Justblairs Audio and Electronic's Pages

Since building my first RepRap Prusa V1 printer over a year ago, I have been gradually updating the machine, improving it’s print quality as I go on.  One of the areas that I have managed to improve upon quite a bit is the y Axis of the machine.  The original Prusa had a fairly complex sprung print bed which was less than ideal.  in order to improve upon it I both used ideas from the V2 Prusa and developed my own very simple adjusting mechanism to all but eliminate backlash in the Y direction.  Here is how.

I have been more than a little quiet on the website, mostly because of the birth of my son and the busy busy lifestyle that goes alongside such an event.  However that does not mean that my soldering iron has been allowed to go rusty.  For the last few months I have been busy building a RepRap  3D printer.  This is a popular project these days and one that has been rewarding and challenging to me.

The printer that I opted to build was the Prusa Mendel, named as such in recognition of the designers.  Building the printer is a story for another article, but in this I want to show you how to add a LCD/Rotary Encoder based control panel to the printer. 

On the 2nd of July 2011 I am organising an Arduino Workshop at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow.

The workshop is being held at the Electron Club room and we meet at 1pm (Presentation starts at 1:30). 

We are going to begin with a presentation about the Arduino programming environment which will be suitable for everyone. I hope to give a short guide on the software and demonstrate the building of a couple of simple sketches. After there will be a chance to compare projects, seek advice from other attendees and generally chat and plan how to move a regular meeting forwards. 

I will also bring my box of "toys" so there will be other hardware (sensors, servos, displays etc) available for people to experiment and play with. If you have an Arduino, bring it and a laptop with you! If not, still come. I have a couple of spares and others may have more too.

This is the first event of this kind that i have organised and I hope that it will become a regular event!

If you are in the area and can spare some time, come along and try out some Arduino programming with us.

The Sure Electronics Tripath TA2024 Board is out of the box a good value for money amplifier module. However with some careful tweaking it can be made to sound better. This article focuses on the power supply to the Tripath chip and shows some improvements that can be made.

So far I have modified several aspects of the Sure TA2024 board. In this article I look again at the input to the device and swap over the input capacitor.