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Is it monday already?
Feb. 25th, 2008 07:35 amSunday morning started with doing a pile of loads of laundry, followed by a ham, cheese, salad toast (not toasted) sandwich, then the afternoon was electronics hackings.
Started off at UCC, making a power supply for the MiFARE card reader for the UCC Vending system, out of an old zip drive PSU and a Localtalk cable, with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
unfoldedreality artificing a plug to go into an interesting looking socket inside the snack vending machine. Not quite sure what voltage or polarity it was, but hey, SMPS's don't care too much about either of those. Then we mounted the reader on the inside of the door using some clear double sided tape I had picked up in Tokyo, and concealed the serial+power cable running from it kinda nicely.
unfoldedreality + ducts spent the next few hours debugging serial connection issues, till they finally just reran the cables, and it all worked. Mmm UCC quality.
Also while at UCC, made a PSU for one of the 15 inch LCDs out of one for an old camcorder. Probably should finish it off with some diodes at some point. It's putting out about 18V under load, even though it's only meant to be putting out 14V (per label) and the LCD wants 12V. Tried for a few hours and no magic smoke though, so it'll probably be ok.
Went to Subway for dinner with trs80, shmookey, patrick and rowan (remarkably, we're still welcome there), then stopped off at IGA on the way back to get some drinks for the vending machine.
I shared some of my music with UCC via the wonders of my tinny speakers, and then came home when the laptop battery started dying, but the music had reminded me of the Ducktronics for UCC I was working on last year. Was going to finish that off last night, till I found out I seemed to have thrown the wrong end of the plug out from inside the Airport Express (Gah!) and that I can't find my multimeter (gah!). I can probably get Crazy Ivan from EE to solder wires directly to the PCB, so that won't be an issue long term, and I've been after a new multimeter, so again, no big deal, but still, Gah!. So instead I spent the time making the front panel for it, which is pretty much done, and modifying the remains of the old Airport Express case to mount the PCB inside the new case, which is also done and mounted. Found the screws that I had were from the Unisfa Ducktronic's donor, and that Apple had changed the size of them between the time that one and this one were made, but fortunately I had some spare M2x4 screws to use instead.
Started off at UCC, making a power supply for the MiFARE card reader for the UCC Vending system, out of an old zip drive PSU and a Localtalk cable, with
unfoldedreality artificing a plug to go into an interesting looking socket inside the snack vending machine. Not quite sure what voltage or polarity it was, but hey, SMPS's don't care too much about either of those. Then we mounted the reader on the inside of the door using some clear double sided tape I had picked up in Tokyo, and concealed the serial+power cable running from it kinda nicely. unfoldedreality + ducts spent the next few hours debugging serial connection issues, till they finally just reran the cables, and it all worked. Mmm UCC quality.Also while at UCC, made a PSU for one of the 15 inch LCDs out of one for an old camcorder. Probably should finish it off with some diodes at some point. It's putting out about 18V under load, even though it's only meant to be putting out 14V (per label) and the LCD wants 12V. Tried for a few hours and no magic smoke though, so it'll probably be ok.
Went to Subway for dinner with trs80, shmookey, patrick and rowan (remarkably, we're still welcome there), then stopped off at IGA on the way back to get some drinks for the vending machine.
I shared some of my music with UCC via the wonders of my tinny speakers, and then came home when the laptop battery started dying, but the music had reminded me of the Ducktronics for UCC I was working on last year. Was going to finish that off last night, till I found out I seemed to have thrown the wrong end of the plug out from inside the Airport Express (Gah!) and that I can't find my multimeter (gah!). I can probably get Crazy Ivan from EE to solder wires directly to the PCB, so that won't be an issue long term, and I've been after a new multimeter, so again, no big deal, but still, Gah!. So instead I spent the time making the front panel for it, which is pretty much done, and modifying the remains of the old Airport Express case to mount the PCB inside the new case, which is also done and mounted. Found the screws that I had were from the Unisfa Ducktronic's donor, and that Apple had changed the size of them between the time that one and this one were made, but fortunately I had some spare M2x4 screws to use instead.
