Engineer In Wonderland

Maybe the title over-eggs this a bit, but there is a CNC machine that can be made for maybe £300, that can mill wood and appears to be able to do light aluminium work. It is called MPCNC, which stands for mostly-printed CNC – and that is the secret of the low price, it is made up of 3d printed ...

A 4Gbyte Raspberry Pi 4 is on order to see how it performs, but the cases were sold out. I was going to chase it around the desk uncovered, and then I though I would design one and 3d print it – I was thinking of something with the board on its side and a chimney to help cause a ...

TMC2209 is a stepper motor driver chip from German firm Trinamic that I suspect folk interested in the insides of 3D printers will be hearing a lot more about in the near future. In many printers, the stepper drivers can be changed as they are fitted as ‘Pololu’ carrier boards or  ‘stepsticks‘ – small pcbs that plug into the main ...

It transpires that, once there is a 3D printer in the house, printing becomes the default solution to remarkable number of problems. During phase n*+1 of the bike rebuild, it became obvious that the main-dip headlamp control box would no longer fit. The original enclosure – for which the pcb had been made – was not the right shape for any ...

Big Nixie tubes certainly make a nice looking clock – although why I find them good-looking, I am not completely sure. Anyway, the tubes are pretty expensive now, but the author of the TechMoan YouTube blog has come across an alternative that gets the Nixie look, without any vacuum tubes at all, instead using a stack of edge-lit acrylic sheets for ...

Copenhagen firm Soundboks produces Bluetooth speakers for folk who need a lot of sound in a portable rugged form. ‘Soundboks 2’ is its 66 x 43 x 32cm 15kg unit that includes 216Wrms worth of amplification and will run for eight hours at full volume (40h moderate volume) from its 12.8V 7.8Ah LiFePO4 battery – and batteries are quick-swappable to ...

PCIM – the power electronics exhibition in Nuremberg, is a fascinating place, accompanied by a vast amount of promotional activity – possibly more than the larger Embedded World show at the same venue. This promotion takes various forms, some useful and some not. Amongst this years crop, Infineon’s on-line ‘virtual booth’ really stood out as a useful application and design ...

A bright spot in the the history of mobile phones was the near universal adoption of micro-USB charging, and creation of a 30mW standby limit for high-quality plug-in chargers. Nokia (now Microsoft), for example, produced in-expensive five-star chargers – cutting the power lost by left-plugged-in chargers to nearly nothing. Roll on a few years and my heart sank when I ...

I was stuck for a bracket to mount a bike light on to my handlebars yesterday, and decided to 3d print one. It took a couple of hours to remember enough of DesignSpark Mechanical (note-to-self: make time to learn more) to create a pair of workable .stl files, then 20 minutes to set up Cura and to slice them, and ...

How wonderful 3D printing is, I feel today. Why? Because, at last, my printed bike light is on a bicycle, and it is working. Even though I designed it, made it and know how it works, it still feels like the future slipped in without being noticed – a machine makes usable things. All the plastic is either lightly loaded ...