Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Christmas tree is up!
Lately I’ve taken to browsing my local Radio Shack and “rescuing” some of the clearance items I come across.
Today I wandered in looking for some terminal lug strips and came out with 60′ of hookup wire (can never have too much wire around, right?) and a neat little Velleman Decision Maker kit, both of which were on clearance.
About 15 minutes at the bench, and this simple little kit was all assembled. It’s basically a binary magic 8 ball. Press the button and the LEDs flash quickly, eventually slowing down until one of them stays lit.
It’s all through hole components, and is very easy to assemble making it an excellent kit for someone learning how to solder. Perfect for introducing soldering techniques to a kid.
Not bad for $2.
I noticed that one of the lights on my binary clock wasn’t lighting up anymore, and another one was only lighting up very dimly. Thinking that maybe it would be a simple fix to replace some LEDs, I popped it open and have a look inside. It was pretty easy to open up with just 4 tabs to unclip.
Everything is all on one board with surface mount LEDs (labeled D7 – D26) instead of the regular LEDs I was expecting.
The dead diode is D24, and the fading one is D18.
The six 1N4001 diodes do some rectification of the 9VAC input power. I haven’t traced out the circuit yet to see how they’re arranged.
A PIC16C505 microcontroller is the heart of the binary clock. The other chip above the PIC controller (U2) is a 5V voltage regulator, which provides the power to the PIC controller.
I wonder how hard it would be to find some LEDs to replace the dead ones with.
Update: Traced out the arrangement of the diodes and this is what it seems to look like.
It’s a bridge rectifier taking the 9V AC input and doing full wave rectification
With just one mold to use, the Advent candles took a few days to make, but I finished the last of them today. I made two sets of Advent candles: 6 purple, 2 pink and 2 white candles all together. I ended up with just enough wax of each colour left over to make a set of votives too.
The purple ended up a little darker than I planned. Forgot how concentrated those wax colour blocks are. The pink ones look more reddish in the photo, but they’re definitely pink-ish. Still need to do a bit of finish work on the candles. The bottoms need to be flattened so they stand up straight, wicks need to be trimmed and the sides polished up a bit.
Two weeks after the wisdom teeth were taken out. Everything seems to be healing up pretty nicely. No more pain where the teeth used to be. There are days where the remaining teeth are a little more achy than others. The molars in my lower jaw have been pretty pressure and temperature sensitive lately. I’m hoping that goes away over time because it sure makes chewing and drinking a bit of a pain.
