Freeside Atlanta

I've been busy working on this project since I last wrote about it. I have a new PCB designed and built up and another that has since been designed but not yet built. Designing electronics is a process. The first design I had built had an analog mux on it that I was using to push all the current sense signaling to a few ADCs on the board. Later designs needed those pins on the MCU for other purposes so I added an 8 channel ADC to the design and removed the mux all together. I then found that the ADC was too fast to measure the current in a useful way because the PWM I use to adjust the current would give the ADC values that were either 0% or 100% instead of a working average. I knew this going in, but assumed I'd be able to get a reliable average in a reasonable amount of time. For whatever reason though, it took about 300 samples per channel to get an reliable average value. Multiply that by 8 channels and then assume a single byte to store the value and you can see that it co...

Freeside Atlanta and My Inventor Club will be teaming up on Saturday, February 9th to bring you  a daylong hackathon in 3D Modeling, Design, Marketing, Theory and  more.  This is a free, educational meet and greet event which will be hosted  in Freeside Atlanta and My Inventor Club's space. This is the (draft) speaker line-up and schedule of events!  Like so many of these things, this is subject to change.  Watch this blog or follow us on Twitter for updates and other announcements. Cost: Free Location: Freeside Atlanta ,  675 Metropolitan Parkway Suite 6066, Atlanta, GA 30310 Directions, Parking, and other Information Date: February 9th, 2013 Time: 1200-1700 EST Contact: pr@freesideatlanta.org or info@myinventorclub.com Speakers Track 1100~1500 Eastern Time (UTC−05:00) This will be a Google Hangout invitation on the day of the event. Nicholas Giovinco ,  Moderator - Freeside Atlanta Greetings and Introductions: Welcome to Fr...

I have been working a Bluetooth 4 automotive power distribution unit for a couple months now. Here are some videos showing the capabilities.  The goal is to have a device about the size of a deck of cards that can distribute up to 100A @ 13.8V for automotive applications. 8 individual circuits can be controlled. Control will include constant current, circuit breaker at specific currents, and PWM duty cycle. You will be able to program dedicated functions to external buttons. Lastly, you will be able to get real time feedback from the system on a Bluetooth 4 device. This data will include total current, current by channel, and system voltage among other things. There are a lot of features on the drawing board still. This is going to have application in show cars, jeeps, motorcycles, and boats I believe. It's been a really fun project so far. I'm going to need about $120,000 to bring it to market so I want it to be pretty perfect before I write that check. I do hope I ge...

Come one; come all! Freeside Atlanta and My Inventor Club will be teaming up on Saturday, February 9th to bring you a daylong hackathon in 3D Modeling, Design, Marketing, Theory and more.  This is a free, educational meet and greet event which will be hosted in Freeside Atlanta and My inventor Club's space. What to Expect : -Several Machine Technologies on display with instructional demonstrations -Show and Tell examples of select prints and design prototypes -Lectures ranging from Design Theory, Modeling Techniques, Printing Strategies, Troubleshooting & Community Experiences -3D printing workshops and Hands on immersion -Special Guest Speakers Cost : Free Location : 675 Metropolitan Parkway Suite 6066, Atlanta, GA 30310 Date : February 9th, 2013 Time : 1200-1700 Contact : pr@freesideatlanta.org or info@myinventorclub.com -Nick

We've had two really great 3D printing meetups lately, one to talk about and demo 3D printers , and another to help people build and debug them . Here's some of the stuff we saw -   Jorge brought in his Rostock Prisma to show it off and debug a few extruder issues. It's a really cool and fairly robust design. Plus, it's a lot of fun to watch! You can also check out the Thingyverse page that Jorge has put together for it.  We also had Ant's 3D printer and the Thing-o-Matic going, so people could benchmark or run off a few parts. James Stephens also brought in his RepRap Mendel to debug some extruder issues. Randy did some work on his CNC, building a cabinet with removable side-walls for it, while Van continued working on his 3D Printer, the same variant as Ant's and the one that I am building for the space. I made slow progress on that, too, and it "only needs to be wired up" now. That's all for now! Watch our Me...

I got an interesting question on my YouTube channel yesterday asking if my transimpendance ammeter can measure A/C in addition to D/C and if the output of the instrument is A/C. The answer is yes to all of the above. Good question and a fun little thing to test on the bench on a Saturday morning.

I pushed 185 watts through my custom DC relays last night. They ate up that power like a champ. Likewise, I've also been testing it in the off condition to measure its steady off power consumption. The cards burn 150 nano amps or 1.8uW when off. That's means it's about 80 mega ohms which is OUTSTANDING. This project is really moving along nicely. I have some serious burn in testing to do and then it's time to get the main board encapsulated and do some real life testing. That's going to be fun!

Well, its time to finally get this project "out there". I've been sitting on it for months putting together a bunch of cool little projects for this board and the video above shows off some of the cooler ones. Check out the Kickstarter page for more details as well. Ever since I saw Kickstarter the first time I've been wanting to give this a shot so I could learn the ins and outs of doing small scale manufacturing from home. Because this is not a product, but a platform or hacker tool I am not super confident there is a substantial enough market for it but I cannot know if I don't try. The plan if this succeeds is to give all the boards a final value engineering assessment and put the project out to bid. I've already done this with a Florida shop called Tropical Assemblies as well as with Seeedstudio. I'm not super excited with Seeeds PCB quality so I think I'll skip them but the good news is that the local fab shop had similar prices so at l...

Recently, we at Freeside Atlanta teamed up with the Alchemical Arts Alliance and My Inventor Club to design and build an Offroad Wheelchair so that our friend Robin can get around their events. Together, we've raised about $2,000 for the project. The design phase is usually the most difficult part of the projects, and it is often the most expensive place to make a mistake. Committing the resources to a poorly-designed project can cause the entire thing to be wasted, so we designed the Offroad Wheelchair project very carefully. We started with the constraints – We need ease of maneuverability, an ability to overcome obstacles and take fairly steep inclines, longevity to make it through events up to a week long, and recoverability in case it gets stuck. Also, biggest two constraints – Budget (~$2000) and time to prototype (2 months) From that, we landed on 3 design options – 1 – Electric motors with onboard generator for periodic battery charge 2 – Modifying an exi...