http://smackaay.com A showcase of Steven Mackaay's stuff Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:27:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It hasn't been long since my last update about this thing but I've made some progress as far as making the unit into a single board. I simply used the AD7705B as I suspected it work work great for this application. I've been playing around with reducing the amount of ... http://smackaay.com/2008/12/03/viscometer-rotary-strain-gage-update/ A while back I purchased a 200mm f4. Rokkor lens off EBay for pretty cheap, like 40 bucks total. Since then, I haven't really been taking any photos and thus haven't been able to get a good feel for the lens. Tonight I decided to brave the cold and take ... http://smackaay.com/2008/12/03/minolta-md-lens-test-200mm-rokkor/ Well, so far, so good. That's all I can say at the moment. The rotary gage is operational, though it hasn't had brushes made for it and it seems to output a reasonable amount of voltage difference based on displacement. Here's what it looks like so far: [caption id="attachment_301" align="alignnone" width="358" caption="The ... http://smackaay.com/2008/11/30/the-rotary-torque-sensor-continued/ After a few years of looking on the web for various items, the trend towards mandatory registration on certain websites is becoming more and more prevalent. Now, I'm not talking about social networking sites or the really massive corporations, I'm talking about the mid-size companies that have their IT dude ... http://smackaay.com/2008/11/28/websites-and-registration-an-opinion/ Now that It's coming up on two years at the place I work, I was looking through some of the drawings. I figured it'd be fun to post some of them. I'll simply place a gallery here, click the images to see a more detailed description [gallery] Note that these aren't all ... http://smackaay.com/2008/11/25/been-almost-2-years-at-endura/ This update is a little bigger than usual since I want keep the images and text as a sort of record of what I did for future reference. For the viscometer project, I've discovered that the motor is far too unreliable to produce reliable results despite algorithmic compensation. So now ... http://smackaay.com/2008/11/24/torque-coupling-update/ So now I have to find some way of measuring the torque applied between the two shafts of the viscometer. Here's my idea. [caption id="attachment_262" align="alignnone" width="345" caption="Strain Coupling Model View"][/caption] What you can't see is that I plan to manufacture it out of plastic, that way the strain gage experiences the ... http://smackaay.com/2008/11/20/creating-a-strain-gage-coupling/ Well, things are proceeding apace as far as the viscometer is concerned. Unfortunately, the motor is just too non-linear to serve as a useful measuring device. God I'm dumb! Anyways, my graph-it program is working ok now and producing some useful graphs. I have programmed the save and load features and ... http://smackaay.com/2008/11/19/graphing-program-and-viscometer-proceeding-apace/ Yes, I haven't made a new youtube video in some time. Now the video I make is a redux of one I've made already, namely Doki Doki Panic. The reason I redid it was because the original wasn't narrated. This one is, for only to add some personability and add ... http://smackaay.com/2008/11/16/a-new-youtube-video/ Now that I've got the new board working, I've been programming all of the pertinant functions back into the chip. This time I've redesigned them to be a little more modular and useful in the long term. As was mentioned in the post a while back, I made a new ... http://smackaay.com/2008/11/14/viscometer-and-graphing/