I’ve been a little busy on the workbench lately. I’ve been working late at the-day-job so I’ve been neglecting my workbench notebook and my blog for most of this week. I’ve got a ton of “fun” stuff planned for this weekend; no way I’ll get it all done.
I won’t make you read through the whole post if I pulled you in with mouse hacking 😉
I am a poor gamer.. give me a cheat code and I’ll use it. I have no shame in gaming. Adam Fabio recently got me slightly addicted to ClickingBad … I refuse to link it, don’t search for it.. it’s a god-awful time suck. I clicked a freakn’ mouse for 90 minutes straight… Well screw that. I pulled out one of those el-cheapo USB mice you get with a refurb computer… the $5 throw-away kind. I popped it open and as luck would have it little microswitchs on a single sided PCB. Well 2-1/2 minutes later I had soldered wires to the switch contacts, dumped them on the normal open contacts of a small relay, hooked it up the relay coil to my MOSFET driver (yes, way overkill, it was laying there already), and threw it under a PIC. I used a rate of 70 ms off 40 ms on.. I probably could have sped that up but it was at that warp speed, I was happy. Did it take away from the game? Nah, I had that much more to buy! I was shocked the relay held out for a few days of being hammered (“Batches hand-cooked: 1.01Q” , that’s not a quadrillion clicks, but it was a lot regardless). I pulled my cheat-clicker off after a while because the super-fast click of the relay was getting pretty damn annoying. I had little bug in the system: a little phantom drift issue with the el-cheapo mouse so turned down pointer sensitivity to as slow as possible; That allowed for a couple hour stretch of non-stop cheating.
Continuing on with actual electronics projects: I have five active projects I’m working on, a few I’ve recently benched waiting on a big purchase, trying to get other stuff out of the way or for other reasons.
1. Video Synth … Lawrence has inspired me to help him build a Video Synth. I’ve gotten a fair amount of reading done. Looks like I’m going to need a spectrum analyzer for some filters I want to build (awww darn! heh). I’ve gotten some boards finished which I needed for other projects but just happened to work for this one as well.
… version 2.0 of these boards in at the fab. I’ll probably sell some of these for people needed a quick sweep generator for their VCOs, etc.
2. Workshop Time Standard — Just started this because I got most of the parts in. This will be powered by my MikroElectronika PIC clicker and GPS2 click…. Stay Tuned.
3. WWVB for non-US persons… Edward contacted me about using my WWVB project but to actually broadcast the correct time. Well, fair enough. This has gotten me to buy all the stuff I think I need to create a PIC NTP client, GPS NMEA input .. and then the easy part. Broadcast it on 60KHz… I’ll have some kind of notice you should do this in a lead box under the ocean. I certainly wouldn’t sell this to someone within the US. I don’t think the FCC has any rule that allows a person to broadcast any tiny amount of power on 60KHz, certainly not intentionally. I didn’t find anything I thought I’d be safe under Part 15. I’d love to be proven wrong on this.. really.
4. My electric scooter. I just got a welder … now for some more material. Most of the electronics are done-enough until testing.
5. My ESR meter… waiting on parts of course.. come on Customs.. let me have my fun-stuff.
… all this work has left me bench a disaster zone.
.. I’ll finally leave you with this fun photo:
