A new beginning… or is it?

Well as it happens I’ve started training as an avionics maintenance engineer this year so there hasn’t been much time so far to get into any pointless projects but I intend to get something happening.

Recently in training we were crawling through a small avionics access area in the bottom of a Boeing 727 when our torch light fell on this sign:

It sorta gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling… especially in small enclosed spaces.

Anyway stay tuned and hopefully i’ll have some more stuff up here soon.

Ultimate Desktop Fan x5000

I guess, readers, you were all waiting for a new innovative technical breakthrough after I being away for so long yet I have come back with something much more cooler… A desktop fan.. taking exactly 20 minutes to build and minimal thinking power. Here it is:

Simply a computer cpu fan hooked up to 9 Volts or it can also handle 12 Volts. The great thing with these fans is that they are made to be running for great lengths of time – my computers fan runs 24/7, 365 days a year and hasn’t died yet. The only thing to remember when setting it up is to make sure the air will be blowing towards you and not away.

So there you have it folks,

Enjoy!

Zane Vohland

A possible automatic door unlocker thingy?!

A 4.3GB IDE hard drive isn’t something people usually get excited over these days and with one just laying around here it wasn’t much use unless I wanted to chuck linux on it then forget about it. So I opened it up, along with a world full of oppertunity… well sort of anyway.

First thing to notice is the stepper motor… I am guessing it is low torque and high speed which could come in handy later down the track, the other thing is the write/read arm mechanism. Now this mechanism works off the same idea as a motor where you have a north and south pole and then an electric current running through the centre, causing crazy forces and stuff to turn it around… though in this case it is a bit different:

The large black sort of L shaped part to the right of the hard drive where the read/write arm disappears under is the part that acts as the North and South pole magnets… what you can’t see under it is the copper wire wrapped around the other side of the arm. Anyway, by applying an electric current through the copper wire allows us to control the direction in which the arm swings, by reversing polarity the direction is changed.

Now if 12v is applied the arm will swing to the opposite position with a supprising amount of force which got me thinking, dangerous i know but I thought all the same: This arm could act as some sort of lock mechanism.

All I have to do is work out what sort of lock it could be used for.

This blog isn’t dead yet!

Last post was the 20th of June, huh?… That seems like a long time ago. I guess you relentless fans out there have been checking this blog every day since just waiting for an update, I am sorry.

Anyway, over the past two months nothing much has been happening in the way of crazy, useless projects but now that I have had my break its time to get right back into it all again and just to show my enthusiasm I have changed the theme of this blog… Wahoo?!

Okay so here is an update on what to expect in the next few upcoming days:

•  .obj file viewer written in ruby/opengl
• something crazy to do with a hard driver’s writing head

The main priority at the moment is to get something happening with the viewer program. If anyone knows of some good sources for ruby/opengl information or samples let me know.

Well, hopefully you will all see an update here in the next few day. My QCS test is this coming week closely followed by my end of term exams so this is perfect timing for some projects of my own.

Until next time!

Controlling an RC Car with PC

My apologies to all you fanatic readers out there who have been waiting for an update… (I think I am talking to an empty room…), but oh well, here is an exciting update! WAHOO! (insert rolling eyes here):

Inspired by Mr. Ashish’s little project (ashishrd.blogspot.com) of controlling his remote control car via the computer, I decided to try to the same to my remote control car and hook up my wireless camera to it as well.

So I guess it all started with my brothers remote controlled car that was laying under his bed collecting dust.

From there the idea evolved into a question of can Ruby programming language be used to control the car? Well of coarse it can! I mean, its Ruby we’re talking about here. Though the initial search on the subject seemed to turn up nothing in particular, I was mainly wanting to know how ruby when about detecting a key press. So search I did until I found this peice of code:

So it was a start… from there I just mucked around with it until I got it to eventually work. I then wrote up some if statements to check weither or not the key was pressed and if it was what the program was to do, so for example if W was pressed send 0001 to the parallel port. Now for an interesting fact: I have always heard people, when talking about programming, discuss effeciency of the programs design and how much fast the program can run if it is structured in a certain way, now I had never came across that in my mild dabblings in programming until this day; With my program all written up I then tested it by pressing up, down, left and right but there were slight pauses in the program and it would detect the left key unless you pressed it a few times and the same with the right key and I had a weird feeling it was to do with the if statements… so I changed it all to a case statement and everytime no matter how fast I pressed each key and in what order each keypress was detected… very interesting!

Now that I had that under control, the car’s controller had to be interfaced with the the computer. I happened to have four relays laying around at the time so I used them and found a nice little schematic that helped things, I just modified it to my needs:

Also instead of the BC548 I just used 2N222A’s and I didn’t bother with the resistors… everything seemed to work fine without them… this is how the whole thing turned out:

And here is a picture of the RC Controller cracked open and a few wires soldered here and there:

And so after a successful afternoon of soldering and programming it all worked fine… here is the car with my camera attached and ready to allow me to experience the great outdoors from my computer… oh I am lazy!

Remote 360 Camera Panner

Well as bordem strikes, one finds themselves looking for ways to quench their thrist for ultimate knowledge of all things of the universe… but only when bordem strikes. Otherwise we would be doing more important things like working, cleaning and all of that sort of stuff. Anyway in my seeking of the ultimate knowledge of all things I happened apon my RC Plane’s electronics which I had brutally gutted from a flimsy, plastic excuse for an aircraft.

Believe it or not, multiple crash landings for these planes do them no good… funny that, isn’t it? In the end I think the nose of the plane was closer to the centre of the aircraft than was to the front.Now, what comes out of those cheap little RC Planes is quite interesting, for $50 – $100 AU you get two mini servo’s, a motor speed controller (miniture size) and a 4 channel reciever… not bad at all, and think of the possiblities! Now I went back to my mini wireless camera and got to work making an extreme 360 Degrees Panning thing.

It was all pretty simple and no great electrical knowledge was required, all I had to do was replace the high speed and low torque motor that came with the RC Plane kit with a low speed high torque motor and it was done and with a little bit of mechanical handiwork I rigged up a couple of PVC tubes and a blank cd holder, to allow the camera a base to swivel on.

It worked perfectly. Not a completely useless project completed, WAHOO!.

The Ramjet Project… Only the beginning?

For a physics assignment I decided to try to build a ramjet and that was about October last year. Now finaly, it has been built and tested and guess what? IT WORKS!… to a certain extent, but it works!Anyway for those who haven’t an idea of what a ramjet is check out this wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet

Here is a quick model I made to show the basic structure of a subsonic ramjet:

And the ramjet I made:

As can be seen there are 4 main parts of a ramjet, the air intake nozzel, flame holder(also know as diffuser), combustion chamber and exhaust nozzel. Fuel (in this case LP Gas or Propane) is injected before the flame holder along with air traveling at high speeds, and in this case produced from a hair dryer and leaf blower.

The fuel/air mixture then passes through the flame holder which slows the mixture down and compresses it which is then iginited and is shot out the exhaust nozzel. The pictuer below shows the flame holder in my ramjet… in all its perfectfullness (is that even a word?), anyway you get the idea:

Now thats the basic theory behind how a ramjet works… here is some pictures of mine in opperation (i’ll try and post a video soon).

This is the flame that the ramjet produces when ‘idling’, as you can see it’s nice and blue but not much thrust is being produced, what is happening here (or so I believe), is that there is a good fuel air mixture being produced but for there to be any thrust the air being forced (by a hair dryer) into the air intake nozzel needs to be at a greater speed. Now here is a picture of the flame produced when the leafblower is started behind the hair dryer, causing a slight increase in speed.

As can be seen by the above picture there is a lot more oxygen that is being burn’t, hence the yellow flame, meaning the the fuel/air mixture isn’t as rich as when it was idling. To correct this problem I assume the amount of gas being injected into the ramjet needs to be increased, though on my fuel line from the LP Gas bottle I have a regulator… which I figure is ‘regulating’ the flow of the gas too much.

When the leaf blower is used by itself, it extinguishes the flame, meaning that the problem
is still with the amount of gas being injected… though taking the regulator of the line is a little crazy for someone of my experience at the moment…

Well I hope that educated you to some extent because it was certainly an educating experience… though I guess I had better do the whole responsible lecture now:

‘PLEASE DON’T MUCK AROUND WITH GAS AND FIRE!… GAS BOTTLES AND FIRE DON’T MIX AND SO DOESN’T GAS BOTTLE SHRAPNEL AND BODY PARTS! OH… AND I DON’T TAKE ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR ACTIONS INSPIRED BY MY EXPERIMENTS SO PLEASE READ AND USE THE ABOVE INFORMATION AT YOUR OWN RISK!’

Okay… that should suffice…

Also please be aware that I am not an expert in this field and am an amateur when it comes to this stuff… so how I interpret the results collected may not be entirely correct though I do my best to make sure that they are as close to correct as possible. If you see a problem or disagree with anything that I ‘determine’ or ‘figure’ please make sure you let me know!

Anyway stay tuned for more crazy projects!

P.S If your interested in ramjets and want more ramjet projects to browse upon or simply just want to learn more, check out: http://www.pulse-jets.com/phpbb2/index.php

A Nice Car and A Pic Programmer… What more could you want?

Well, I have something slightly different for all you fanatic readers out there and its to do with graphics, but have no fear I also have included some electronics at the bottom of this post as well…

Anyway today I opened up my laptop to find I had photoshop open so I though why not try my hand at something graphical today?… so I figured if Car Photo + Imagination = Imagination Car Photo then I should be able to do something rather interesting and here is what I came up with:

A nice Holden Monaro… The original photo is from http://www.carpw.com/vauxhall+cars/monaro/vxr+(2005)+170/?1

And here is a nice before and after:

So now for some electronics,

I have just moved my Pic Programmer which I built not long ago from the prototype board and put it all in a nice case and everything:

I have made it so that you still have to use a prototype board to hold the PIC but all I have to do is connect it up to the 5 wires on the cable, this is so I don’t have to worry if I want to program a PIC with a different amount of pins.

Also in my previous post about regarding PIC Programming I mentioned that my initial problems were due to a faulty serial cable but I was wrong… I bought a new serial cable and it gives the same readings as the ‘faulty’ cable. I have came across a serial port power booster that can be made using a MAX232 chip I will have a go at making, and will hopefully fix my voltage problem.

On other news I have been mucking around with a 3×4 keypad and PICBasic as well as giving my self crash courses at Assembly. So far I have got the circuit to beep everytime a key is pressed… stay tunned for more exciting info on my progress of making the most advanced combo-lock the world has ever seen!

Blinking an LED with a PIC16F84A

After building my Pic Programmer I needed to do something with it, so now I present to you…… An blinking LED controlled by a PIC16F84A (I suppose this has been done to death but hey, you gotta learn to walk before you can run)…

So I done some searching for a nice tutorial on programming a PIC to flash/blink and LED and came across this tutorial: http://www.mikroe.com/en/books/picbasicbook/01.htm

It provides a schematic as well as the code needed to program the PIC which is handy.

Unfortantely I didn’t have any 4MHz Resonators on hand so I just used a 3.5MHz crystal and 2x 20pf ceramic capacitors instead and also I left out the 10K Ohm resistor going to the /MCLR pin and used a 150 Ohm resistor on the RB7 pin of the PIC (before the LED) and my power supply was just a 5v, 800mA powerpack.

I downloaded the mikroBasic Compiler from the website also and it seems to be a nice decient free compiler which I recommend try out.

Anyway, after compiling the code (I tried to use the hex provided but it didn’t work so I ended up just compiling the provided source code) and plugging it all in… it works!

I have a 3×4 keypad laying around here somewhere… I think I will see what I can do with that…

Programming the PIC16F84A

Over the past 2 days I have made a quick temporary PIC programmer so that I can start programming some pics I bought ages ago.

I done a quick search for programmers and found the uJDM programmer, nice, simple and small. Check out the website here:
http://www.semis.demon.co.uk/uJDM/uJDMmain.htm

After quickly building the programmer and then downloading IC-Prog (download it here: http://www.ic-prog.com/) I ran into some trouble with communications between the programmer circuit and the pc. To cut a long story short and with much help from a friend (Thanks Paul ) I finally worked out that I had a faulty DB-9 plug on one end of the serial cable I was using…

In the circuit I did change a few the recommended parts (mainly for the reason of not having them): In place of the 5v1 Zener Diode I used a 5v6 Zener Diode, In place of the BC546B Transistor I used a BC548C Transistor.

Anyway, apart from that one rediculous problem it all works fine now and I have successfully programmed a PIC16F84A with no problems. Well now that I have the power of programming I can’t wait to start on some crazy projects involving PIC’s… so like usually… stay tuned for more to come!