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Tag Archives: Engineer in Wonderland

Progress on the 1610Pro CNC upgrade

EinW 1610amateur CNC

Back in 2021 I bought a little 1610Pro CNC machine (right) just to see how they work – it was just over £120 as I remember. It was great fun to play with, and a complete bargain, but let down by considerable slop and flex in its components, which must be much worse in the larger more popular 3018 version ...

3d printer motherboard could be the best controller/driver for medium-sized CNC machines

BigtreeTechKraken

Medium-sized cnc machines, which I am defining as those using NEMA 23 and 24 motors, need about 5A per stepper, usually mandating separate driver modules alongside a control board. However, 3d printer parts maker BigTree Tech, also known as Biqu (Shenzhen Biqu Technology), has recently released a 3d printer control board that includes four 8A 24-60V drivers – integrated right ...

Community-sourced desktop CNC milling machine product

MilleniumMachines Youtube Milo v1.5

There is a volunteer community behind the open-source Voron 3d printer series, which has produced several high-performance – literally world-class – desktop 3d printers, and now it looks like another community is trying to do the same for open-source desktop milling machines. It is the Millenium Machines project which: “started life out as a mod for the OpenBuilds mini mill, ...

Need a fast wide-voltage current feedback amplifier?

Need to lay your hands on a 1,300V/µs amplifier module that can output ±12V into heavy loads? Look no further than headphone amplifier boards based on TI’s TPA6120A2, which are available all over the internet. I can take no credit for this discovery – it was pointed out in 2015 by tszaboo on this EEVblog community forum. In the IC, ...

Lithium titanate – cells you can charge below 0°C

Nichicon lithium titanate cold charge

While lithium ion cells have many wonderful characteristics, one of the great limitations is that they cannot be charged below 0°C. This statement, it turns out, is slightly glib as there is one Li-ion chemistry that can handle it: lithium titanate, it is usually called. And just a note here: not all lithium titanate cells are so blessed. One manufacturer ...

Cometh better-behaved high-power bicycle lights

LightSkin NacaRoad beam

Leds revolutionised bicycle lights long before they even started to appear in exterior car lighting. There were lots of quite reasonable led-based headlamps for bikes… … and then it went mad… …as powerful leds appeared and allowed small companies with cnc equipment but no optical design expertise to produce cycle lights as bright as car headlights with uncontrolled beams that ...

Muting transistors (and hunt for MM4052 data)

EinW diamond buffer with limiting redrawn

First, an apology: This blog has been inactive for a while because covid reared its head again, and this time ‘brain fog’ was a feature, which led to getting nothing much done for a month or so…. Now the brain is back to some extent, I noticed a whole genre of transistor that I was ignorant of, and it seems ...

Updated: DB’s alternative isolated pwm interface

DB's idea for a constant current PWM interface

An idea in an earlier blog is to make a pwm interface that can accept 5, 12 and 24V pulse streams. That one uses a bunch of resistors and has three separate inputs. Below that, wise commenter DB suggested a different approach, using a constant current sink: Update: In a previous version of this blog, I made a mess of ...