So, about a week or two ago, I came across this post on hackaday, which led me to this site with instructions for building a self-balancing robot. I’ve been wanting to make one of these for a while, so I figured I would give it a shot. I mostly copied the same design from Joop Brokking, so if you are building one, I’d suggest following his youtube video series on the design and construction of the robot.

At $DAYJOB, I’ve set up a number of raspberry pi kiosks out in our shops to display drawings and other info to our shop employees. I’ve recently ran into an issue on a few of our units where the usb ports stop working and the error logs fill with this message: [ 133.401276] usb 1-1-port2: over-current change In researching the error, I came across this thread on the raspberry pi forums.

I’ve been a bit busy lately and haven’t posted in a while, but I have been working on a few things. I started putting together a small cnc machine out of some scrap mdf and some chinese hardware. I’m not working from any plans or anything. I’m just winging it, which is probably a bad idea, but we will see how it turns out. I’m still waiting on a few parts to get it completely set up, but here is the progress so far.

This weekend, I cleaned up the heathkit hw-101 and slowly brought it up on the variac and the receiver seems to work. I hooked it up to my 40 meter dipole and my 20 meter dipole and it received fine on CW, LSB, and USB. The first thing I did was open up the case and take it outside and blew out as much dust as I could. Those pictures were after I blew out the dust.

My wife and I like to shop around at second hand stores for things we can use in our respective projects. For me, its usually old electronics or industrial doodads. Over the weekend, we stopped by our local store and my wife found a robotic arm kit. I’ve seen this same kit in other hobby shops several times over the years, but I wasn’t willing to spend $50 to $100 on what amounts to a desk toy that I wouldn’t do much with.

Last night I finished restoring the hp-23b power supply that I got with the heathkit hw-101. You could tell that it hadn’t been used in a long time and it had all of the original components including the old paper caps. I never actually turned it on in its original state so I never verified if it was in working order, but it seemed like a no brainer to just go ahead and replace everything.