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French cleats and bench grinders

ShedWoodworkingWorkbench

So I’ve said once or twelve times that I needed to do something about this stuff in the shed:

The little air compressor proved useless for shellac and stuff so it’s moved indoors to the lab for future mucking about with airfix models with junior and the like. The dremel, well, that’s handy for stuff so it still lives there, but the grinder was just a pain in the fundament. It’s on an MDF base with a small cleat on the bottom for the Black&Decker Workmate to grab onto (or the vice on the bench these days). So I finally got round to fixing that up and getting it out from underfoot.

Smaller base, cleat at the front end to act like a bench hook and a holdfast at the back keeps it nice and stable (the base tends to cup a bit, I don’t think it’ll last forever).… Read the rest

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Rough work is fun too!

Woodworking

So not every piece of woodwork has to be fine and finished to be fun…

It’s surprising how much fun 5-to-13-year-olds can have with hammers and nails so long as someone older is there to do the branding and the sawing 🙂

 

 

But dear grief, it’s rough work and now I feel I need to remake a doll’s school locker properly in something nicer than badly warped pine and poplar offcuts 😀… Read the rest

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DerBlinkenLightzen!

ElectronicsNew Toys!PIC
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PIC AssemblyProgramming

8-pin microcontrollers are pretty neat things. I’d only used the larger PICs before, I didn’t see how these could be all that useful. And the 16C74s could do more… twenty years ago. These days, the 8-pin PICs have caught up with the older models in internal features, if not pincount. It’s really quite remarkable:

Same amount of program memory as the one from PICrat (actually, the modern version of the chip from PICrat, with the fancy flash memory), the CPU’s faster, it has more RAM, it has an internal EEPROM for persistent storage, same number of digital comms, one less CCP (but 32 fewer pins, so okay), half as many ADC channels (again, 32 fewer pins) but higher precision on those channels, same number of timers, a new comparator, a wider range of operating voltages and it takes less power (much less, it turns out).… Read the rest

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