Little failures.

I’ve had a few little failures and handbrakes recently – these aren’t the sort of thing that put me off, more the sort of things that make me curious.

I’ve just made a camera shutter release for android which works for every phone except mine – I use an old Samsung S3 because it’s really good for closeup filming in bright light. Turns out they use different media controls to literally everyone else… Who Knew? Now I need to build a bluetooth camera trigger. Incidentally I just tend to leave a camera running on timelapse or video as I work and then grab images from the video later, more on that further down the page.

I’m making a 555 timer gated dimming 3w led light at the moment (nothing too clever, just useful), which I’d designed up to work with a potentiometer – I waited for about 5 months for surface mount 555’s to arrive from China. Now they’re here they’re totally out of spec, I actually had to build up a circuit to even establish they’re timing chips, where I’d expect about 1khz I’m getting about 1/10th hz. If they are 10,000x slower (or 1/10,000th as fast for the mathematically literate) then there must be something screwy happening here.

With a DIP chip the light goes dim as you twist it left.

And it’s bright if you twist it right. Unless you use (supposedly) identically specced smd chips, then they go screwy – So now I have to spin up some test boards to work out what the hell the 555 chips I bought actually are and how they work. Then I can move on to the question of, what can I use them for.

Then there’s little things which aren’t really even usually worth commenting on. I’m wanting to create a macro keyboard so I can speed up my production of images for this blog. I usually just set cameras running in either video or timelapse when I’m making stuff, then I’ll run the video and screen grab – then I’ll jump to photoshop,. crop, resize, and save the images for the blog, rinse & repeat… Keep rinsing, keep repeating.

Doing that is laborious as hell – the writing is easy, this post for instance will take maybe half an hour to an hour to write, I don’t spell check or anything fancy. But the whole video to photoshop thing feels like it takes longer each time – it feels like work. So I could create less images, or I could make a macro keyboard to take care of all the keyboard shortcuts.

This basically entails a bit of wiring and some simple arduino coding, maybe a bit of hard thinking about just how I could lay it out (I haven’t even made a V1 and I want to make a V2 incorporating a mouse). So I’ve ordered some pro micro’s… Only now I’m getting the message that…

Postal delays are a thing now with the global apocolypse thingee being what it is. I’ve a feeling that USB hub chips are going to be even more of a pain in the tail to wait for. Such is life. I live in New Zealand incidentally, we have a pretty normal life right now, but postage and supplies of anything non-essential are patchy at best. Not that I’m complaining, I’m quite happy to be here with no postage thankyou very much.

I’m not short of projects at least, I’ve modified a crap soldering iron to be decent (Jaycar 10w iron modification), I have a Canon 30D I’m thinking of modifying into something more interesting, timers, protoboards, an arduino gameboy thing etc. etc.

Enough, Back to my lair.