Electronics « William's Workbench

Archive for the ‘Electronics’ Category

SMT soldering video

Sunday, February 12th, 2012

Posted in Electronics, Fabrication | Comments Off on SMT soldering video

This is something I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while and finally got around to designing a schematic and board layout. It is a 128 button USB HID joystick. Why would you want one of those? To use as inputs for your flight simulator of course. 🙂

The firmware is still alpha and untested but should be pretty straightforward. Once I get some boards made and the firmware finished I will provide some updates, as well as share the source code and schematic.

Update: The boards ~~are on order~~�have shipped

The board was created using the free version of EAGLE�and exported to POV-Ray�using Eagle3D. Using POVRay a sequence of 720 images were rendered and then turned into the video below using ffmpeg.

Posted in AVR, Electronics, Flight Sim, Programming | Comments Off on usbSimInput

SCORBOT-ER 4PC

Friday, January 6th, 2012

My cousin works for a school and spotted something on its way to the dumpster that he thought I might like.

He was right. (Thanks cuz!)

That is a SCORBOT-ER 4PC teaching robot, complete with controller and a PC with SCORBOT software. It’s amazing what some people will throw away. After getting this home, cleaned up, and up on the workbench for a look I discovered there was no cable to connect the PC to the control box.

Off to the webs I go and after waiting a few weeks for back order (nobody carries weird DB cables in stock these days) I had me a cable. Oops, it doesn’t fit. What at first glance I thought was a DD-50 connector was actually an HD-62. The cable from the control box to the robot is a DD-50 and I assumed the other was the same. Lesson learned, I should have counted the pins instead of assuming.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and a shiny new HD-62 cable arrives. Plug it in, boot up the ailing old Windows 98 PC (I really need to backup that HDD…) and I have a working robot. Wow. I’m in geek heaven. Now to bolt this thing to the workbench and teach it to solder…