I recently bought this fairly chunky buck converter from China, manufactured by a company called Yeeco. Despite its price, it works well and the quality of manufacture is high. You can set voltage and a current limit on the “control panel”, and you get some CV/CC lights too – it tries to behave like a […]
Read More Secret UART On Cheap 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 UbuntuInformation 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)This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while but never got round to. I was initially going to design my own PCB, but sadly A level exams are a thing, and I just wanted a quick project. Switches and LEDs fitted to plate and soldered to PCB Half dressed… Finished. The keycaps are […]
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 has been to build my own Quadcopter. I spent a while researching in late 2015, got some parts for Christmas, and have been building since. As you can see from the costings graph above, my main expense was the RC transmitter, as I decided to go for one that supports telemetry. For a […]
Read More Quadcopter
Ben James 