Fabsosh’s Blog

a tall giant beautiful bird paid us a visit today. tried capturing the best picture I could with my S600 sumsung camera since birds of this size does not always come.

A switch mode computer power supply was used as the basic building block. The power supply has two functions i.e. 1.2V – 17V variable power supply and a lead acid charger. A function selector switch has been provided for choosing the mode of operation.

S.Ndlovu 2009

S.ndlovu

2009

A giant sign board(5mx1.2m) made in the lab by Conty  using the sign/vinyl cutter, for a  local furniture shop.

Conty in front of his creation

Hello World!

The Hello World circuits, all of them complete. Tshepiso our electronics intern has made all the Hello World circuit boards.

Tshepiso

Hello World

The mega88 controller board has been designed to be used in any applications that require a microcontroller. The Atmel Atmega88 AVR is used to design the mega88 controller board. Connecting inputs and outputs is done through 4-pos mta pin headers. It also has a 5 pos- mta pin header for ISP and a power jack with a power led indicator.

S’khumbuzo Ndlovu

June 16 2009

I think a lot of people have been asking themselves what happened, no new posts, nothing new on the fabsosh blog. The past few weeks has been hectic for us, we’ve been hard at work with our new project, a line follower robot. Our next target after this robot is Rodney’s Robot (the one which about a size of a child). The hardware design is finish and ready. Started with the programming late today, and we managed to programme it to follow a black line drawn on white surface. We also want it to be able to follow a white line on a black surface. Is still not perfect yet, we hope that we are going to finish the programming tomorrow. Conty is going to design a new and proper track using the vinyl sign cutter. More still to come.

Our little line follower bug robot

Conty and Rodney making the track.

S’khumbuzo Ndlovu

2009/04/28

USB ports works with +5V @ few hundreds of milliamps to maybe thousand. I found this fairly good enough for programming AVR Microcontrollers and powering my microcontroller circuit board. Unfortunately USB power current is not enough for circuits which requires a little bit more current (maybe above 1A). I have harvested the USB cable from my old USB mouse that was no longer working. The rest of the parts are from the lab.

Here are links where more info can be found:

http://pinouts.ru/Slots/USB_pinout.shtml

http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/usb_stuff.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USB.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Types-usb_new.svg

The pictures below show the whole process.

S’khumbuzo Ndlovu

FabSosh

09-04-2009

Students from Tshwane University of Technology Soshanguve Campus visits Fabsosh. They are from the Electrical Engineering department; they are currently at S4 level. They were shown some of the things previously made in the laboratory and some of the projects we are working (Rodney’s robot among them) on. Every semester students from TUT electrical engineering come to Fablab to Design and make their Design Project (electronics project) assignment.

S’khumbuzo Ndlovu

07-04-2009

Rodney is our robotics enthusiasts; he is currently learning how to programme avr microcontrollers and basic electronics which he needs for his robots. He has made and programmed his first ever microcontroller circuit using the Attiny13 AVR and also made his own programming cable (bsd). The picture below shows the circuit and programming cable Rodney has made. Rodney has never worked with microcontrollers before. His exposure to microcontrollers is through FabLab. Below is his tiny13 circuit board.

S’khumbuzo Ndlovu

05-04-2009

PICOcricket lego kit

S’khumbuzo Ndlovu

31-03-2009