Some more ideas and expansions

December 1st, 2012

I’ve added a 4 port power driver to the 4 channel LED IR receiver plus made a 3-servo driver board, with a pot to control and a pushbutton to select which servo.

 

Piggy MIDDLE “Binary Timery” working on the bench

November 18th, 2012

Managed to make the prototype pcbs during the week but didn’t get to build the hardware until Friday after work.

Pleased to say that it works (after an hour or so tweaking the code and adding stuff I’d not thought about) although the pcb will need modifications to make it pupil proof. Bigger pads for soldering to mostly plus move the pot 1/10″ out. Since I’m using the A/D input as an output later in the programme I’ll need to add a couple of padder resistors as at each end of the travel it cuts the volume (as I thought it might). Added bonus from this is that on minimum the lowest bit lights, so that will save doing it in software.

Joule thief upgraded

November 14th, 2012

After seeing some new surface mount LEDs in the Rapid Electronics catalogue I tried one on my Joule Thief circuit. With an ebay special ping-pong ball as a diffiser it spreads a serious amount of light, almost TOO much for a night light!

I took the opportunity to make the board easier (more pupil-proof actually) to build and also added bigger pads for the SM led. At the same time I put three holes and track to suit a minature slide switch for on/off.

Its a remarkable little project with endless scope….

Work underway for new motherboards

November 10th, 2012

Three new boards have been added to the Piggyaxe 08M2 family – a 12 volt capable power driver, developed to drive the RGB LED tapes that are increasingly available. Power is fed INTO the daughter board and a 78L05 regulator then feeds the picaxe below. It keeps the Potentiometer and the pushbutton input so you can develop your own routines with maximum flexibility.

There is also a servo driver board that will drive up to 3 servos, also with a pushbutton and potentiometer and on the servo theme, a board that offers sound, LED drive and a servo output with potentiometer and pushbutton input. Photos will appear once I have working prototypes.

It was bound to happen, I ran out of pins for the inevitable “bigger projects”, so I have created two more motherboards to add yet more flexibility to the range.

PiggyMIDDLE, based on the 14M2 and…

PiggyMAX, based on the 20M2.

It will take some time before these appear on this site as I’m still prototyping, but a nice little binary timer with some neat functions/features is currently underway for the PiggyMIDI.

Welcome

October 22nd, 2012

This is a fledgling venture at providing some handy resources for teachers and hobbyist in the field of Design Technology and Electronics, subjects that have been my interests for 45+ years. As its on top of my day job you may not get 24/7/365 support but I’ll try….it’s also a repository for other things I’m interested or involved with so I can easily publish to a wider audience under one banner.