I used my Dremel 4000 for the first time to do a simple project, attaching a brass nameplate to the cherry wood cradle I made back in 2003. I spent many months building the cradle and got it done just in time for Laurel’s birth — we picked it up from the workshop on the…
An important part of the Speed Vest project is shaping the electroluminescent wire into digits. The original creators provide a layout template, which has odd digits only on the right, and 0 through 6 on the left. I wanted to do all possible digits on the right, leaving me with only 1 and 2 on…
A couple of weeks ago, I started hearing some funny noises from our Series3 HD TiVo. Sort of like an engine periodically revving up then stopping. I said to my husband, “The cooling fan is going bad.” But we ignored it and eventually the noise went away. Until, a few days ago, the TiVo got stuck at…
A week ago my 4 year-old daughter bounced on the bed and knocked off my laptop. The laptop was fine, but the ethernet cable had some minor damage. The plastic tab on the RJ-45 plug, which holds it in the computer socket, snapped off. At first, this didn’t seem like a big deal. The cable still worked well….
I have some new toys to play with: The main item is the Dremel 4000. It can drill, sand, plane, shape, rout, basically do everything except bake bread. Initially I’ll be using it to make holes in the enclosure box for the Speed Vest. I do have another small project in mind. Years ago I…
I had quite a scare this morning. I went to add a new blog post, and discovered that I had forgotten my password. GoDaddy insists on stronger password protection than I normally use for sites like this, so I couldn’t remember it. No big deal, there is a nice “Lost password?” link on the page….
With the circuit board wired up, the ribbon cable in place, and the electroluminescent wire connected, the Speed Vest was ready for its first end to end test. I used the sample code supplied to have the Arduino run through each of the output pins, lighting up each strand of wire to make sure everything…
With the ProtoShield wired up and the ribbon cable prepared, the next step for the Speed Vest was attaching the electroluminescent wires to individual strands of the cable. This was rather fun as it was my first chance to try something I’d been interested in for a while, heat-shrink wrapping. I paid my Coolight, my…
If you’ve ever worked around computers, you have seen IDC ribbon cables before. They are extremely common. So when I saw that the SpeedVest required a 14-wire ribbon cable with a 2×7 female header, I figured that I could simply get one at RadioShack or order it online. Turns out, it is not so simple…
The electronic circuitry for the Speed Vest is fairly simple. A high-voltage, low ampere power supply lights up strands of electroluminescent (EL) wire. Each wire corresponds to a digit on either the left or right side of the vest. We use a microcontroller, the Arduino Duemilanove, to read input from the wired wheel sensor, calculate…