02 Apr 2015
I have an old Minolta Hi-Matic F 35mm film camera – I love it dearly, despite its desire for unconventional batteries – and one day it suddenly stopped focusing properly. It was impossible to make the projected amber circle of the viewfinder align with the viewfinder image, and the lens seemed a bit ‘looser’ than normal.
Thankfully this was a simple fix that simply required the tightening of a few screws lens assembly. The roundabout way I discovered this isn’t particularly interesting, so instead I will show you what the problem was and how it was solved so you can get back to shooting sooner rather than later.
You will need a small flat head screw driver, and a small philips screwdriver. You won’t need to remove the top or bottom shells of the case, but if you are looking for that, hang around for a while and I’ll show you how.
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21 Aug 2014
The idea is simple: a set amount of time before your alarm is due to go off the lights in the room are gradually raised to simulate dawn, thus leading to a more gentle awakening than the typical blaring alarm clock buzzer. In an ideal situation you would wake up just before your scheduled alarm time.
I saw this project on Hackaday which prompted action!
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27 Feb 2014
I want to use an ATtiny13 to control the brightness of an LED light source (as a controller for this) and therefore need to control both the ADC input and the PWM output. This example is very simple, but will hopefully serve as a jumping off point for people new to the ADC and PWM systems in AVR microcontrollers.
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18 Aug 2013
I recently managed to save a big, heavy binocular microscope from being rather unceremoniously turned into scrap metal. After spending a fair while looking at anything we could put our hands on underneath its' lenses I turned to changing the dim yellow tungsten light bulb to something with a bit more oomph - a high brightness LED.
The eventual aim is to attach a camera to it, so more light is always better.
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17 Aug 2013
The BodyParts3D database from the Life Science Database Archive is brilliant - a couple of thousand separate meshes of organs and anatomical parts that add up to a male human body. There is a downside, and that is that the object files are named rather obtusely as FJ1252.obj and FJ1702M.obj. I found out about it from this forum thread at Blender Artists, and the basic Blender actions are based on those proposed by PietPW.
The main reason for writing this post is that PietPW's method of renaming the files relies on an older dataset, as the latest release has changed formats from a straight "this is what this file depicts" to a more obscure separate database of files that describe the relationship of these files to an anatomical 'tree'.
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