Arduino – Week 2 – Stepper Motors

What is a stepper motor? A stepper motor uses opposing electromagnets to create rotation. The different number of steps are determined by the number of poles on each the stator and the rotor. There are several different types of stepper motor, depending on the use case and the size that is required. The main types […]

Arduino – Week 1 – Software Notes

Pulse Width Modulation     Using ‘unsigned char’ to replace values > ‘unsigned char’ allows you to control all of the same variables in a sketch by only changing one value unsigned char DelayTime = 255; unsigned char LEDoutput = 2; // the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board […]

Week 7 – 3D scanning and printing

3d Scanning can be done in multiple ways and at multiple price points, either with handheld scanner for an iPad all the way up to full systems, e.g for car manufactures to scan clay cars. They also have different degrees of accuracy, with hand held scanners being less expensive they will also produce less detailed […]

Week 6 – Embedded programmer

The task this week was to program the board that we made using the CNC router. There are several levels to this week, some being ‘simple’ and some being advanced. The main goal was to upload some sort of program to our Echo Hello World Plus board and ensure that it completed the function that […]

Week 5 : Electronics Design

The task this week was to create the schematic, board layout and then mill the simple LED circuit board. Autodesk Eagle is the circuit-board software that we used > Installing it was relatively easy as it was just a simple installation but to get the correct components for the FAB LAB, downloading the library of […]

Week 4 : Electronic Production

Surface mount components are very common and are what the majority of manufacturers will use due to the smaller size, compared to through components. It seems fairly easy to use them, although the mounting of these components, via soldering is vastly different to through hole components. Through hole components have the obvious advantage of being […]

Solidworks Notes

Help Menu > Solidworks tutorials is a good place to go if stuck GrabCAD is an online source of downloadable CAD files which can help you to learn how they made a model – with the feature tree you can see every step of them making the model I have used Lynda.com to start learning […]

Dice making Fusion 360

Making the dice is about learning Fusion 360 and using as many different techniques as possible My original method is as follows: Sketch 10×10 square > Extrude up 10mm > draw on dots by either using the pattern tool and deleting the extras or using the construction line at a diagonal and making equal circles […]