Saturday 9 August 2014

A Bit of Soldering

Made a start soldering some components on the Tandy Mulitface board.

Bare board:
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As the instructions are in the form of a downloadable pdf file I put it on the iPad so I could easily see what to do next:
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Resistors and diodes fitted:
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So far it is going a lot easier than I thought it would as the solder pads can look very close together. For the resistors I was able to use a 12W iron with a narrow bit but the diodes soaked up the heat too fast so I had to resort to a 15W with a larger bit for them.

I gave up after that as my eyes were beginning to go out of focus!

Later another small kit arrived, the MyPiFi LED board, so I decided to put that together. This is a simple board with three LEDs and a switch. Useful for me to test out a bit of programming:

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The example scripts are for Python but I typed one in and kept getting syntax errors when I ran it. I think I may be short of a couple of GPIO files there.

I also tried it in FUZE BASIC and eventually got the LEDs working. Just got to get the switch working then I'll explain the differences that need to be make to pin allocations for it to run in FUZE.

4 comments:

  1. John, it looks a lot more complex than the Arduino. I found the latter fun but not really practical as intervalometers and bulb timers are so cheap. Cheaper than the Arduino that's for sure.

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    1. I just enjoy tinkering Adrian. Been playing with things electronic since I was 15. I've seen some interesting panning time lapse done with the Pi. Would love to have a go at that one day. The camera is so small and light it doesn't need hefty gear to move it about.

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    2. John, I can pan and tilt time lapse in CS6. Even sRAW images are over 3500 pixels wide so there is plenty of room to move. It isn't as good as then pan/tilt/rail heads.
      There is some excellent video here at
      EMOTO

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    3. Adrian, Ah. I was thinking more a 180 degree pan over time.

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