Hi everyone!
I’m Andy.
I discovered the Leo’s Bag of Tricks Youtube channel and then Facebook page in the last year or so. You’ve done some great videos with really relatable projects and an engineering approach I appreciate so I’ve really enjoyed watching them and also looking at the other stuff on your website.
The Techno Hoarder vid was really hard but very inspiring as I’ve got tonnes of projects that are nowhere near that polished that are just so hard to part with!
Others have mentioned it but I too love the Techniques and Strategies for Building Electronic Circuits video and have started to incorporate the ideas after being from the Elm-Chan school of prototyping for many years previous.
As for me, I trained in EEE (Electronic & Electrical Engineering) and got into embedded stuff for Pay TV operators. FPGAs, Device Drivers, Operating Systems, etc. Since then I’ve been slowly working my way up the stack and now run a data strategy consultancy.
Past hobby/personal projects include a sensor & monitoring system based on an active 1-wire driver for long wires that I prototyped and developed from an appnote. I tested it up to 600m before running out of cable! This had applications in monitoring temperatures of an anaerobic digester and also in theatre use for musical shows where sensors can be used to generate OSC (Open Sound Control) messages to trigger cues in Qlab. Side quests in this project involved porting FreeRTOS-Plus-TCP to the Atmel1284p and reverse engineering the debug peripheral in the new ATTiny 1-series microcontrollers.
I was interested in Leo’s Tank Friend video because I’d wanted to build a similar sensor for monitoring various tanks that were part of the anaerobic digester. I’m still not sure if I understand why Leo’s hardware has two sample and hold circuits. Can’t it be done with one as it’s used to store the maximum and then the second ping is measured against it but not stored?
Current projects that are on the workbench in various stages of completion are
- A receiver for the 60khz time signals broadcast from Anthorn in the UK, WWVB in the US and various other transmitters around the world. This one’s based on a design I found as it’s my first proper RF project but I’ll do the packet decoding using my own design.
- A micromouse style thing because I’ve always struggled with the physical side of robotics so I wanted to see if I could build a platform that would actually stay together. This is entirely my own design and I’m trying some sensorless brushed DC motor techniques from some appnotes. I’m not sure if I’ll do much more than build the platform/chassis tho’ as that’s the part of the problem I’m currently interested in.
- A robotic glockenspiel door-chime. This is purely an art project. It’ll take the form of a piece of DNA made out of brass and I need your guidance on whether it should have half a twist or a whole twist so I’ve made some prototypes out of cardboard. The forum won’t let me attach more than one picture as a new user so if it’s appropriate I’ll have to post photos later!
I’m pleased to join the community!
Thanks Leo for starting it: it seems to be quite an innovation on the currently popular Youtube format!