Soldering iron holder with fume extractor

As you’ve may already noticed, I’m soldering a lot and those fumes are bothering me.

Yes of course I have that big fume extractor but nearly half of time I’m working soldering iron is in the holder and fume extractor can’t reach fumes there so I’m slowly killing myself. So I’ve decided to implement small fume extractor to the holder. It’s 30mm fan 5V and 0,7W and its really strong for such small thing. There is also active carbon filter. Check out video and some pics.

Regulated Power Supply UPDATE

Finally I was able to find cheap panel voltage meter, which I can use for new version of my LM317 regulated voltage supply.

Few months ago I made LM317 voltage regulator, but it has no display to show you actual voltage. Only way how to determine actual voltage on old version is to make scale, but that is not reliable. So I’ve decided to take the old circuit put it into new project box and add this display. Now it finally looks like a power supply and I can be sure that I know what I’m getting on the output.

Small Arduino using AtMega8

Few days ago I’ve bought Atmel Mega 8 chip and I’ve decided to create some sort of small Arduino.

I’ve got one Altoids Smalls can available so I wanted to create Arduino so small it could fit into the can. I’ve used just prefboard, but I think it’s great. All needed pins are accessible. After I’ve done soldering there was just one more thing to do: burn bootloader. There are several ways how to burn bootloader, easiest how to achieve that is with use of parallel port. However my PC don’t have one, so I’ve decided to program my Arduino Duemilanove as AVR programmer. If you chose this option be aware that it doesn’t have to work first time. I myself burned bootloader 3 or 4 times. After you have burned bootloader you need just one more thing and that is TTL to RS-232 adapter to be able to program the chip. I’ve used my XBEE-USB adapter which has got FTDI chip. I’ve got one more AtMega8 so I’ll probably create other Arduino it was kinda fun and I’ve spared some money.