Making a present can be quite complicated. Mostly it’s not the making that is hard; getting the idea is the crucial step. Once the idea is in, the rest follows (although it can still cost a lot of time). So, after months of tinkering and thinking, no idea that was good enough came across my… Read More »
Time for a little experimentation with high voltages. To see how well the concept of launching a ring using Eddy currents works, I wanted to do a more serious test. Just to get some feeling for its behaviour, since theory alone is a bit boring. Thus, with this first prototype, no optimisations or whatsoever are… Read More »
The goal of this experiment is to understand, and build an eddy current ring launcher. This video shows shows some aluminium can destruction and the launching of an aluminium ring using eddy currents. Besides that it looks cool, I want to understand the underlying process, so that it is also educational in the theoretical sense, instead of “just… Read More »
A short update for the wake-up light. Some quick (and dirty?) coding using an Arduino Pro Micro and the Fastled library already gives some nice results: The code uses the Fastled built-in HSV colorspace (hue, saturation, value). Although originally meant for RGB LEDs, it also seems to work fine for WWA (warm white, cold white,… Read More »
With these long nights, waking up can sometimes be challenging. Therefore, I wanted to make a wake-up light. Buying one is also one of the possibilities, but making one yourself is much more fun. You can also add some unique features. The idea is to not just have one light, but to use an LED… Read More »
For today’s experiment, the goal was to make a simple buck converter, based on an XL4005 I had lying around. Since I don’t have experience with building an actual switching voltage regulator, this is a nice and educational experiment. The circuit is basically the application example of the XL4005 datasheet: Operating frequency is about 300 kHz… Read More »