A coroplast 38″ wingspan delta wing slope soarer for 2-channel elevon control.

Read on for more pics, and all the tasty links you need to make your own.
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Not yer granddad’s RC plane construction. Lithium-polymer batteries and brushless electric motors mean no more noise or messy fuel and allow really miniature construction.

Read on for lots of pics and a video. (Read More…)

This is a fun little project I finished a few evenings ago; a homebrew 500x digital microscope for all your biohacking needs, made from an old webcam found in the trusty junk box.

Read on for a mini-howto and some captured microscopic images. (Read More…)

This was a couple of years ago. I never got round to posting it here at the time and the video’s a bit rubbish. It’s much prettier in real life! But seeing as I’m going through the backlog, why not. For some reason the camera would only capture half the streamers – it would be fine half a second, then go streamer-blind for half a second. Likewise it would only show the lighting of the flourescent tube at 2:01 intermittedly, although it was lit constantly. Very wierd. Quantum effects?

Hmm, that topload’s none too impressive either.

Read on for the tech stuff. (Read More…)

I had an unusual valve kicking around – an ECH83. It’s a triode-heptode designed for use in car radios, with an anode voltage of only 12.6V.

I also had a couple of the ubiquitous Park G10 practice amps from my early guitar-playing days waiting to be recycled into something better, so I thought I’d see if I could concoct some sort of bastardised hybrid.

The G10 actually has quite a nice chip amp for it’s final stage; the TDA2030A. What a pity about the JRC4558 preamp stages. I really hate the sound of that particular 80’s opamp.

Inspired by this wanton ECH83 abuse by Engels, I decided to use both the triode and heptode in the ECH83 as preamp stages and salvage the silicon from the G10 for a power amp stage.

This is the result (click to enlarge):

Read on for explanation, layout and construction notes.

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I’ve been getting back into electronics. High voltage stuff this time around – I’m trying to get a small Tesla Coil running at the moment (and to that end just let the magic smoke escape from my cheapo bench power supply).

Going through my camera, I found some photos of some robots I built last time I was in a soldering mood and thought I’d share and document – read on for pics and details.

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