Daniel’s Stuff

I now have the replacement PCBs from circuits.io and they look great.  They also included some free PCBs, so hopefully they will work.  :)

I’ll post some pics when I have some

I spent a little time on my lunch break putting in the last few wires and the board has come up

The flash from my phone has drowned out the LEDs on the board, but they were blinking as they should.

Since I didn’t have another voltage regulator handy I have used the voltage drop across two diodes from a bridge rectifier (a trick I’ve used successfully before with other 3.3v parts from Microchip).

I took a few more pictures of the failed boards and sent them to the fantastic people at circuits.io.  They have very generously offered to send me new ones at no charge  Hopefully these new boards will work out.

I also had a quick go at getting one of the boards working.  After soldering lots of wires on the bottom of the board I powered it up and let the magic smoke out of my voltage regulator, so it looks like I may have a crook connection somewhere.  It could also be because I didn’t have the right regulator available so tried another with a slightly different pinout.  I put some heat shrink over the input lead and bent it into the right position. Maybe I didn’t get it quite right.  The interesting thing is that the Mac I had it plugged in to didn’t complain about the device drawing too much current, so I don’t quite know what went wrong.  Time to head out to Jaycar and get the part I actually need I guess

Over the weekend I replaced the leaking inlet valve of our toilet. What should have been a 5 minute job took a couple of days as whoever installed it in the first place glued the nut joining the inlet pipe to the inlet valve. This meant that I had to cut the inlet valve out once I had managed to snap things off badly inside the cistern. No going back once I had snapped a couple of the plastic bits on the inside. Once I got it out I was able to replace it in a matter of minutes

Time for bed.  I’ve successfully hacked an app I need for work to do something it is not supposed to do  A little reverse engineering, byte patching and single stepping through machine code and I now have it being quite naughty