Once again, a hack-a-day post has me all excited.
Can you solder something this small? Yes you can! There’s a new, very detailed, instruction set available. Get nearly professional results on your hobby bench!
Also good: The whole Instructables site, and hack-a-day’s soldering station tutorial.
I am always interested in the actual building of cool technology. There are so many cool applications of electronics that just aren’t mass-produced. We should be able to make them ourselves.
It’s amazing how much the internet has made this possible.
Groups of people band together to share a 155 inch panel of printed circuit board, each using several square inches for their own panel, and each only paying a fraction of the cost of getting a custom piece made for them. ($2.50/square inch!!) So, how can you get your board designed?
Well, you could use a pre-designed, open source circuit design. Or you can use free software like CadSoft Eagle. If you do use the free software, you’ll need some instructions on how to convert Eagle files to the Gerber format used by the manufacturing folks.
Now you’ve got a circuit board, but how do you attach components to it? Well, you can solder, but that takes, like, FOR-EV-ER. I just discovered you can use something called a Hot Air Rework Station.
This is a hair-dryer-like device which uses a blast of hot air to liquefy the solder paste you’ve put on the pads of your circuit board, fixing the components to it. This makes it possible to solder on surface-mount components without too much pain. Beautiful! Maybe slower than wave-soldering, but definitely a great hobbyist option.
The amazing thing is that you don’t need expensive tools to do your manufacturing. With a little effort you can use a $30 hot plate as a soldering station.
The internet is a great place to learn more about making electronics!
Resources:
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I’m continuing my progress into the wonderful world of Ruby. It’s such a mind-bender. It’s like a meta-language. Programming it is like writing a language for your program to be written in. The simple stuff is fast and easy. The complex stuff is mind-bending. There’s a page on Ruby Central with some good stuff on creating your own container classes. Good stuff for UI controllers. Another book I need to mark is Hashes are Cool: a note on how to use hashes and their role in ruby method overloading.
I’m still working on the idea of inversion of control/dependency injection/testability for my CSLA classes. After some thread searching, I figured out I need to watch DNR TV Episode 60 with Rocky! It looks like he covers exactly this kind of stuff in there! For the archives here’s some discussion on returning a ‘no results’ object from a CSLA query. I may also find a use for LINQPad sometime soon. Steve Eichert has some thoughts on automatic setup for DAL unit tests.
Yesterday’s big task was building some firewalls for a VOIP VPN. I discovered that I was going to have too many troubles getting IPSEC working, so I bit the dog and learned how to get OpenVPN going on PFSense. It wasn’t so bad, except for getting the routes to show up on each device as they should.
I must remember to tell my old man how to decline doing tech support. His mother is killing him with stupid mac problems.
I just bought CodeRush! Developer Express has the stupidest credit card validation ever, but I think I’m going to be happy with my shortcutty goodness. I must spend some time learning it better.
I just discovered that I really like Yahoo! Widgets. It’s embarrassing how much better it is than Vista Gadgets. It’s not much better than Apple Dashboard, but the widget selection is probably better.
I’ve also been seeing some stories on NuevaSync it looks to be an Exchange Activesync gateway implementation for Google Calendar, Contacts, and (coming soon) Mail. ASP.NET health monitoring is something I should be using in all of my apps. Why the hell is it not turned on in studio? Codeproject also has an Excel interop library that should be useful. Also there is a C# wrapper for the google static map api. I also found a dll linker for .NET. Finally combined assemblies. Now I just need to use Cruise Control and automate my builds. I also wanted to know about Low Carb Diets and Pregnancy. I found a number of articles that are interesting on the low carb subject. JESUS! I just found an article documenting a study that says CARBS KILL THE BRAIN CELLS THAT STOP HUNGER!So we start with menstruation. The date used for this by everybody is the first day of bleeding of the period. That’s day one. This lasts for 3-5 days. Next comes the follicular phase, where the lining gets rebuilt for implantation.
The next major event is LH release, which is measurable by over the counter tests such as Clearblue and Ovuquick (more info). This immediately presages ovulation.
After ovulation is the Luteal phase which lasts between 10 and 16 days until the next period starts. Measuring this time period with tests can give you a reasonable predictor of future ovulation. This period+period length-luteal length=ovulation day.
Fertility is highest between 5 days before ovulation (lifespan of sperm), and two days after ovulation. Another measure for this is next period minus 10-19 days. A simple calendar is available online.
Once you hit the jackpot, you have a shiny happy baby in 266 days.
OpenWinForms is a cool little site with some interesting coding hints and techniques. I hope more work goes in, as it could develop from a cute ideas blog to a good resource site.
Gotta keep track of those CodeProject articles: Reverse Proxy is a cool little ditty to reflect a web page in your web page.
FreeSwitch Infos:
Oooh I just wandered across Github…hosting for Git. Way cool. Now we just need TortoiseGit.
I also want to look into ASP.NET build automation with CruiseControl.net
Hanselman has the goods on the SP1 release. Lots of cool stuff in there. Unfortunately, from the response on the web, there appears to be a lot of breaking buts. Hurry up and wait for a SP1 service pack.
I’d gloat, but my iPhone crashes now.