rained on, a leak in the roof on the deck soaked the table I was working on when some heavy overnight rain decided to come bucketing down. To say it was rained on is an understatement really, it must have been placed perfectly under a torrent of water that jammed more water into...
To align my SW-40 transceiver I needed to use a dummy load, something I didn’t yet have. The dummy load I bodged together in a hurry was 2 x 0.5 watt 100 ohm resistors in parallel on a BNC chasis connector. It worked, but got warm enough to discolour the resistors enough to make reading the values tricky. I had...
My first transceiver kit, a nice little radio with great instructions and is easy to build. I built this board over 2 nights, about 4-5 hours in total. While researching and ordering this kit I was still in the process of getting my foundation license, and not long after getting the kit in the mail I stumbled onto a small...