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. 

                                          

  

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. 

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:

V_OUT = 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 * ((V_OUT/1.25) -1)

Down here you can see some pictures and video.

Info

Hi there you've surely noticed that there has been no new posts, that's because I've got some health issues but don't be scared it's nothing serious. There will be no post for a week. So thanks for your support and please wait :}

Arduino homemade LED Shield

Few days ago I’ve seen LoL (lots of LEDs) shield at Makershed it was cool, but the price almost killed me.

So I’ve decided to create my own LED shield for Arduino. I’ve used 35 Red LEDs which creates Matrix 7x5. Using Multiplexing all I needed was 7+5=12 digital pins to control 35 LEDs. At first I’ve drawn a circuit then made PCB and LED Shield was on the world. After everything was done I’ve realized that 1k resistors were limiting current so much that LED wasn’t shining bright enough so I will have to change value of the resistors. Here you can see video and some pictures later I will add a Tutorial and show you how can you use this Shield.

Arduino LED Matrix "Daft Punk"

I wanted to build LED matrix with Arduino, but I don’t have any LED matrices. So I’ve used 12 Green LEDs.

And recently I’ve seen Tron: Legacy and Daft Punk music there was unbelievable. Well after I somehow managed to create some working code for each LED, I was looking for some word or phrase I can type. Because I’m a fan of Daft Punk and also songs in Tron are terrific I’ve typed “Daft Punk”. There are still some problems I’m dealing with but after I will resolve them I will post here an tutorial how to setup LED Matrix using multiplexing.

Fritzing

Hi there recently I’ve found something very interesting it’s a program called Fritzing. Fritzing is actually program that helps you create your circuits and schematics. It uses three types of view : Breadboard, schematic and PCB. This program is very intuitive and also it has Arduino in the library so can use Fritzing to create Arduino schematics and then also you can upload them to the Fritzing server. I think that the best about Fritzing is that it is Free application it’s still evolving and online community is very huge.

Here’s the site of Fritzing : http://fritzing.org/

So when I’ve watched the video of what can Fritzing actually do, I’ve decided to make schematics of my project I’ve posted here earlier so everybody can make it.