My Projects
The following are a list of projects that I've worked on in the past. Many more are to come. I attempt to fully document my findings on these pages, but I have many other commitments, so it may not be entirely possible. These projects are sorted by date of completion with the most recent projects at the top.
Please note
While these projects were constructed to certain degree of success, I do not guarentee the same for you. If you spent a lot of money buying components, built the machine and your power supply bursts into flames and burns your house down, its not my fault. The information presented on these pages are done so in good faith. You are expected to practice good judgement when using this information.
Intended audience
High school students and up. Some basic technical knowledge is necessary. These documents are of varying degrees of technical depth. I try to begin with ideas that are easy to understand and go into more technical detail as I go along. If there's anything hard to understand, I'll try to explain what is going on. I am just a hobbiest myself and I understand how difficult it was to get started. If you need any clarification, please feel free to contact me.
Lathe Steady Rest Fingers
2011-12-22
A friend of mine recently bought a lathe that came with a fixed steady rest which had no fingers. He came to me and asked me to outfit this steady rest with fingers. That is exactly what I did.
Indexable Dovetail Cutter
2011-09-30
I bought a commercially made 60° indexable insert dovetail cutter and found that it doesn't actually cut 60° dovetails! It turns out that with the axial rake, the effective angle is actually about 59°. This indexable cutter was made to actually fix this problem and cut 60° dovetails.
Parallel Port Control for Linux
2009-11-28
Having searched high and low on the internet about details on how to control your parallel port in Linux, I am going to summarize my findings here. Also, available is a utility to control the parallel port and nice C++ wrappers for ioctl calls.
DC Motor Controller and Tachometer
2006-05-06
Circuit to control and detect a motor's speed without sensors or special motor controllers. Very sensitive detector and very cost effective design.
Frequency Counter
2006-12-30
This is a frequency counter which I designed and built from scratch.
Oscilloscope
2006-01-14
Digital oscilloscope with programmable gain and vertical offset. Interfaces to a computer via serial port. Built with an FPGA, some opamps and a bunch of misc. logic. Oh yeah, resistors, capacitors and voltage regulators too. Did I mention wire? Powered by an ADC0804 with a maximum sampling frequency of 8kHz, but it will get better.
This page was last revised on an unknown date.
