Peter Edwards of Casper Electronics shared a picture of his workbench today via Make.
With the exception of the audio recorder and circuit bending tools, pretty much every piece of equipment on that bench can be found on mine as well. I even have the same yellow bins!
There’s a great writeup on his site describing each numbered tool in the photo. If you started from scratch and bought all of the items on his list, you would have a great instant electronics workshop.
I just got an e-mail from HSC Electronic Supply announcing their 45th Anniversary Sale (aka Sidewalk Sale), which takes place this Saturday, Sept. 26th. If you are in Silicon Valley this weekend, this is definitely worth checking out. If you want to get an idea of what this event is like, check out my photos from last year’s “Warehouse Clearance Sale.” (It seems like they change the name of this event every year now!)
45th Anniversary Celebration
Local Customer? Come on in and celebrate with us and save
10%-60% on everything in our stores. One day only!
Out of the Area? For our online customers, from September
23rd to 27th, HSC will offer *FREE shipping plus an additional 10%
off any order over $50.00. Just mention “Anniversary Special” in
the shopping cart order notes and we’ll take care of your discount.
The 6,000 items listed online are just a sample of our extensive store inventory.
Don’t see what you need? Please don’t hesitate to call us at 1-800-442-5833.
HSC is having some online specials too, although if you shop online you are missing out on 90% of the fun, such as sifting through crates of miscellaneous electronics parts!
Every project I work on usually involves at least one trip down to the South Bay to visit HSC, and I usually find at least a few interesting odds and ends at their annual clearance sales. And while you’re in the area, I highly recommend a side trip to Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale as well.
Good news! The AVR HV Rescue Shield kits are back in stock, with new, lower pricing!
The full kit, which has been reduced to $19, includes a professionally made PCB with preassembled DC-DC converter and all the parts you need to build the AVR HV Rescue Shield.
The PCB-only option is still available, which includes one unassembled PCB (DC-DC converter is not included). Pricing on the PCBs has been reduced to $6.
Head over to the AVR HV Rescue Shield page to place an order!
(Note that prices do not include shipping or taxes, if applicable.)
The rain and dropping temperatures in San Francisco this weekend reminded me of a project I made in the winter of 2006. This was long before mightyohm.com existed, so I originally documented the project at instructables. I’m not going to repeat everything here, but I wanted to share some pictures and provide a link to the instructable in case anyone else wants to try this at home.
The project involves using a digital programmable thermostat to control an inexpensive space heater. The original motivation for this was that I wanted to lower the temperature of the heater at night, reducing my energy bill, while still being able to wake up to a toasty room in the morning by setting the heater to turn on full blast 30 minutes before I awoke.
Here’s a schematic of the simple circuit I made to interface the thermostat to the space heater. The resistor/diode/capacitor circuit allows the thermostat, which is designed to control an AC load, to switch power to a 24VDC coil relay. A 36VAC
I installed the necessary components inside the case of an old power and telephone line filter, used to protect a fax machine or office copy machine from power surges. The case came with a handy 110V outlet mounted on the front panel which I reused for this project. The digital thermostat mounts to the top cover of the case.
I used a barrier strip as a way to simplify the wiring and mount the few loose components:
I had to adjust the value of C1 to get reasonably clean DC to the relay while not having an annoying turn-off lag when the control line from the thermostat goes low. 100uF works well for the relay I used.
Here’s the finished product installed in my former bedroom:
I haven’t used it since I moved into a house with working central heating, but it sure came in handy during the cold winter I spent in a 100 year old farmhouse in Petaluma. This solved the problem of the sub-50 degree mornings I was having nicely!
instructables.com: Space heater controlled by digital thermostat
Comments? Questions? Leave a comment below!
Back in March, I released the AVR HV Rescue Shield, my first open source hardware kit. The AVR HV Rescue Shield is a high voltage parallel mode fuse programmer for Atmel AVR microcontrollers.
Since then, I’ve sold dozens of kits around the world.
If you bought a kit, I want to hear from you! Specifically, I’d like feedback on the following items:
You can leave feedback in the comments below, or if you want to respond privately, use the contact form to contact me directly.
Thanks!