Monday, February 21, 2011

Portable Soldering Station 2



Few months ago I’ve started to create series of portable devices that should together make a portable soldering station. Now I present you Beta version of this. It’s stored in a box of candies. When you open the box inside you’ll find soldering iron with stand, solder, breadboard with power supply, fume extractor and parts container. This project is portable, however it uses 12V wall adapter but that’s perfect for me, because I’ll be using this project in the school. Remember it’s still a Beta version, I’m now looking for stronger Fan, desoldering pump and helping hands. So check out video and pictures and wait for full release. 


                                          





  

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Arduino ProtoShield

Recently I’ve bought an Arduino protoshield. It’s a cool board that helps you keep your project small and compact. It sits on Arduino perfectly and you can use all of the pins + there are enhanced pins for GND and +5V. 






Saturday, February 12, 2011

Regulated Power Supply

Hi there. I’ve got some health issues, but now I’m back. Today I’ll show you my latest project: Regulated Power Supply.


Well if you work with electronics as I do, you’ve probably noticed that every electrical device works on different voltage. Until now I was forced to use batteries or different types of supplies. With this regulated power supply you can easily change voltage from 1,25V to 13V by turning potentiometer.  Only thing that you need is an adaptor that gives more than 13V (mine gives 17V). Heart of this project is LM317T voltage regulator, which is very good. Reason why this adjustable voltage regulator is so good, is that this regulator is small and it can regulate up to 40V and up to 1,5A so for desk power supply is this regulator best choice. Here you can see some pictures and the circuit. You can also make this as a fixed voltage regulator there’s an equation for counting resistor value (note that R1 has to be 240ohms).

If you want to calculate output voltages use this equation:
VOUT = 1.25 * (1 + R2/R1)

And if you want to calculate resistor value use this equation (with potentiometers R2 is maximum I’ve used 2K2 Potentiometer):
R2 = R1 * ((VOUT/1.25) -1)

Down here you can see some pictures and video.