Les's Lab Notes

[Les Hall]

Here it is Thursday night at nearly 1am, my active time, and I am 3D printing a "Fish Gate" for gnu_don.  He wanted another one done so I guess I will print two, filament allowing.  I have half a kilogram of black and that should be enough.  

This week I spent a whole lot of my free time on the elequa prototype number four, nicknamed EC4 for electrocoagulator 4.  At the moment I'm working on the electronics and the software, both of which are Ardunio based.  I chose the Arduino platform because it enables us to make stand-alone units as well as computer interfaced units and have both types of units perform control, user interface, and measurement functions.  

At the beginning of the week I was finally able to get the soldering for EC4 done.  There is a patient on oxygen near my room here in the nursing home, so I voluntarily chose not to do soldering inside.  This means that I have to wait for weather, assistance, and my mood in the daytime to all phase-align to get any soldering done.  So I save it up and plan for that joyful sunny day when I can have a solder party YaY \o/.  

With the soldering done I was free to begin wiring up the breadboard which is a slow process taking days for me, since I use the "neat freak technique" that I have developed for clean, neat, reliable, and functional breadboards.  

I wired the inital power entry section, the LED bar, the potentiometer, and the energy indicator LED over the next three days.  Oh, and also the power distribution.  Then I coded some software that drives the LEDs in response to the Potentiometer input and that all works good.  The only thing left is the power driver section and we've got a working EC4 prototype ready for testing.  I plan to have that done my Monday.  

That gives me an extra four days before the deadline of the end of this month that Ryan declared and I accepted.  It's not written in stone but setting milestones for ourselves helps to ensure that things get done.  

I'm also happy to mention that Ryan has been using the computer based EC3 prototype to run his tests and it is working just fine.  In fact, all three of the earlier protos worked properly as does the original proto.  Maybe we're blessed or maybe we're due, lol, I'm just doing my best to prepare for the workshop at SXSW in rOcktober where we will open source the finalized design to make it available to the public.  

Now back to printing the Fish Gate...  I'll keep you posted!  

Les