The monitor was knackered although the backlighting using LEDs worked a treat. Really good practice doing the conversion though, so I'm going to look at the 21-inch rescued TV next.
I was having a sandwich lunch down at Tyrella beach on the Co Down coast back in late September and went for a walk afterwards and found this thing half-buried in the sand. It turned out to be a boat immersion heater of some sort (I don't own a boat so maybe someone can enlighten me). There was an electrical element and 2 pipes coming out of the top and the bottom connection you can see in the photo. It must have been thrown overboard (assuming the boat it was on didn't sink!), maybe after being replaced. It had been in the sea a while by the looks of it, but being stainless steel it has started to polish up quite nicely. The lid is held on by 6 bolts and I gutted all the old gubbins out of it to get the cylinder itself. Willis Solasyphon Anyway, the basic plan is to wind 1 or 2 tight coils of 8mm microbore copper pipe like in the photo above and make a heat exchanger out of the cylinder. I've had a go at winding this type of coil before and it isn't easy, but I'd ...
A few months ago I bought a mini electric chainsaw from Lidl to cut up wood for the stove. Going by the reduced gas bills I think the chainsaw has almost paid for itself. The chainsaw uses the Parkside 20-volt lithium-ion batteries and I bought a 4Ah battery and charger to run it. Since then I have bought a couple of other Parkside gardening tools and a larger 8Ah battery which was on offer. In all I've spent about £60 on the batteries so I want to get maximum use out of them. Now over the last few years I've acquired free or for a couple of quid, several Bosch drills. These are the last of the tools that used NiCad battery packs. The big SDS hammer drill above came with two 24-volt NiCad battery packs, one completely dead and the other almost dead. I bought a couple of 18-volt NiCad packs to run this and a smaller Bosch drill and they have been really useful, especially last summer when I was working on improving the patio lean-to. So could the Bosch dr...
I got around to taking the screen out of one of the LCD units to see what could be done with it. For a start the actual screen is 6.2" (according to the serial number and a ruler) not 7" as on the manufacturer's website, but that's no bad thing. It turns out a 6.2" screen is just the right size to fit in a double-DIN car radio slot, which prompts all sorts of ideas. It also turned out that there were 2 circuit boards, a big one with an audio amplifier and some power supply circuitry and a small one for the actual screen. Essentially the screen will operate with just a 4-wire connection (9 volt, GND, Video and Video GND). There is another connector for options (screen mode, colour and brightness), but with nothing connected to this the monitor defaults to perfectly use-able settings. In the photo I have it hooked to a PC via a VGA-to-Video adaptor. The computer is running Tiny Core Linux (my new favourite distro) in 640 x 480 mode (I think). It will go down to 320...
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