VFD Filament Driver Circuit

Don't give up! I spent the last 3 years troubleshooting this circuit with an LM4871 chip with the goal of supplying a low voltage alternating square wave current across the filament of vacuum fluorescent displays. Spoiler alert: it was the addition of a single 10Ω resistor to lower the voltage from ~5V down to ~3.3V.

Milling PCBs in the Classroom, Updated Workflow

I'm continuing to teach high schoolers to design their own circuit layouts and mill the boards so they can solder them together and have their own custom hardware to keep. The microcontroller I use for these is usually an ATTiny 85, 84, Adafruit Metro Mini, or Raspberry Pi Pico, all relatively inexpensive. What follows is an easier workflow than I've outlined in previous posts.

Milling PCBs: Tinkercad Circuits, Eagle, Carbide Copper, and Carvey

This workflow for designing and milling a single-sided PCB on the Carvey CNC is an updated workflow from that which I worked out last year when I first started doing this in my high school classroom/maker space. This workflow is much simpler, and allows my students to make their own simple PCBs in less time and with less frustration, while still giving them an experience of circuit design, PCB layout, and hardware integration to container design.

Hacking IKEA LEDBERG flexible rgb lightstrip

I got a roll of awesome rgb lights at IKEA and used part of it to make an infinity mirror (sorry the link is to IKEA Europe but for some reason it's not on the US site, but anyway it was here in large quantities in Brooklyn). It's made to cut at certain points marked with a scissors and I only used a few feet of a 5 meter roll for the mirror project. So at the time I thought I would figure out eventually how to use the rest. It would be a shame to throw away.

Milling PCBs: Fritzing, FlatCAM, and Carvey

I have a new superpower of making PCBs! Here are my steps, worked out over several boards of my own and my students. The project here is one my students did using an Adafruit Pro-Trinket 5V to program 5 LEDs and a button. (I now know we could have used an ATtiny84 to control the LEDs but I'm just starting to learn how to use them.) Here are a few finished projects.