My first PCB arrived from PCBWay — in black — and then I found out I'd designed in JST PH connectors, a flyback diode and resistors I don't actually own. While the missing half of the BOM ships from Amazon, I hunted down a proper 2 % silver solder at Kjell (the Temu wire was the real problem all along) and soldered the parts I had.
Read entry →My Biltema parts boxes are discontinued, so I can't extend them — and I refuse to be stuck. The fix: a printed storage system, Gridfinity bins inside Bookfinity "books", with a nuts-and-bolts cover I made by feeding the comment-variant design to nanobanana. Two books are off the Bambu Lab P2S so far, print-in-place hinges and all.
Read entry →With the valve circuit working on a breadboard, I turned it into my first home-made PCB. I drew it up in EasyEDA, kept everything through-hole so I can hand solder it, and — after Claude caught a switch trace on the wrong rail and talked me into a flyback diode across the motor — sent five boards off to PCBWay.
Read entry →My family's summer-house garden tap is fed by a manual valve buried half a metre down in the workshop floor, under a shelf. Step one of replacing it: I drive a CWX-15Q motorised ball valve (CR05) from a single switch using a four-transistor circuit — no microcontroller — that runs the one-way motor to the position I pick and cuts power at the valve's limit switches. For fun, and tested on a breadboard.
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Why this site exists, how it works, and what it's built with: plain
HTML committed to git, graph paper drawn in CSS, and a deploy
pipeline that is just git push.