It’s been 4 years!

smackaay — Tue, 24 May 2011 16:08:58 +0000

Yay! this site has been around and updated semi-regularly for four years now. Having just paid the bill for another 2 years, hopefully it’ll be around for a while longer.

Looking back through this site I can see some of the things I’ve worked on and recall the state of my life at each of those times. I’ve gone through three jobs and one period of pseudo-unemployement. Some tough times and some good ones. I’ve learned a lot both professionally and personally.

Here’s to another 4 years of half-finished but fun projects.

Viscometer and Graphing

smackaay — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:11:56 +0000

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 board and I’ve come to realise that the RS-485 Port is wrong. It has 2 connectors when it requires 3. A-B-Ground. Sigh!

Anyways, I’ve been running tests with the viscometer and everything is working great so far. I’ve got the temperature sensors working and the conditioning of them with OP-amps has worked like a charm. Though I find that the read value from the ADC is pretty jumpy.

Anyways, as reference, here some photos.

The Whole Deal

Temp Conditioner

Also, the linearity test went well. Better than I initially expected.

Motor Linearity

One can notice that there are some burps along the graph but for the most part, it’s fairly linear as far as I’m concerned.

Steve's Junk » smackaay

It’s been 4 years!

Viscometer and Graphing