March 2009

Musical Tesla Coils…

March 30, 2009

…and I guess I use that term lightly. I’ve been building a MIDI modulator for the DRSSTC tesla coil I put together last year. One of the problems is tuning a 555 based oscillater to match MIDI note numbers. I played around with Excel for a while, but couldn’t really get anything useful going. So [...]

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“Vintage” variac casing

March 29, 2009

I’ve been going through all my shelves in the basement and trying to complete as many of the unfinished projects as I can, just to clear some space. One of the things I needed to do was box up the old Staco Autotransformer I have. I was faced with this: But luckily I found Tim [...]

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Money As Debt

March 28, 2009

Several years ago I asked my workmates the question: “If a government needs more money, why can’t it just print more?” We talked about inflation, and the linking money to tangible assets like gold, but soon realised that we didn’t have enought information to come up with a good answer. I recently saw the “Money [...]

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555 timer as a VCO

March 23, 2009

Taking a break from robots and lasers to work on my MIDI to DRSSTC Tesla coil adapter. (?) How cool is the 555 timer? I just discovered that by modulating the control pin (5) with a varying voltage you can alter the output frequency. Effectively a VCO – wow. (Do I sound like a geek [...]

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Do I look like my daughter?

March 20, 2009

Not sure, Mum thinks I do a bit… She’s got better hair then me…

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Flatpack K9 – robots by mail

March 20, 2009

I just received the K9 flatpack kit. Some of you know that a couple of years ago I started building a K9 (I thought it better to start with something small and angular before tackling a big curvy monster like the Dalek). I started strong, but things soon got out of hand, and my (then) [...]

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Arduino Shield for Laser Harp 2.0

March 19, 2009

I just got the first prototype PCB back from BatchPCB – there were a couple of errors (on my part) but the board is really well made and seems to work OK. I need to correct the silk screen layer and update the wiring for a couple of things. I might add some test points [...]

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New laser harp almost done…

March 7, 2009

Some of you have been following my rebuild diary on the laser harp… Well that’s got the hardware pretty much complete – now the difficult task of rewriting the firmware to support all the new features. But first, it’s time for a cup of tea…

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Deathprobe!

March 5, 2009

I’ve just been watching the Six Million Dollar Man episode “The Return of Deathprobe” (all one word, not Death Probe mind you). As I kid I was completely in awe of this thing – and it’s only watching as an adult that I realise how completely silly the plot really is. I did notice one [...]

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New Laser Harp for 2009

March 4, 2009

I’ve been working away on a new version of the laser harp for 2009. The old one broke down after heavy gigging so I thought it was time to rebuild it, (we have the technology), to be better, stronger, faster than before… Built out of an old black box flight recorder – so quite a [...]

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