Hello, everyone!

I'm just curious about you guys' favorite projects. What project, whether finished or still in progress, are you most proud of? Pictures are appreciated!

Der Strom

P.S. Here's your chance to brag

 

I'd probably say my time machine, as it got me here from 2473. Unfortunately, you folks don't have any crinkillium yet, so it looks like I'm stuck here a while. That's OK, as I'm raising ducks and plan to take them back with me when I return, as I can build a great web browser with them. I'll call it "L'Orange".

 

I have proud moments when I share experiences with Forum members.
I have with held some proud moments because of privacy like most
members of the Forum.I am proud to be an active member of this Forum.
I don't know the words to use being on u-tube winning cash,I would not
use the word proud,but different..when some one besides you post a
story on the Internet.

 

FX box for the car.
http://www.flickr.com//photos/nsaspook/sets/72157621859582481/show/

 

So far, my automated slot car intersection is my biggest build. It taught me and my partner a whole lot about troubleshooting.

Available at the completed projects forum.

 

I'm almost done with a project for a biomechanics research lab. There's not that much electronics involved, but by the time I finish it'll be just as functional (if not more so) as similar devices that are commercially available for $50k, only it should end up costing less than $6k to build. Its a device that performs compression testing on small soft tissue samples and measures force and displacement to calculate material properties of the tissue. Force measurements will be accurate to within 20 uN and displacements to within 4 um. Its not a complicated device but definitely the coolest one I've worked on so far (in my very short career). I could post some pictures next week (don't have any good ones right now).

 

I'd probably say my time machine, as it got me here from 2473. Unfortunately, you folks don't have any crinkillium yet, so it looks like I'm stuck here a while. That's OK, as I'm raising ducks and plan to take them back with me when I return, as I can build a great web browser with them. I'll call it "L'Orange".

Ah, looks like you must been seperated from your cohort Eloi Cole in the jump. I believe He has found the crinkillium you seek. I hope you can make it to Switzerland before he departs, so you can join him back to the communist chocolate hellhole from whence you came.

 

My most functional and succesful build was not electronic at all. It is a belt grinder for making knives; a hobby I used to be very into a few years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG5duTeuqFE

This was before I got into electronics

And here's the best knife I ever made with it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbPj9sytyPw
If I look like a crazy person, it's because I used to be a crazy person. But I got over that, mostly.

 

I got an old, cast iron drill press for free because it was supposedly unrepairable. I looked up new bearings for it and they hadn't been made since 1938. So I took it apart, drew up plans to convert it to modern bearings, and paid a machine shop to make the new parts. My pride is about saving an antique drill press that will last another 70 years.

 

I got an old, cast iron drill press for free because it was supposedly unrepairable. I looked up new bearings for it and they hadn't been made since 1938. So I took it apart, drew up plans to convert it to modern bearings, and paid a machine shop to make the new parts. My pride is about saving an antique drill press that will last another 70 years.

do you have a pic of it? I like to see old things and restoration

 

You can see the square, aluminum, idler block that I had made, but you can't see the adapter plate and bearing holders that are in the part that goes up and down.

and yes, to the <snips> among you, one of the belts is crooked today.

 

Oh, I like that! Thanks for posting. I can see it works just fine as is, but if you ever decide that you want to make a complimentary 4 stage pulley for the motor shaft, here is a method that I looked into once: http://www.backyardmetalcasting.com/castingpulleys1.html . I never got around to doing it, but I have all the stuff to make the furnace and what not. It would likely take a few days to get everything together to make just one pulley, but you might get a new hobby out of it. I plan on doing it some day.

on second glance looks like maybe it's not supposed to have a 4 stage pulley there. I don't know.

 

There is no point in making a 4 stage pulley on the motor. It can already get to 7,000 rpm and most of the best uses for a drill press are at high torque and low speed. I have a 2" pulley for the motor, but why??? What needs 14,000 rpm?

 

Casting is fun - actually I'm quite proud of these silver cufflinks that I made from sand castings and chain. They are in need of a good polish but it's been a while since I used them. <ed> Was feeling sorry for them so I just gave them a polish </ed>

 

I got an old, cast iron drill press for free because it was supposedly unrepairable. I looked up new bearings for it and they hadn't been made since 1938. So I took it apart, drew up plans to convert it to modern bearings, and paid a machine shop to make the new parts. My pride is about saving an antique drill press that will last another 70 years.

That's pretty sweet. One project I want to start some time in the future when I have time/money (i.e. when I'm done being a student) is to buy a cheap/free drill press or benchtop milling machine and work on converting it into an automated machine - eventually with computer controlled downfeed and tables. Maybe I could get some CAM software and basically have my own CNC mill. At this point I really don't know how much work that would entail, but it seems like it would be a fun project. If I could do it right, that could possibly end up being one of my favorite projects.

 

This is one of 8 drawings required to make the conversion to modern bearings. I won't try to post all the drawings as AAC would probably blow a fuse about the megabytes required to do that. My point is that it required massive meticulousity to do the conversion. Thus, a job to be proud of.

 

This project is not at the top of my list but I thought it was pretty clever. First some background info. I was doing my masters in nuclear physics in the early 1970s and we were fooling around with TV circuits. We used a National Semi MM5320 TV sync generator and we created our own "pong" game entirely on a breadboard using up/down counters and monostable multivibrators.

Now on to the project. We needed to create a graphics display in order to display gamma-ray spectra. This was in the days when RAM was not readily available. So we took an inexpensive 12" B&W TV and rotated the yoke so that the scan lines went from bottom to top. We used the MM5320 TV sync generator, some binary counters and lots of TTL glue circuitry. The entire histogram generation was interrupt driven from a DEC PDP-15. The user had the option of displaying bar graphs or dots. We also had a flashing cursor to pin-point any particular x-value.

 

Now on to the project. We needed to create a graphics display in order to display gamma-ray spectra. This was in the days when RAM was not readily available. So we took an inexpensive 12" B&W TV and rotated the yoke so that the scan lines went from bottom to top. We used the MM5320 TV sync generator, some binary counters and lots of TTL glue circuitry. The entire histogram generation was interrupt driven from a DEC PDP-15. The user had the option of displaying bar graphs or dots. We also had a flashing cursor to pin-point any particular x-value.

Now that's clever and cool!

I took a nuclear physics class in the 1960's and we had a Nuclear Data spectrometer to do that work for us. The nifty part was to get output, you borrowed the department secretary's IBM Selectric typewriter and a big bar of solenoids was bolted to the typewriter over the keyboard. Yep, you guessed it -- the spectrometer typed out the data. This was really cool to watch and listen to.

 

Oh yeah! I remember we had one of those IBM Selectric but if I remember correctly it already had some kind of mechanical interface in order to printout a graph using characters. We probably had the same Nuclear Data unit. One of my first tasks as a grad student was to pull all the cards and scrub the gold plated contacts with an ink eraser.

 

I will like to make LED tv ..............