Various ramblings – Electronics, Radio, 3D Printing & CNC
Many years ago I stumbled onto a few websites and YouTube videos showing off scratch-built foamies, and at first it seemed to be a great idea! But after a bit of digging around local parts stores and websites I quickly changed my mind, a very expensive hobby to start off in… Fast-forward to mid-2012, and I once again stumbled onto...
My first attempts at etching these boards didn’t go so well. Using the toner transfer method has worked very well for me in the past, but it looks like my current printer doesn’t work as well as the one I used previously. Below are a few pictures of the backplane boards I tried etching, the first photo based off a...
While I was reading the Steve Jobs biography I was given for Christmas in 2011 I was feeling strangely nostalgic about the good ol’ days. This was strange mainly due to the fact I wasn’t yet born when the Steve’s (Wozniak and Jobs) were designing and building the Apple I & II… Some time after that I read on Hack-a-Day...
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...
Being my first transceiver, I really wanted to make it my own (well, as much as I could with a kit…). I had seen many radios built into cases made from FR4 fibreglass PCB material, and thought I might have a go at doing my own. Quite a simple process but it would have been much easier if I had...
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...