Thursday, December 10, 2009

Oops

Scanner Lense 008
No amount of “No dude I’m serious, I can do this!” will put that squiggle back beneath the surface of the PCB where it belongs. I once read that scraping along a rail to expose the underlying copper with the intent of soldering directly to it could be rather “hit or miss”. I’m thinking the miss part applies here fairly well.

I had nothing to do with this…

 

Scanner 004 (2) 

I am a very organized person, I would never store cables this way… I came home one day and bumped into Jesus as he was leaving my room. He said “I was bored so I went in there and touched everything, quite a few times”. You know, looking at it now, I think it’s easier to believe that I sat down and purposely tied every cable together in a monkey fist knot and began weaving additional cables throughout. Either way it doesn’t change the fact that buried in that nightmare is 1 cable I actually need right now.

Scanner 004 (3)

That’s the only part I can see, it’s tucked way up in the middle and will most likely stay there for eternity.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

No good can come of this.

I made a Jacob’s Ladder powered by a neon sign transformer. Why? I wanted a quick and dirty project with a high “oooh ahhh” result.

DSC00196

Instead I burned up hours of my life trying to bend two pieces of wire just right for about 5 minutes worth of “heh, badass” quickly followed by “wow that took way too long…”.

The upshot here are the important lessons learned regarding the fantastically high voltage (10-15 thousand volts) produced by this transformer:

  1. You only have to touch 1 of the 2 electrodes and it will shock you.
  2. You so much as think about looking directly at this thing and it will shock you.
  3. Say the word “insulation” to a high voltage device like this and it will laugh at you, and then shock you.
  4. Connecting 1 of the electrodes to my doorknob and waiting for someone to enter without knocking was actually the best result of this experiment.

First post and whatever this is.

LCD Lamp 007
This is a “lamp” I guess. It was born out of necessity as I am constantly in need of a decent light source that doesn’t throw a bunch of harsh shadows on whatever I’m working (hah) with.
LCD Lamp 008
That blue thing sticking out of the top is a standard VGA cable; yeah, this thing used to be an LCD display.
 LCD Lamp 010_stitch
I spent a good 3 hours trying to hack together some kind of simple driver circuit for the lights, but in the end I said to hell with that and resorted to hooking it up to my laptop to keep the damn thing lit…Windows 7 believes I have a 2nd monitor over to the right of my desktop. In reality, it’s nothing more than a giant black hole to lose my mouse pointer in. Still, best work light I’ve ever had.