Archive for category Make
Dragonfly Ordainment
For my girlfriend’s birthday the other week I made her a dragonfly ordainment. 
Here’s how I built it.
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Steampunk Inspired Goggles
I had been meaning to make a set of goggles for a while and when a pair of broken 58mm lenses came into my possession I couldn’t resist. Here is how I went from raw materials to the finished goggles, which took the best part of a day to accomplish.
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GPS Logger VIII – What happened?
So over two years ago I set out to build a GPS Logger to take hiking and traveling. Everything was assembled and it was good to go (almost) and hasn’t moved from that state. Driving around Australia for 2 years and then taking off around the world has a way of putting a cramp in finishing projects.
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GPS Logger VII – Componets and Assembly
Finally the components arrived. The next step was to check them against a printout of the PCB to ensure that all the footprints matched up. I had already checked that the printout was a 1:1 scale of the PCB artwork.
Copper Tree
For Mothers Day this year I made an ornamental tree from copper wire. This post documents the steps that I took to build it.
Curtains for the Crusier
As I travel around Australia I will need to be able to sleep in the ‘cruiser and store items in it out of sight so I made some curtains to cover the 4 side windows, the 2 back windows and to divide the front and back. 
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GPS Logger VI – PCB Layout and Case
GPS Logger V – Full hardware
Having determined the battery and power requirements, a full schematic of the GPS logger was made. Buck regulators and Li-Ion battery chargers were investigated from a variety of manufacturers. The TC105 3.3V Buck regulator and the MCP73863 4.2V Li-Ion battery charger, both from Microchip, were chosen to provide the power needs for the project. The circuit is capable of detecting if a USB port is a Charging Port and adjusting the battery charge current to suit.
GPS Logger IV – Power and Batteries
The prototype is at the stage of being able to successfully achieve GPS lock, log the received coordinates, waypoints and go to sleep. The power usage of the system needed to be analysed in order to specify the battery requirements. The current draw was monitored after the 3.3V regulator as the device was put into its various modes.
GPS Logger III – NMEA Processing
The GPS Logger is currently able to access files and directories on a FAT16 filesystem, contained on a SD card. This post covers processing NMEA with a finite state machine and some of the problems encountered so far with the logger. Read the rest of this entry »