Hey folks, I revisited my flame lamp project from 2020 and gave it a serious upgrade - we're talking a leap from 300 to a whopping 1024 LEDs thanks to these nifty flexible WS2812 panels. I've kitted it out with a versatile PCB from my Crystal Balls project, tackled power injection challenges and kept things cool with a current-limiting power supply. I had to wrestle with 3D printing and getting the panels to behave inside the lamp's tube, but the end result? A mesmerizing blaze of colors with gorgeous fire effect, all orchestrated by the WLED software. It's like my...
Discovered my Hue switch battery performance is correlated with room temperature after a nifty web scrape of Amazon's device usage history. While it's a given that batteries are temperature-sensitive, actual data from my own living room provided a neat confirmation, graphing a daily pattern. Wanted to go green with a rechargeable lithium coin cell, but the voltage risk to the ATmega256RFR2 on the PCB is a no-go. For now, it's back to the humdrum world of regular coin cells and unexciting battery charts. Dive into the video for a deeper geek-out on this!
In my latest DIY adventure, I explored nickel plating to harden PCBs at home. I was inspired by a slick resistor box design I found through EEVBlog, which had an incredibly cool switching technique but left the PCBs vulnerable to wear from contact scraping. Despite some initial mix-ups and challenges—like dealing with steel instead of pure nickel, using the wrong voltage, and dealing with contamination—my experiments led to some promising results. I even compared the scratch resistance of plated vs. original PCBs in a very informal test. I wrapped up by sharing some handy links for anyone eager to dive...
I've delved deep into the reason why people prefer to use wedge-shaped coils when building PCB motors. After a lot of Googling, a bit of Python scripting, and a ton of visuals, what emerged was a very compelling argument for the humble wedge coil. Turns out, radial lines are the heroes in the story – the more the merrier – because these are what generate the fields in the correct direction to crank up the torque. Don’t get too attached though; there may be alternative, more efficient coil designs yet to discover, but those are topics for another day!
I've been diving deep into the world of PCB (Printed Circuit Board) coils, inspired by Carl Bugeja's incredible PCB motors! After deciding to set up an automated process for creating the coils rather than manually drawing them (can you imagine?), I found our main constraints became track width and spacing, and the number of layers we could use. During the process of creating spirals for our coils, I encountered some interesting problems - spirals are easy, but what about arbitrarily shaped coils? My attempts ultimately lead me to develop more efficient algorithms and KiCad plugins to generate these special coils....