Fear of failure has stopped more would be hackers from starting a project than lack of knowledge, lack of supplies and lack of skills combined. In all honesty knowledge, supplies and skills can be found, scrounged and developed. Fear of failure on the other hand needs to be conquered. The raod to conquering this fear is this simple question … “Whats the worst thing that can happen?” Will you spend four hours searching the net and reading articles about servo motors or perusing circuit diagrams? Will you end up with some badly cut out pieces of scrap wood that you have to toss? How about having to rebuild a circuit or once you realize you could have wired it better. Not exactly heart stopping failures are they? Now wrecking your brand new plasma TV may be something you can’t live with … so don’t hack it. If you can’t afford to lose it don’t hack it.
For those lucky hackers with kids you have an endless supply of out grown toys to hack with the kids. Don’t forget to include the kids ! Todays kids need hands on engineering and this has the added benefit of keeping old toys out of the landfill.
When I built a Vibrabot with my daughter I let her take the cell phone apart fot the pager motor. She felt like I was letting her do something she wasn’t allowed to do. Taking things apart has become a “naughty” thing to do. In part because parents bestow expensive toys on their kids. Who wants their kid taking apart a $400 PSP ? A few dollar store musical toys on the other hand is a circuit bending afternoon waiting to happen ! They will learn a hell of a lot more ripping apart some cheap old toys than from playing “Diego’s Animal Rescue” .
dave Uncategorized Hacking
If writing is really the art of re-writing then Hardware Hacking is the art of rebuilding. After looking over the first two boards of the Makers Quilt I’ve decided they need a rehuild. For starters the 26 AWG I used on board is over kill and 30 AWG will work just fine. I also want to redo the LED matrix so the the 9’s and 6’s look better.
Board 1 needs to have the gears removed so I can do something cool with them and the ribbon cable needs to be rerouted through a slot on the board so the edges are clear for connecting other boards.
No design is ever right the first 100 times … that’s why we have solder pullers.
dave Uncategorized Hacking, Makers_Quilt
After finding out the power supply was not regulating properly. The voltage dropped to 4.8 Volts if I had more than 12 LED’s lit. So I re-wrote the code to prevent that from happening. With no LED’s lit the board puts out ~8.05mA With one LED lit the board puts out ~29.2mA. I’m probably going to change the current limiting resistor on the on 6276 to 1.5K. That should drop the Current Draw from the LED’s to around 15mA.
I hooked both boards up to test and one of the LED’s on the first board has blown. With both boards running the power supply had trouble regulating. Proof positive of two things. I have to raise the current limiting resistor on the drivers and I need to get a better power supply before board three gets wired in.
dave The Makers Quilt Hacking, Makers_Quilt
I just found out I can run my Picaxe programmer from a VM. No need to leave my Linux box to program the little buggers. This should all be a moot point when I switch to AVR’s
dave The Makers Quilt Hacking, Makers_Quilt
I swapped out the Picaxe 08M for an 18X. I’ll run some tests this weekend and hopefully have this board done and connected before the next Make NYC meeting.
Halloween prep has also been going slower than I expected. My motivation is just not happening.
I need to set some hard deadlines on some of these projects and honor them. It’s hard when you don’t have to produce results for anyone but yourself.
Second board finished by Friday
Tombstones ready for painting by Saturday
3 LED Spots ready for enclosures by Sunday
There I’ve said it and if anyone is watching you can hold me accountable.
dave Halloween, The Makers Quilt Hacking, Makers_Quilt
Looks like board two will get a different Picaxe. I’ve been running into some odd problems that look like they are related to the code being to long for the device. The Dev tools are not very good about letting me know this. Luckily we’re talking about a few wires so this can be pretty quick.
dave The Makers Quilt Hacking, Makers_Quilt
Finally wired the second board up. I’ve been pretty busy lately so I’m trying to prioritize working on the board. All that’s left is the code.
I was running some code tests and had a timing problem. The bit banging code I used was sending the clock pulse before the data was valid. A 1ms delay fixed that up nicely.
dave The Makers Quilt Hacking, Makers_Quilt
OK quick update on the second board …
32 3mm Red LED’s are soldered in and ready to go.
IC Sockets go in tonight and an interim picture will go up.
dave The Makers Quilt Hacking, Makers_Quilt