Nerobro's Resume: Mechanical and Electronic Projects.

[Nerobro]

So, I am a noob at this.  I will probably always be a noob in electronics.  But I've done a few things over the years. 

We'll start with what I am most proud of.   It's not directly "electronics" but here we go. 

This is mini-mill based on the plans from: http://www.crankorgan.com/brute.htm



Here's the build process: http://www.practicalalchemy.org/~nerobro/brutemill.html
Oh, and video of it taking a cut in aluminum:

Most of what I've done with electronics has been with power electronics.  I think the most interesting to this crowd would be building a regulator/rectifier unit for a motorcycle.  Most motorcycles have a permanent magnet alternator, so power output is directly related engine rpm.

So the trick is to transform 12-130vac 3phase to smooth clean 14v DC.   At least it's 3phase input.  At like 6-60,000hz, or something crazy like that. 

The solution was to use two two phase rectifiers, and three SCR's.   


And here's how I packaged it:


My friend and I built two, and they worked. Very stable voltage output.  The cases we chose just didn't really do the job well, so at some point I'll revisit that.   

In an effort to make a bicycle headlight, I bought the parts to support natsemi's simple switcher.
 


And I made it work.  I later put that circuit onto perfboard and hooked it up to 56 LEDs.  It's neat, and bright, but it wasn't all that useful when compared to some real flashlights.  I was just happy it worked.  And I was happy I managed to make some SMD components work on a breadboard. 

I also built the capacitor tester from jytech, same people who make the avr based occiliscope kits.  .... I also tried to make the o-scope too, but failed somewhere along the line.  I think I burst a SMT cap.

 

At least the cap tester works! 

I've got a couple arduinos that I've been messing with.  Which is really more coding than hardware work.  It's really satisfying to be able to swing some code in a few minutes and get servos to do what I want over a serial console.