Tag Archives: hardware

Bodgers – Soldering & Crimping

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Usually in the Bodgers group we use breadboards and jumper wires to connect our components together which is fine for prototyping, but today we looked at some techniques for making more permanent connections.

Soldering is a process in which two or more metal items are joined together by melting and then flowing a filler metal into the joint—the filler metal having a relatively low melting point. The metal to be soldered is heated with a soldering iron and then solder is melted into the connection. Only the solder melts, not the parts that are being soldered. Solder is a metallic “glue” that holds the parts together and forms a connection that allows electrical current to flow.

We started by soldering some header pins on stripboard, then we looked at using a desoldering pump to remove excess solder. Then we looked at stripping insulation from wire, soldering two wires together and using heat-shrink to re-insulate the wire.

An electrical crimp is a type of solderless electrical connection. Crimping is normally performed by first inserting the terminal into the crimp tool. The wire is then inserted into the terminal with the end of the wire flush with the exit of the terminal to maximize cross-sectional contact. Finally, the handles of the crimp tool are used to compress and reshape the terminal until it is cold-welded onto the wire. We crimped both insulated and uninsulated terminals onto some wire.

 

See you all next week.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – Cool Projects

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Hello again everyone.

In the Bodgers group we’re starting to put our projects together for the Coolest Projects Showcase.

“Coolest Projects International is a world-leading showcase for young innovators who make stuff with technology. If you’re up to 18 and you’re making something with technology for fun, to solve a problem, or as a creative outlet, then we want you to come out and share your project with us! This free event will take place in the RDS Main Hall, Dublin, Ireland on 5 May 2019.”

Find out more here: https://coolestprojects.org/

If you have any questions you can contact me at coderdojoathenry@gmail.com.

Don’t forget we’re off for the next 2 weeks, we’re back on 27-Apr-19.

see you all then.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – GPS

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This week we looked at GPS which stands for Global Positioning System. The idea behind GPS is based on time and the position of  a network of  satellites. The satellites have very accurate clocks and the satellite locations are known with great precision.

Each GPS satellite continuously transmits a radio signal containing the current time and data about its position. The time delay between when the satellite transmits a signal and the receiver receives it is proportional to the distance from the satellite to the receiver. A GPS receiver monitors multiple satellites and uses their locations and the time it takes for the signals to reach it to determine its location . At a minimum, four satellites must be in view of the receiver for it to get a location fix.

We used the Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout connected to an Arduino as our GPS receiver. It’s very easy to set up, all we did was install the Adafruit GPS library on our Arduino and this gave us a load of programmes to chose from. We used the parsing sketch which gave us Longitude, Latitude and our location in degrees which we used with google maps to show our location.

See you all again on the 23/Mar/19

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

 

Bodgers – Introduction to Arduino

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Hello again everyone.

I was away this week so Dave led the group, they did a couple of Arduino projects. They  revisited the traffic lights from December but this time used the Arduino to control them and then moved on to  a temperature and humidity sensor called the DHT11.

 

Here is the wiring diagram for  the traffic lights and you can find the code here.

arduino lights

 

Here is the wiring diagram for the DHT11 and the code is also on Dropbox here.

dht

We will be doing more with the Arduino particularly for some of our projects.

See you All again on Saturday

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – FreeCAD and Fritzing

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Hello again everyone

This week we continued working on our Astro Pi entries and we also looked at FreeCAD and Fritzing which are tools that will help us with building our projects.

fritzing_freecad

FreeCAD, available for download from here, is used for 3D modelling and allows us design very complicated things from simple 3D shapes such as cubes and cylinders. Here are a couple of quick videos to get you started.

Then we looked at Fritzing, download from here, an application for drawing very easy to understand circuits, here’s how to draw a simple circuit using it.

 

Dave will be leading next Saturday’s session and I will see you again on the ninth of Feb.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh.

Bodgers – Introducing Gpio Zero

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Hi again everyone.

This week we started looking at physical computing and the Raspberry Pi. This involves attaching various components such as sensors, motors or controllers to the GPIO pins on our Pi. This week we connected a LED and two buttons, and we used the GPIO Zero module for Python to control them. I’ve made a video, it’s a little bit long, that covers everything from Saturday’s session.

 

At the end of the session the group started working on a traffic light idea and we will combine this with HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor next week to create a measuring device.

I don’t have any slides this week as we worked directly from the GPIO Zero Documentation available at https://gpiozero.readthedocs.io. This is also available on Dropbox, along with this week’s code and a sheet that contains a drawing of our circuit and drawing of the GPIO pin layout, here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k26mbrfmdvq9tro/AAB5jfjkIlBqLhfnUAVVUvtJa?dl=0.

See you all next Saturday.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh.

Bodgers – Making Pictures With LEDs

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Hello again everyone.

We started of this week’s session by looking at the recent Soyuz rocket launch which was to send two people to the ISS. During the launch one of the booster rockets failed and the launch had to be aborted. Both crew members, astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin, escaped without injuries.

Official astronaut portrait of Tyler (Nick) Hague – Blue Flight Suit Picture. Photo Date: January 13, 2014. Location: Building 8, Room 183 – Photo Studio. Photographer: Robert Markowitz

We then continued to work on our pictures and messages for the Mission Zero Challenge. I made a video of some of the work we did, but it’s very hard to film LEDs so the quality is very poor.

If you want to find out more about the Soyuz incident and have another look at how to make pictures and messages with the Sense-hat LEDs my notes are here day 4.

Next Saturday we’ll start looking at Pygame Zero. See you all then.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – Making With Trinket.io

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Hello again everyone.

In the Bodgers group,  we’ve been working on code for the International Space Station. To do this we are using on online Sense Hat emulator, the Sense Hat is a special piece of hardware designed to be deployed with a Raspberry Pi on the ISS.

Capture15

The online emulator is available at https://trinket.io/sense-hat and there’s a good tutorial on the Raspberr Pi website here https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/astro-pi-mission-zero.

Here is our Trinket https://trinket.io/python/04b90b70cf.

You can play around with these and we will probably finish up with the Mission Zero Challenge for while after Saturday. My slides from last Saturday are here day 3.

See you all on Saturday.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – Making For The International Space Station

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Hello again everybody.
This week in the Bodgers group we started working on our code for the Mission Zero Challenge.

mission-zero-logo

We began by writing a simple text message on the 8×8 full-colour LED display, then we changed the text and background colours. We then coded a picture by assigning a colour to each of the 64 LEDs on the display. We finished the session by taking a quick look at using the temperature sensor to read the temperature. Here are my slides from this week day 2.
Next week we will recap what we covered this week and we will start to personalise our code for the challenge.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of fun videos on how the Astro Pi computers got to the ISS.

See you all next Saturday

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – Making a start

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making

This week we got things off to a flying start with Bodgers Bingo where the Bodgers had to look out for various phrases as I went through a very long slideshow that introduced them to what we do in the Bodgers group, it went very well with lots of Starburst and Chewits for everyone. My slides are here Day 1 (PDF).

We are going to start of the year by working on the Astro Pi Mission Zero Challenge in which the Bodgers will use a Raspberry Pi Sense Hat to write a greeting and display the temperature inside the International Space Station to the astronauts on the ISS. Here are the guidelines for Mission Zero Astro_Pi_Mission_Zero_Guidelines_2018_19 (PDF).

If you’re interested in buying a Raspberry Pi I’d recommend the following sites:

https://thepihut.com/

https://shop.pimoroni.com/

For electronics components and for breadboards etc. I’ve found https://www.bitsbox.co.uk/ are good value, they also do cheap Arduino clones.

That’s all for this week, we’re really looking forward to next week.

Declan, Dave & Alaidh