The last post described the physical setup of the mini mill CNC conversion. Apart from adding motors to the mill, you also need something to control those motors. Most people seem to just get a G540 motor controller from Geckodrive and hook it up to the Mach3 CNC software. This seems to be a nice “turnkey” solution …
As I’m now about to start fabricating actual parts for the Long-EZ, I was contemplating the easiest way to shape the foam pieces. This Long-EZ builder used a router to cut the depressions, but was left to do the tapered parts by hand. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some way to do this …
An exercise that almost everyone that starts working with fiberglass encounters right away is that of building a heated box for epoxy storage. The epoxy should be warm when used, somewhere around 30C or 90F, otherwise its viscosity is higher and it’s more difficult to wet out the fabric. If you don’t store it at …
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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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This is post #3 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. In the ceiling of the cabinet interior was a “lamp”, meaning a single white LED, controllable with one of the front panel buttons. It didn’t really provide enough light to be useful, but it was already wired to the …
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This is post #2 describing the wine storage unit upgrade. See the introduction post for the background. The first thing that needed figuring out was how to redo the front panel. In the original setup, this is actually where the microcontroller is located, but that wouldn’t work for the redesign because there are only 3 wires …
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