This is What Happens...

This is what happens when you send your laptop home with me to fix it.
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Beautiful Failure #1

Things break. Sometimes it is sad. Sometimes it is beautiful. This is one of the latter times. In this particular case it is a 500 Watt theatrical lamp that burned out. I like how the filament melted into the quartz before it vaporized.
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It's Finally Here

I was walking around the downtown area of a small town and I found this posted on the door of a store. Hit the More link for a cleaned up version.



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Keychain

When I was doing my CFL Teardown I mentioned that I thought the PCB would make a cool keychain. It does. I have had it on my keys for a little while now and it works quite well at helping me find my keys without getting in the way. I like the side with the components silkscreened on, most people like the green side with the traces.
To make it work as a keychain I had to widen out one of the holes to fit the key ring through. There are a ton of ways to do this, but I happened to have my Yankee Drill sitting on my counter as I was working, so I used that. Next I wanted to take off the excess solder so all the holes would be visible. I was feeling lazy so instead of using a solder sucker I just used solder wick. Once I was happy with the amount of solder I had left I put the keychain in my toaster oven to round off any sharp bits of solder that were left over. This made the board a bit discolored, but it also kept me from cutting myself when pulling my keys from my pocket.

After a few weeks using it the only problem I see is that I am slowly wearing the hole larger. I figure that in a few months I will wear completely through. I could cover the whole thing in a clear epoxy and it would probably last much longer. Probably I will just take apart another broken CFL and use the PCB again.
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Yamaha Motorcycle Fixup Part 1 of many

This is going to be an ongoing project for a while. I believe that it is a 1975 Yamaha motorcycle. I don't really know many other details yet, hopefully I'll get someone much more knowledgeable than myself to take a look at it soon. Hit the read more link for more pics and a little more info about the bike.

I went to visit my younger brother this weekend, and he had this yellow bike in his garage. It was left behind by the previous owners and he didn't have a use for it. Not to mention that it was very broken and dirty.
So I threw it in the back of my car (with the help of my lovely wife), tied down the trunk with some rope and drove it back to my place.It is going to need a lot of work. Almost all of the electrical is unhooked and there is no battery.
The seat cover was all missing but the little bit that said Yamaha on the back. The seat was soaked in dirty oil. The gas tank isn't connected to anything. The chain, brake cables and throttle are all missing.
But, when I pushed on the started the engine turned over. Yes it may yet workThis is the label, or at least most of it. The top has the numbers 3/75 on it so I'm guessing that is "THE DATE OF MANUFACTURE shoWN ABOVE" If anyone has any info or tips as I dive into this project I'd love to hear from you.
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Dremel Rocks!

My Dremel burned out recently when I was using it. I was cutting through some thin aluminum with a grinding wheel when it got hot, then stopped working altogether. I received the Dremel as a gift for my wedding and didn't have a receipt for it. I called up Dremel and they had me send it in without giving me any trouble. A short while later I got a box from UPS. Not only did it contain a perfectly working replacement unit, it had a nice letter, a CD of project ideas and a free accesory. Thank you Dremel very much. I think I may need to go buy some more Dremel products.

The accesory was a 120 grit flapwheel sander. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but right now just about everything is looking like it could use a good sanding.

In case you are wondering how I finished my project after the original dremel died, the metal was thin enough that I was able to cut through it with a box cutter. You'll see that project in a later post.
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CFL Teardown

One of my compact fluorescent lights stopped working recently. Instead of throwing it away I decided to crack it open and see what was inside.
<warning> Electricity can hurt you. If you don't know what you are doing, get someone who does to help. </warning>

The first step was to remove the metal base and pry the plastic off of the globe. The plastic base, globe and lamp were disposed of. Be careful with the lamp, it contains mercury vapor, not something you want to be breathing.

The main circuit board. Everything was pretty tightly packed in. At first glance nothing is obviously bad. The plastic on the enclosure was a little browned, so I'm guessing something overheated. One part of the large yellow inductor was cracked when I removed it, so that is a possibility.
After a little time with the soldering iron I've got a nice pile of parts. I got six diodes, seven capacitors (two matching), five resistors (two matching), three inductors, two matching transistors, a fuse and a nifty circular pcb. Normally I would dispose of the pcb but I think it would make a really cool looking key chain.
Now all I need to do is check the parts that might be bad and put them away in my parts drawer.
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EEE PC Repair Part 2

Look what I got in the mail. I should really order things for myself more often.

The box was easily large enough to ship a full sized LCD. I reused the bubble wrap to ship my burned out Dremel in for repair.
The replacement screen, it looks exactly the same. So far so good.
All fixed up. All the screws went back into the right places, even the stickers and rubber bumpers went back. And I've even upgraded the software to boot. It's like a brand new machine.
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Don't park in the flower beds

My wife and I like to visit missions along the California coast. This sign was above one of the flowerbeds. I was really disappointed because that was where I really wanted to park.
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3D rapid prototyping options

Recently Ive been looking into options for 3D rapid prototyping. There are two main categories, additive and subtractive. Additive involves depositing a liquid material that hardens, subtractive involves cutting out of a preexisting object. A few years ago the only options were tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and required specialized software and knowledge to operate. Now thanks to the open hardware movement there are more options available, and for less money. Read on for my initial investigation into what is available.

Cupcake CNC 3D printer $725 basic kit $950 deluxe kit
http://www.makerbot.com/
Fireball V90 CNC router $889 basic kit $1199 deluxe assembled
http://www.probotix.com/
Lumen Labs micRo CNC router $699 micRo Premium $999 micRo Gold
http://lumenlab.com/
Versa Laser/Epilog ~$8000-$15,000 and up
http://www.epiloglaser.com/ http://www.ulsinc.com/versalaser/
Rep Rap No complete kits available
http://reprap.org/
Fab@Home $3700 fully assembled $2750 Kit (on sale)
http://fabathome.org/
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Ubuntu 9.04 is here

This is just a quick note to let you know that the newest version of Ubuntu came out yesterday. If you haven't tried Linux before, or even if you have it is worth giving it a look. It's really easy to use, you can try it out on your computer without changing anything and it's free. Seriously man, check it out.
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Yankee Tools

At work I found a hand push drill from Yankee Handyman. Unfortunately it was missing all but one drill bit, and it was bent and broken. I decided that I had to have one. I went to Rockler with my Grandpa looking for one, and it turned out that they haven't been made for a long time.
When we got back to the house my Grandpa took me out to the garage and to one of his older toolboxes. He pulled out a Yankee Handyman drill, with four bits still stored in the handle.

This beauty belonged to my great grand father. Both it and the drill from work were dirty and slightly rusty. So I decided to clean and oil them. First up was the work driver.
All it took to dissasemble the driver was unscrewing the threaded bit at the front of the handle. As you can see there was a spring inside and below that a wooden peg that the whole thing spins on. It was all covered in dirty oil so first I cleaned all of the grime off with rubbing alcohol and q-tips.
Next up I oiled all of the moving parts and threads, as well as the bit since it was bare metal and a little rusty.
One neat thing about this drill is the bit storage area. Too bad I don't have any bits to fill the other slots.
The threads on this driver only go in one direction. When you push it in the bit spins clockwise, on the way back out the bit spins counterclockwise. This probably explains the unique design of the drill bit.
Next up was cleaning my driver.
The shaft of this driver has threads in both directions. It can spin in either direction.
The driver had an amazing mechanism to allow it to spin in one direction, and then release freely in the other.

As you can see there was quite a bit of grime on the inside, and rust on the bits.
Getting inside this one was much harder. First I unscrewed the front like the other driver. Then I had to push in the switch on the ratcheting mechanism and slide down the silver cover. This got me into the ratchet. After removing three bits of metal the gears were loose. Next I had to unscrew the back, and then another bit that it screwed into. Even still I wasn't able to get the shaft out completely.
After a thorough cleaning and oiling both drivers look much nicer, and work better as well. It is much easier to get the bits in and out. With the gunk and rust cleaned off these fine tools are ready for many more years of use. MORE

Discount Tires

If you are looking for really cheap tires this is your place.
Now you know where all of those chunks of tire on the side of the road come from.
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EEE PC Repair Part 1

A while ago the screen on my EEE PC 701 was cracked.

I decided it was time to look into getting a replacement.
To find out what kind of replacement screen I needed I had to open it up.
After removing the screws from the screen I realized I would have to take the bottom plastic off as well to get to the screen.I removed the battery and six screws on the bottom. Not even close to done.
After removing the keyboard, another batch of screws and the touchpad I was in.

Sure enough on the back of the LCD there is the model number I needed to get a replacement. Since I hadn't ever ripped apart an LCD I went ahead and did so, there were several sheets of plastic, glass and the display all squeezed into that tiny case.
I ended up ordering a replacement screen off ebay for $68.67 new. I'll post an update when it comes in. MORE