I recently bought this fairly chunky buck converter from China, manufactured by a company called Yeeco. Despite its price and origins, it works well and seems to be of fairly high quality. You can set voltage and a current limit on the “control panel”, and you get some CV/CC lights too – it tries […]
Read More Secret UART On Chinese DCDC convertersThis is a project that I’ve had on the back-burner for a while, but recently got around to finishing. It still needs some tuning but it’s getting there. Since I wanted to be able to control it from my phone, it uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W to handle WiFi communications. For a cheap, easily […]
Read More Balancing robotI decided to build a tube headphone amp because I’ve been aware of them for a while, but I wanted to see how much of a difference they actually make to a listening experience. I decided to go with an amp that uses a twin triode 12AU7 tube, which has two advantages: Runs on 12V, […]
Read More Tube headphone amplifierDue to a friend moving away (Finnian Anderson, check out his blog) I came into ownership of a Skywriter. I decided to hook it up to an Arduino Leonardo to create a gesture/shortcut pad for my computer. The skywriter can detect a number of gestures including flicks, circles and taps. I assigned each gesture to […]
Read More Computer gesture control with Arduino and skywriterA lot of the online guides broke when i3 acquired the new dependency xcb-util-xrm, and I’ve also had trouble with the xorg-macros package, so this post is just a collation of fixes, really. First, ensure i3 is not installed! I installed it before I tried to setup i3-gaps, hoping it would make installing the dependencies for i3-gaps […]
Read More Installing i3-gaps on Ubuntu 16.04Information is pretty scarce on getting these up and running, so I hope this quick guide might help to clarify the process for others. First, you want to expand the filesystem. Launch raspi-config: Go to Advanced -> Expand filesystem Now you’ll need a copy of the driver. Download it here. This installs the driver and also […]
Read More How to install a Makibes 3.5″ LCD screen on your Raspberry Pi (Raspbian)This is a very brief guide to putting QMK on your GH60 Satan, in a linux environment. There are many ways to do this, but this way works for me. It’s a very similar process for Mac. There are two parts to this: Compiling your custom QMK hex file for your board Using tkg-tookit to […]
Read More How to flash a Satan GH60 with QMK keyboard firmware (linux)Edit: Since posting, I have had a lot of messages about this keyboard. I will gladly make these to order if people would like. Get in touch at customkeyboardsbyben@gmail.com if you are interested. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while but never got round to. I was initially going to design […]
Read More Mechanical keyboard buildRecently I was given an old iPod dock for parts. Since I had some spare 3″ speaker drivers lying about, I decided to salvage the circuitry from the dock and make a portable speaker. First, I had to make an enclosure. I used some scrap oak floorboards that I found in our shed, along with some pine […]
Read More Bluetooth SpeakerMy latest project is building a small, fast, 250-class quadcopter. Since it’s designed to be light and agile, keeping weight down is an essential part of the build. A lot of the total weight (~1/4) of the quad comes from the battery, so choosing the right size is a major decision. I decided to model the flight […]
Read More Modelling flight time