Warranty Void if Removed

Pete brought me a challenge from Sarah's house - make their carbon monoxide alarm louder. A malfunctioning boiler and landlord means they suffer frequent CO problems. I suggested that Pete buy a personal attack alarm from the SUSU shop whilst I figured out how to get a signal out of the CO alarm.

A few weeks back I was thinking of ways to fuse electronics with jewellery. The first one I came up with was an LED on diamond. You could have a classical diamond ring with an LED built in the bulk. Gold contacts could be evaporated on, and could merge in nicely with the rest of the ring! ...

Thought I'd make my 3rd year project writeup available. It is a switch-mode power supply with digital PID control implemented in a low power microcontroller. The aim is to achieve a higher performance, more flexible design than a traditional analogue supply without the high power consumption of a high-speed DSP.

It scored highly, so might be worth reading if you're a 3rd year Electronic at Southampton.

In the early hours of this morning the Z-axis was completed. A new, much higher torque NEMA-23 motor from Motion Control Products (part FL57STH76-2808B ) was added, along with a length of 10x3 trapezoidal leadscrew and nut from Marchant Dice . In addition an adjustable mounting was added to one end of one of the guide rails to allow them to be adjusted perfectly parallel. Here are the results of a pen pretending to isolation mill a circuit board layout. Video:

The other day I thought "wouldn't it be cool if I could make an X-ray machine for reverse engineering PCBs, etc". So I looked around and found an ancient Scientific American article. It seems that all one needs to produce X-rays is an HV supply and an evacuated tube containing a cold electron-emitting cathode and some kind of target anode.