MightyOhm

MSP430 enthusiast Mark sent us this Polish translation of the Soldering is Easy comic book.

Thanks, Mark!

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I note one of you has his hand and wants to ask a question. Go ahead. “What is our hackerspace’s philosophy?” you ask. Well I’m glad you asked that question as I was struggling to come up with an un-contrived way to work this into a blog post. You really saved my bacon.  Well our hackspace can been summed up with three sayings.

0) Don’t be on fire.

This embodies our essential and fundamental philosophical belief that each individual human should strive not to combust in an oxygen rich atmosphere. The rules of thermodynamics are against us, but with care we have so far managed to maintain this rule. We have enshrined this philosophy as our hackspaces rule 0, showing the reverence that we hold this axiom.

1) Well volunteered.

We believe in self-empowerment and also spreading out power among our members. So whenever someone suggests a project or problem that needs fixing they become responsible for implementing it.

2) Let me show you this neat thing.

We enjoy sharing our knowledge and projects with other people, this extends to young hackdays where we teach young kids about technology and how to make things.

I stumbled on this gem from London Hackspace while judging entries to the 2011 Great Global Hackerspace Challenge.

The five finalists from the ~30 hackerspaces that entered (not all listed here) will be announced soon!

From our friends in Russia comes this reminder that one should not take our instructions to “hold the soldering iron in your dominant hand, like you would hold a pencil” too literally.

The CD101 is an inexpensive (under $40) PID controller sold by Sure Electronics. Aside from the incomplete documentation that is shipped with the unit, I’m pretty happy with this controller. I’m planning to use it to replace the failed PID controller that controls my soldering hotplate.

I am having one small issue with the CD101 – stop mode doesn’t seem to do anything. By that I mean it doesn’t disable the outputs or seem to affect the controller in any way. Based on my interpretation of the user manual, the outputs and alarms should be disabled in stop mode. This is mostly an annoyance in my application – if I want to disable the hotplate I’ll just turn it off. However, I can imagine that the lack of a standby mode might cause problems in some applications.

I contacted Sure Electronics about the problem, and they requested a video. I figured I might as well post it here, since I went through the trouble of making it and everything.

By the way, since it can be hard to find information on this controller (eg. how to change from Fahrenheit to Celsius display), I have been slowly putting together a wiki page for the CD101.

PS: The video was shot with my new Canon PowerShot S95, which seems to take great footage, except that there is no autofocus or zoom control while shooting. (?!)

Here’s an interesting way to donate your spare CPU cycles to a good cause. This project has been around for a few years now, but I just started participating.

Running the software reminds me of my college days. There was a time when everyone I knew was running the SETI@Home screensaver (most likely on an AMD K6 or Celeron 300A!)

Clients are available for all major operating systems.