1202 ALARM

I have a bunch of these little motors recovered from broken printers. They have a neat feedback system built onto the back using a slotted infrared sensor and an encoding wheel. All that needs to be added is a 74LS14 (or equivalent) Schmitt trigger to clean up the pulses coming from the infrared sensor. I modified the motor spindle to take the smallest Lego Technic gear and built a little test rig with a linear actuator type arrangement. The motors can be glued upside-down to a 4x2 stud Lego plate and occupy roughly the same space as a classic Lego Technic 4.5 volt motor. VIDEO -  Lego Robotics Test Rig The motor is driven by a L293NE H-bridge IC with another of the Schmitt inverters used to reduce pin count to just 2 - MotorDirection and MotorSpeed. The code uses an interrupt to count the incoming pulses on a pin and also detects a stall situation by checking if the pulse count has stopped when the motor is supposed to be running. TEST CODE // Lego Robotics Test 002 // G...

A kind Freegle user called Niamh (who owns a lovely bicycle) gave me this awesome retro Pioneer stereo system (YouTube video below).  Pioneer Stereo System The CD tray was a bit temperamental and one of the speakers might have a damaged wire, but nothing too serious and the unit was quickly back in action. I only ever came across Pioneer systems in classic cars so was keen to find out how this one performed. I hooked the stereo up to a heavy pair of speakers I got from Will on Freegle a few weeks ago and have been blown away by the sound quality. Real depth and bass. The tape mechanism and big tilt display are just things of beauty, I think I'm in love!