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ASI build complete

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

I completed the build of my ASI (air speed indicator) for my flight simulator project. There were some minor issues with the PCB but nothing a few jumper wires couldn’t fix. The most frustrating “bug” was with the USB connector. For some reason the connectors I ordered have an unconnected ground pin. Ground is instead connected to the case or shield of the connector. Once I added a jumper from the connector case to the ground pin everything worked great.

You may have noticed an empty IC socket and unused connectors on the PCB. That is because I designed the board to support two stepper motors, two limit switches, two encoders and a switch but the ASI only uses one stepper and one limit switch.

Time to build instrument number 2!

Posted in AVR, Electronics, Flight Sim | 5 Comments »

Restoring from backups

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

My main server suffered a hardware failure that ultimately led to the loss of integrity on the main RAID5 array. Luckily I maintain good backups of almost everything. While I am busy restoring all the services some of the links on this blog may not work. In particular I am still restoring my code repositories. There is nothing like disaster to hone your sys admin skills.

Posted in Ramblings | Comments Off on Restoring from backups

CNC router progress report

Friday, November 6th, 2009

I have decided to build my CNC router based on a design by CNCzone.com forum user jgro.

This is a 3D view of the CAD design.

Here is a pile of parts I have completed.

As you can see I am making a real mess in the garage.

Here are the bearing assemblies for all 3 axis. These are made from aluminum angle and skate bearings and will ride on black gas pipe to form a linear bearing.

Here is the back of the x-axis assembly, showing the parallel bearings.

Posted in CNC, Fabrication | Comments Off on CNC router progress report

usbSimStepper PCBs have arrived

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

I designed a dual stepper motor controller that interfaces to a computer via USB for use in my flight simulator. These boards will drive various instruments, such as my airspeed indicator. This is the first time I have used Seeed Studio for PCBs and I am very please so far with the end result. The total cost was right at $50 for 11 of these boards which measure about 3 inches square.