Magnetic Rotary Encoder PCBs!

Sparkly purple packages in the mail always bring good things from Laen inside.  These are the magnetic encoder eval boards that I designed about a month ago….

Magnetic Rotary Encoder Eval

I got some samples of the nifty looking AS5040 10-bit magnetic rotary encoder IC from Austria Microsystems.  I want to do some experiments with these chips to…

10lbs of Junk in a 5lb Box?

I’ve been slowly working to model the components that go into the CNC milling machine electronics package, and fitting them into an off-the-shelf rack mount enclosure.  I…

Encoder Coupler Idea

I have been trying to come up with a good way to attach a rotary encoder to the spindle of my CNC milling machine, so I can…

Experiments in Drag Soldering

Here’s a quick video I did of my first experiments with drag soldering using a new Metcal hoof tip that I picked up on eBay.  This video…

Epic Hardware Hacking Weekend

It turned out to be quite an epic weekend of building boards and getting things up and running.  It’s good to be back in the groove with…

Custom PCI Express Riser

One of the other boards I had in the latest order is an oddball PCI Express 1X riser card, which I could not find commercially.  In trying…

Machine Breakout

I populated the machine breakout PCB this morning.  This board will actually be installed inside of the CNC milling machine, and the various homing and index sensors…

Population: Tire

I got my final batch of boards from Laen in the mail today.  I had three designs in this batch, so I was pretty anxiously awaiting delivery….

Rigol DS1102E Unboxing & Mini Review

It’s been a week of new toys for the electronics lab here at the world headquarters of Tangent Audio.  Yesterday brought the affordable hot air reflow tool,…

eBay Hot Air Rework Tool Review

Based on Dan’s review and Dave Jones’ review, I picked up a Kendal 899D hot air/soldering iron rework station off of eBay for about $80.   These tools…

More Boards!

[singlepic id=332 w=480] Another purple envelope was waiting for me in my mailbox when I arrived home this evening.  I noticed that Laen had mentioned he shipped…

From the Trenches: Embedded Platform Work

I’m tinkering with a new platform for my embedded projects, based on the NXP LPC1768, which is an ARM Cortex-M3 chip. I picked up an eval board (the Blueboard…

The Hammer

I thought I’d try to get one more design into the January 23 Laen PCB order.  For the new CNC electronics setup, I’m going to be using…

Final PCB for the CNC Done (for now…)

Finished my fourth board in as many weeks, finishing off the bare minimum of boards I need to get the CNC mill back up and running. This…