Introducing a new category: Airplane building!

This post opens a new category: airplane building. I’ve been wanting to get a pilot’s license for a long time, and I got halfway back in 2001 before losing momentum and realizing the financial futility of the endeavor. This past spring I thought I would get back into it, actually flew twice back in Massachusetts …

Continue reading ‘Introducing a new category: Airplane building!’ »

High Performance Wine Storage System #8: Adding Open-Loop Control

This is post #8 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. When I put the temperature probe into the bottle, I set it up as a nested control loop system where the bottle temperature would regulate the desired air temperature in the cabinet and then the cooler would be regulated …

Continue reading ‘High Performance Wine Storage System #8: Adding Open-Loop Control’ »

High Performance Wine Storage System #7: Final tuning

This is post #7 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. If you’ve followed the story so far, you know that it’s kind of been a bumpy road, especially once the ICs started burning out… But at this point we have a basically functioning unit. Now the question is how …

Continue reading ‘High Performance Wine Storage System #7: Final tuning’ »

High Performance Wine Storage System #6: Troubleshooting

This is post #6 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. Time to start testing things. I had managed to burn the Arduino bootloader onto the Atmega 328, and I had previously written some test code to exercise the front panel LED display. The big thing to test now was …

Continue reading ‘High Performance Wine Storage System #6: Troubleshooting’ »

High Performance Wine Storage System #5: Hardware

This is post #5 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. By now, most of the electronics are done, but some hardware work remains: The cabinet needs to be drilled up to fit the temperature probes, and 4 conductors need to be put through to the lamp area for the …

Continue reading ‘High Performance Wine Storage System #5: Hardware’ »

High Performance Wine Storage System #4: The Main Board

This is post #4 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. If you’re read the previous posts, you have an idea of what functionality I have in mind. What remains to be made is the main circuit board that will house the microcontroller and the driver circuits for the thermoelectric …

Continue reading ‘High Performance Wine Storage System #4: The Main Board’ »