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Author Topic: Presenting my workshop and how I am fighting uphill to get order into it  (Read 30813 times)

Hellmut1956

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%==BCague
« Reply #50 on: April 20, 2018, 11:56:41 am »


Health is still an issue, even after my 3rd stroke early in 2017. The last couple of months I had to fight against being extremely tired, slept more than 15 hours a day and in between often my brain was unable to work on stuff in my workshop and my other projects related to the build from scratch of my sailboat model I call Carina. today I want to focus on reporting advances and activities related to my electronic workbench in general and my panel.





I did modify what used to be my electronics corner and has been reworked to store stuff, mainly screws of any kind in glasses as shown. This way I can see the kind of screws available there and choose the appropriate one.


Doing window shopping in the Internet I found 2 devices that I felt would be of interest for my electronics workbench:





Here the real device as it looks like:







This will be used to monitor the PC power supply that generates all the tensions I have available in my workshop. It is for AC monitoring. i have no need for it, but I thought it would be nice to have this values displayed .







This device displays the voltage and current of a DC line and seeing it brought to my mind to have the individual voltage sources of my display monitored and the values displayed on this screens:





This was my first shot as to how to expand my panel to include this displays. As you can see, above each set of colored receptacles the display that will show the voltage and current values as it monitors those. The displays have to be placed at 2 levels as the original panel design had the receptacles too close to each other.


Here the drawing from the provider that shows how the displays have to be connected to monitor the DC line:





Seeing this, that I had already seen online, I did a first sketch as to how the circuit of the panel had to be modified  to add the monitoring capability of this displays:





Just doing this sketch I noticed "Houston, there is a problem"! The sketch showed to me, what I could have seen already online, that monitoring the voltage was not a problem, but monitoring the current represents a challenge!





To monitor the voltage all I have to do is connect the "yellow line" of each display to the line that goes to the colored receptacles on the panel. But monitoring the current meant I had to modify my whole scheme for implementing the ground. In my current panel the GND is common to all voltages and so I have provided 6 black colored receptacles on both sides of the panel and 12 screwable GND connectors which are based on the top left of the panel, next to the 5 screwable connectors for the "positive lines of each voltage. You see the to the right of the GND ones! Part of the reason for this problem is that the displays monitor the current using the negative pole.





This was my second design for the modified panel that enables me to place 2 columns of 3 black receptacles bellow each display. Fortunately I just hat to turn around the wooden plate expected to be used, as the displays where at the center of the wooden plate. Compare this foto with the one 4 fotos earlier! While this does solve the problem of getting the areas needed for the black receptacles it left me with the need to rebuild the rather complex physical circuit on the rear side of the current front plate of the panel! searching for support in a couple of electronic forums I got the advice about having to have the ground lines of each tension to be "floating" to one another! Knowing a bit about potential issues with ground planes in electronics and knowing that devices usually have to be grounded with earth to prevent the user from damage, I felt qualified enough to ask the proper questions. 95% is cleared so far. I can operate the panel fed from the modified PC power supply. What is left is if the tension doubler used to generate the 24 VD from 12 VDC.


Finally yesterday I found a source for a black colored plate, 570 x 115 x 3 mm that will replace the current black front plate of my panel. I have decided to replace it as it will be sized 3.5 cm higher and reach on the left side to the place were battery charger pliers can be connected to where the wooden plate on the top of the current panl ends to the right. This way I will be able to place black receptacles coming from the current monitoring of the displays next to the colored ones. Having more physical room between the receptacles of the different tensions I will have the space next to the switch to place an RGB LED that will indicate when ON, that the switch is in the ON position. Each of this LED will have the color corresponding to the tension!

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tigertiger

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Welcome back Hellmut :-))
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ballastanksian

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Yes, I remember your efforts at streamlining your workshop and am pleased to see you back and at it. Pace yourself and you will soon have a first rate electronics suite.
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RST

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Very envious.  In my previous works we had well organised benches with power points and benchtop PSU's, wellorganised powerplug-in points for 12 and 24v, then 110 and 230.

My current place doesn't understand this.  They run mains electricity to exposed terminals on desks in the office (choc-bloc style) on 24v DIN rail PSU's, they have never heard or want for the likes of these...



...I dug an awesome and quite expensive benchtop PSU giving linear twin 0-24v outputs plus fixed 5v from under the workbench the other month.  I brought in shelf brackets to fix it above our workbench so it is used.  It's a great piece of kit but none of the electrical guys want to use it and back under the bench it goes.  If I bring up there is exposed 230v terminals they just shrug, or someone slaps a cardboard box over it!  Apparently cardboard is good for our 400v gear also!!!
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RST

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...sorry, my bad.  Did something silly trying to edit my post and clicked reply by accident
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surfer71

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Best thing I did was to buy up a load of BISLEY office units. These where 6 draw A1 Drawing metal units.. standing around 5ft tall..
I bought them welded 4" wheels on the bottom and painted them red with black draws.. better than the old Grey
and these are brilliant for my work shop..
I can fill them up and line them up my workshop wall..
or if I want pull them out on the wheels and push them to another part of the workshop.. easy!!


I can't work out how to post pictures yet but will one day LOL

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Hellmut1956

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Great, I will wait for your pictures!
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Hellmut1956

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Going on!
« Reply #57 on: July 15, 2018, 08:24:22 pm »

Hi! my health is still causing me numerous problems, but my fascination with our hobby and with working on my workshop keeps me going. However it is far too slow for me!






On one side was able to upgrade my office in my workshop. I bought a high res display from acer, 3840 x 2160 resolution and with my new graphics board, GTX1060, I am now able to have up to 5 screens connected at a time! Finally as my webcams were failing due to problems that originate in the connection cable I bought a Logitech Brio 4K Streaming Edition. It can record with the same resolution as my acer display. The problem here nevertheless is that the webcam can only take fotos with a resolution of up to 800 x 600! But when using it i.e. with Skype, the background can be seen sharply and very well.





I have also had some advances with what i call my 3. Generation Panel. this foto shows how it is going to look. What changed with this "upgrade" is that now it will have 2 an 5 receptacles for both Ground and the positive pole, where my earlier panel just had 1 and 1 receptacle with just the positive pole. The lower 2 receptacle pairs for each tension are always "ON", while the 5 above are switched "ON/OFF" with the switch. As the small displays at the top of each tension supply measure the current using the Ground line, the ground line by passes the switches. At the bottom you can see my screwable connectors, 6 per tension, still in construction.





You can see this module still in construction! The black colored screwable connector pair you can see on top of each tension will be the single point of connection for each tension between this module and the panel. Still having some trouble to get for the upper row of connectors the right cabling.





As you can guess, there is still a lot of cabling to be done. My lumbago this week did further delay my work on this!
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Martin (Admin)

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 Ay Caramba!   :o
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SteamboatPhil

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red to green, green to blue,  Blew up  {-) {-) {-) {-) {-)
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ballastanksian

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Once installed, it will be an enviable electronics system Helmut.
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Hellmut1956

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And as with building models, the work is in its own right a joy!
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ballastanksian

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Your expression in the above photo was one of determination with a slight touch of jocularity  :-)
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Hellmut1956

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I have seen better fotos of myself!  :-))
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Hellmut1956

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Re: Presenting my workshop and how I am fighting uphill to get order into it
« Reply #64 on: December 26, 2018, 01:32:59 am »

I hope you had a merry Christmas, have not eaten too much and getting ready to the festivities when moving to the next year. My best wishes to all of you. Last new year my wish was not to have to go to the hospital in 2018. Sadly I succeeded to survive 3 stays at the hospital. by now I am on my 4th stroke, fortunately as I take medicine to diluted the blood they were light ones. my last stay at the hospital was due to my diabetes. For those of you my long term value was 11, below 7 is good and my actual sugar level was 408 and it should be below 140. As our NHS in Germany does not pay for me to measure the sugar level in my blood I just did learn during my last stay that started the day of my birthday that I had been wrongly instructed or not understood the right use of a medicine that is shot into the fat around my stomach, it is not insulin. Obviously the days between christmas and the new year are not good for patients with diabetes. But excluding the current time im down to around 210. I can feel that many of the problems I had during my last 4 months are now much smaller.


While in the hospital I red some books about artificial intelligence and its impact on the job market. Scary for my kids and their kids. Back home I got a special offer from my source of technical books and so I decided to purchase eBooks, videos and courses about "Blockchain". Just 5 USD each! I simply did not like the fact to read pretty often about Blockchain technology and its possibles uses in other fields then cryptocurrencies. It looks worth to dig into it.


Finally I have been placing my new panel in work on my desk to be constantly remembered to continue working on it. I got bonus credits for my source Conrad and so I decided to buy the complete line, is called E12, of resistances in a 1206 SMD package plus special boxes to organize them. 1206 package is relatively bid for smd resistances, 12x6 mm. I will use them on a small pcb, an electronic board, to be able to control color and intensity of the so called RGB LEDs. So I will now prepare myself to make those boards that will hold the colored LEds on my panel. One reason that made me decide to have the luxury of having the complete line E12 of 1/4 Watt SMD resistances is not to be buying a second 28" 4K resolution display for my office desk. The other reason that got me to the decision to buy those resistances and the boxes made specifically to hold those small SMD packages is that every one of the 8 RGB LEDs that I have next to the switch of the corresponding voltage receptacles requires different kind of resistance values.





This drawing helps me to present to you what I am doing. Kind of start to give you some information to feel more confident when dealing with electronics. If some of you have ever been exposed to programming, you might remember that to test if a setup is ok, you make the controller to display the message "Hello World". This makes you confident that your experimental setup is OK. Now similar for other kind of electronics as you deal with when you work with an Arduino, i.e. is to make an LED blink.


Now when you are rightly proud to have achieved this and you have learned how to program the Arduino to control the intensity of the light of an LED so you can dim it. The a bit more control is achieved using a technique that is called PWM. It is pretty simple. The more current flows through an LED the more intensive is the light it does emit. A PWM is kind of a switch that turns the feeding of current to the LED ON and OFF. If the switch is OFF, the LED does not illuminate, if it is constantly ON then current is constantly flowing through the LED making it shine bright. As the human eye is not able to see the LED to be OFF pretty fast is if it is constantly changing from ON to OFF and viceversa. So the human eye makes an average of the light intensity. The more OFF time the more the LED is dimmed.


Now normal LED do tolerate about 20 mA. That is very little current. If it gets more it is destroyed. So in the drawing you can see that the resistances for each LED are not equal.


R4 = 150 R, the Red LED,
R5 = 90 R, the Green LED and
R6 = 100 R, the Blue LED.

The RGB LED is called so because it consists of a red one, a green one and a blue LED. Depending on the intensity of each of those LED you can create the perception of you eve to see a different color.

Now added complexity for the RGB LED in my panel is the voltage fed to the RGB LED on a pin that called anode, means positive. In my panel each RGB LED is fed with a different voltage:

24 VDC
12 VDC
5 VDC
3.3 VDC
-5 VDC
-12 VDC
and one that can be up to 40 VDC.

So the resistances you see on the drawing do limit the maximum current fed to each LEd to be 20 mA feeding the RGB LED with 5 VDC.

Using the law of Ohm R = U / I

being R the resistance in Ohm,
being U the voltage in Volt and
being I the current in Ampere.

So using this formula I can calculate the resistance value applying the voltage at each line and the maximum current of 20 mA = 0,020 Ampere.

The BC547 is an example of a transistor. This device is used to protect the circuit in the controller from getting damaged. So putting a 1000 Ohm resistor, electronics abbreviate just saying it is 1000 using the letter "k", kilo. The transistor is a switch. If the proper voltage is applied to the pin shown in the drawing the circuit of the corresponding LED is connected to ground allowing current to flow. If the other posible value is applied to switch interrupts the current to that LED. This switching very fast from "0", means 0 voltage and "1" being in this drawing 3.3 voltage is controlled by the PWM function in the controller.

In my panel I will use 8 RGB LED, this means I need to supply 3 PWM to each RGB LED so 8x 3 = 24. My RaspBerry Pi does not have that many pins available to operate as PWM control for the BC547.




So I do use 2 of this boards that have the hardware to generate 16 independent PWM. So generating 12 PWM at each board I do have the 24 PWM I do need. My RaspBerry Pi board does communicate with each of the 2 boards and defines how the PWM has to be setup.


A lot of effort only justifiable if doing this efforts results in a functionality that I do enjoy. So the RaspBerry Pi board does control the color of the 8 RGB LED to correspond each to the color of the receptacles. Switching the the switch on the panel at each column of colored receptacles does either switch the RGB LED ON or OFF indicating that there is or not voltage available at the corresponding receptacle.
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Hellmut1956

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Re: Presenting my workshop and how I am fighting uphill to get order into it
« Reply #65 on: January 14, 2019, 06:37:32 am »

Advancing in both health and on my panel! On the health front I have spend a week in hospital starting at my birthday, my sugar levels were frightening high! For those of you that know about it, my long term value was 11, should be below 7 and measuring the sugar myself 408, below 140 is OK. Now after I decided myself to buy a blood sugar measurement equipment and sensors yesterday I did measure a level of 327. So I will be calling my doctor to adapt my medicine to fix this.


A clever forum member did recommend a solution for my problem to drive the RGB LED for the individual voltages supplied by my panel. I am changing to switches with 2 poles, 4 pins. So when I do switch to "ON", 1 pole feeds the voltage to the receptacles above, the second pole will control simultaneously the RGB LED state to "ON" feeding +5 VDC to the RGB LED circuit. Typical for good solutions, simple! I have purchase those switches and they are illuminated red when the switch is in the "ON" position!


The other activity was turning in my christmas presents to buy a set of 3000 resistance covering the E12 series in a 1206 package.


3000-SMD-Widerstaende-1206-0-25W-1-Sortiment-Set-Resistor-1-4W-E12


3.1 x 1.55 mm size!


Universal-Gehäuse 28 x 16 x 20 ABS Blau 1 St.


Here the link to the article, even as it is in German the technical data should be no problem.


I have purchased 60 of this boxes made to store up to 250 pieces of 1206 sized devices. Each box has a cavity if 10x10x10 mm and a cover plate that seals the drawing with a bit of pressure from the small spring you can see on the left 2 boxes. They can be connected to each other in a 2D fashion. So I make a unit of 5 rows, each with 12 boxes, to store the SMD resistances organizez as shown in the list of the specifications of the 3000 resistors I bought. The devices can be taken out using a tweezer and the boxes and the cover closure prevents smd devices to drop out from within the box unintentionally I will make a small shelf, 25 to 30 mm high, in which I will place the units. So, equivalent to the assortment I have for through hole resistors, there we a single place to find the SMD 1206 resistors in my electronic workbench.


My diabetes and my treatment of it do impact my seeing quite dramatically so I need special magnifying glass and very good light to be able to read what is printed on each device to specify its value.
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Re: Presenting my workshop and how I am fighting uphill to get order into it
« Reply #66 on: January 14, 2019, 08:01:55 am »


Goodness Helmut.....we hope your health continues to improve  :-)) & then you could go into a business selling your resistors ......Derek

Christmas purchase ....3000 SMD Resistors 1206 0,25W 1% Assortment Set Resistor 1 / 4W E12
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Hellmut1956

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Re: Presenting my workshop and how I am fighting uphill to get order into it
« Reply #67 on: January 14, 2019, 05:00:25 pm »

Je, Je, Je! You are right. But when you buy an assortment that contains all resistances of a series, the individual Resistor is so cheap and so small, that you end up having SMD resistor for the rest of your life. But there is also the joy when working as long as I do in organizing the chaos in my workshop to add a shelf where you have the resistors well organized and documented. What was really in comparison expensive were those boxes for the resistors!
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Re: Presenting my workshop and how I am fighting uphill to get order into it
« Reply #68 on: January 14, 2019, 07:44:39 pm »

 :-)) Keep getting better Hellmut.
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Hellmut1956

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Still Fighting health problems. I spent 10 days in the hospital as my blood sugar went crazy. I am on my way to get the sugar under control. The FreeStyle Libre 2 blood sugar monitoring system





Shows me my actual blood level in the tissue and so I can eat whatever I want, using short time and longtime insulin that I do inject myself I can always reach healthy blood levels. Also the system warns me acoustically when upper or lower thresholds I set are passed. In Germany health system pays everything and it is not cheap.


But my general health condition has got worse and so what I used to do in 30 minutes, now I need the whole day. By the way, none of my family members is the girl on the photo, but I thought it was better than putting me on the photo.
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ballastanksian

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Well work at the rate you can cope with and then you won't over do it and suffer for your health Hellmut.
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Hellmut1956

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Thx!
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Hellmut1956...

just curious...   how long have you been diagnosed as a diabetic?
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Hellmut1956

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About 4 years. But it really got mad in the last 12 months.
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Just keep asking to try different Insulins (if you're taking it)  I am a type1/2 somewhere in the middle and have been diagnosed as Insulin resistant.  However I was prescribed an Insulin called Toujeo and together with empaglifaloxin seems to be working.  I do inject Humalog, as well, and that's 6 times a day.There is in the UK a new Insulin which you only take once a week.  I don't know it's name but it's not "lizard spit", tried that and it didn't work either.It can get you down but you just need to try and push through it.  Easier said than done.Anyways, good luck.
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