Skittle sorting

Extremely important Skittle sorting prior to making Skittle vodka, which was amazingly tasty and alarmingly drinkable. Especially the orange flavour. We passed the cheap and nasty vodka through a Brita charcoal filter before infusing it with the Skittles, which I think made a bit of a difference. It certainly made a difference to our filtered water for the next couple of weeks as it had a bit of a vodka flavour until we got around to changing the filter.

Oscilloscopes

This is a nice 20MHz analog scope that was donated by UWIC to Cardiff Hackspace. It's awesomely retro but works great. I don't know how I ever managed to do any electronics without access to an oscilloscope. I keep meaning to use it to display some graphics. I even got around to getting some DACs (Digital to Analog Converters):

Yeah, soldering that onto the breakout board was quite tricky. The main body of the chip (the black bit) is only 1.75 by 1.3mm big. I haven't got around to doing any more than that, so it's in the pile of ideas and half-completed projects.

Fire is the Purifier

LED forest

 Yes, that is quite a lot of LEDs. I did this for a test of my still-in-progress sunrise alarm clock that I started back in October and now will almost certainly not get around to finishing before winter is over rendering the whole thing completely unnecessary.

Ahh, but it looks so pretty.

Allotment shed building

This is our amazingly spectacularly awesome almost finished shed we've built on our allotment. Hewn from a pile of pallets, scrap plywood and doors, with bonus store damaged roof sheeting from B&Q. Doors make remarkably good walls, so we're not expecting to have to replace this in the near future.

This is the largest structure I've ever built, easily overtaking my tree house that I built from 1993-97. I have not yet broken any bones in the construction of this though. I really should scan some of my x-rays sometime....

Anyway, we now (well, ironically, when we put a door on it) have somewhere to store all our tools and various other bits of gardening equipment that we've accumulated already.

Allotment surprises

So when you pick nice fresh food from your allotment (or, in this case, my Dad's) you should remember that slugs are really good at hiding. This one only made its appearance after a day in the fridge, which was quite surprising.

Reprap Heated Bed Testing

 This is the heated printbed from Iain's reprap being tested after he'd replaced the nichrome wire based heater with some chunky high powered resistors:

Once all soldered together and attached to the build platform with metalised epoxy, we fired it up and checked it out with a thermal imaging camera graciously loaned by my work:

Interestingly, the parts where there isn't any Kapton tape show up as much cooler - not because they are any cooler but because the bare metal is reflecting an IR image of the cold window. Anyway, the heater seems to work pretty well as Iain's reprap is churning out all sorts of interesting stuff.