Category: Technique

SMT Assembly Workshop

Learn to assemble and reflow solder a double sided SMT Arduino printed circuit board. At the end of this workshop you will have a working Arduino that you can take home. Note that every effort will be made to ensure…

Eagle Routing Workshop

Step1 – Creating a layout from the schematic Open the “Road_Warrior” schematic. From the file menu select “switch to board” setup the placement grid by typing “grid mm” and “grid 1” in the command line. This sets the grid to…

3D Car Design

I was thinking about how I might design a better looking body for my paper car designs. I needed the design process to be simple to allow young students to design their own car bodies which could be 3D printed.…

Schematic Workshop

The goal of this workshop is to capture a schematic design for an Arduino Uno compatible board. The complete schematic will look something like the schematic below. I will provide basic instructions for each step in the process but the…

Eagle Workshop

I am planning an Eagle workshop that consists of 3 one hour meet ups starting in March. Each workshop is standalone and does not depend on any of the previous workshops however they are all required if you want to…

Linear Actuator Stepper

I was trolling the web and came across a great deal on LM6U linear bearings ($0.50). I also managed to find six Nema 17 stepper motors for $20 delivered. So what am I going to do with these parts? I…

Designing a lead screw coupler

I wanted to connect a Nema17 stepper motor to a 5/16″ lead screw. Traditionally you would just go out and buy an aluminum coupler but there are issues with doing that. Finding a supplier for a coupler with a metric…

Paper Car Parts

After the Maker Faire in September I set out to simplify my paper car design. Well simple is relative. I re-designed elements of the car to provide an easier to assemble, more robust design. The simplifications are designed to make…

Childs Play

I needed an easy to build circuit board that was kid friendly so I designed a simple paper circuit. The design consists of laser cut paper templates that are wired up using copper foil tape. I decided to start off…

Divide and Conquer Minecraft

The goal of today’s lesson is to show you how to transfer an arbitrary design into Tinkercad so that it can be 3D printed. The first difficult you need to deal with is scaling your design so that it will…