Archive for January, 2014
Real Time Clock – DS1307

For my Topsy Turvy clock project I’ve purchased an I2C clock module based on the DS1307 Real-Time Clock chip. As mentioned this came without a battery to keep the post office happy. Although looking at the current wording of the
More small steppers

The output of my stepper motor feeds into a gearbox which I’ve been told has a ratio of approximatly 64:1. During the research of this project I came across a discussion about why the gear ratios were not exact nice
Spotting Drills vs centre drills

In MEW 212 Chris Smith from Taunton chastises Harold Hall for using centre drills for starting a hole and recomends using a spotting drill or stub drill instead. This is something that I also do so I thought I’d investigate
Arduino Micro Review

The Arduino Micro is one of the newer Arduino models but it does not get much of a mention. Like the Leonardo it has a single microcontroller chip, the ATmega32u4 which is an 8bit controller with 32K of Flash and
Small stepper motors

For my clock project I needed to control the position of the hands. My options were continuously rotating servos or stepper motors. I found some small 28BYJ-48 stepper motors and gearbox with ULN2003 driver boards on the internet so I
Smart?

Back in Nov 2012 I backed a project on Kickstarter for a small Arduino like microcontroller system called “Smartduino” which I hoped to use for an internet connected humidity monitor. About this time last year I was expecting to see