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[Reply #270 on:]

5m LED strip, RGB, 24 watts per color.  $14.50 shipped.  They have resistors built in, so constant current driver isn't needed.. just pump em 12v.  I've got a bunch of logic MOSFETs that ought to work great.  I am thinking of using an ATTINY and see how that goes.. no need to commit a 328 to what amounts to color blending and switching... I've talked the wifey into letting me redo the main lighting in the living room.. I have exposed beams, so I am planning to mount to the beam and act as a wall wash instead of direct lighting.  Should soften the light a bit and avoid shadows.  I'll then add several 10w warm whites.  I'll have balanced chromatic light that I'll be able to fiddle with easily..

Also nabbed an SD card module...got a five pack of 32k EPROMS for ten cents, shipped, just cuz I could... lol

[Reply #271 on:]

Bought a 3D print at Shapeways.com - just a tiny test shape. The picture shows the same shape done on the now rather old MendelRepRap at the club, and another done on a friends Ultramaker. You may guess which is which Price info:

5¢	500$ machine
20¢	2000$ machine
10$ plus shipping	50000(?)$ machine

[Reply #272 on:]

Did some ebay shopping again:
bunch of capacitors: 100uF
test wires with female header connectors
Dual H Bridge DC Stepper Motor Drive Controller Module Board Arduino L298N

http://www.ebaypa.com/albums/20120002/sku030020_1.jpg

Finally after a long time I should get my 4 wheel robot driving. I've been away from the forum for a while as I sold my house and moved to another.

[Reply #273 on:]

Got 20 USB-B-S-RA plugs, the same kind as used on my UNO board, for 54 cents each. I won't run out soon. One of the hangups I've had about V-USB projects is the connect. These are clean and cheap.

Got 4 328P-PU's for $2.06 ea and a set of male to female jumper wires and some header pins, just to fill out enough to justify the shipping.

And of course days later I come up with need for female 15-pin 2-row d-sub connectors, got a buddy with old CH pedals and no midi/gameport in his PC. Ain't that the way?

[Reply #274 on:]

Lets see, the latest thing I bought was the Video Experimenter Arduino Compatible Shield from Nootropic design (http://nootropicdesign.com/ve/).  My plans are to merge the video out that I do with my steampunk camera with the arduino doing shutter release and perhaps using a servo to zoom the lens.  It was just mailed today, so I haven't gotten it yet.

Before that, I bought some protoshields and small breadboards from yourduino.com (http://arduino-direct.com/sunshop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=93), with the idea that unlike my bigger breadboard, I can keep everything on the shield and take it off when I switch projects, instead of having to rewire the connections.

[Reply #275 on:]

I didn't buy it but..
internation rectifier finally sent me a free power mosfet sample kit, took so long I completely forgot about it, but now I got some nice assortment of free mosfets

[Reply #276 on:]

yea I just got mine a couple days ago, theres some nice parts in there

[Reply #277 on:]

A couple of weekends ago, after I had accepted a new software development position (yay - I have a job again!) - I went to my favorite electronics junkyard and picked up eight gear motors that were meant to actuate valves for a Jacuzzi spa. They run on twelve volts. The gearboxes are made of plastic, so they aren't super robust. The output "shaft" (it really is a hollow tube that is meant to be mounted on a square valve stem, I think) has a protrusion that actuates a micro-switch (probably meant to tell the Jacuzzi controller "open" vs "closed"). I haven't been able to stall the motor by hand, but running it barely pulls 400 mA, and loaded maybe 600 mA. Not a bad set of gear motors; I paid $4.00 each for them...

[Reply #278 on:]

Four Dollars???  Do they look like this:


If they do, this is one heck of a find!!  They are made to turn a valve that controls high volumes of water and cost tons more than what you paid (100+).  I may be going down there to buy them out of the things.

[Reply #279 on:]

internation rectifier finally sent me a free power mosfet sample kit, took so long I completely forgot about it, but now I got some nice assortment of free mosfets

My kit arrived Wednesday.  Did you get the fancy light blue pouch?

[Reply #280 on:]

I did, though not as fancy as the vinyl checkbook cover like books I got with some cap samples 

[Reply #281 on:]

Yep, now I need to find a use for a 2x2qfn mosfet lol

[Reply #282 on:]

Four Dollars???  Do they look like this:


If they do, this is one heck of a find!!  They are made to turn a valve that controls high volumes of water and cost tons more than what you paid (100+).  I may be going down there to buy them out of the things.

No - they didn't look like that; though that might be a "complete" unit, whereas what I bought might be "inside" that case (I only got the gear motor - not that valves themselves). They were all hooked up to a controller that said Jacuzzi on it.

They were outside, in a tangled mess of a box. Wires and junk everywhere. There was only the eight; there weren't any others, as far as I could see...sorry.

[Reply #283 on:]

My wife really likes the LED wall wash lighting, so I bought another spool.  Five meters of RGB LED's, has built in current limit resistance.  300 LED's, common anode, with adhesive backing.  Got this reel for just over ten bucks, the first one cost about eighteen.  Bottom feeding takes patience, but if you are willing to trade ten hours of search for a two dollar savings, you can get amazing deals at times.  Twenty four watts per color for a total of seventy two watts of chromatic-tunable lighting.  Now I'll have twice that, which should be enough to use as the primary lighting in the living room.  Using a salvaged ATX power supply for power, and fading with MOSFETs driven by Arduino code running on an ATMEGA8.

Also came across something I could not resist-  a 405nm deep violet/near UV laser.  Been playing with fluorescence and that 3 watt UV LED I picked up a while back (quinine fluorescence in tonic water is an interesting light spread, as is Ethylene Glycol.  trying to come up with something interesting to do with it photographically).  It's only going to increase the flexibility and prime the ideas more to have a laser at that frequency also-- fiddling with fluorescence with a laser is going to be amusing I hope... since it was four bucks for the module @10 mw, I stretched the toy budget to fit it in.  

Lastly, a little bird gave me an Allen Bradley 1771-OB DC Output Module.  12-24v rated, looks like some pretty decent power transistors but havin't looked them up yet.  Is there any reason I should NOT just strip the board for parts?  As it's some kid of backplane bus, I doubt it's got much practical use to me as-is...

[Reply #284 on:]

Got a few 128 position optical encoders from a guy on eBay for $17 each, new.  These are $80 new from normal suppliers.

http://www.newark.com/bourns/ens1j-b28-l00128l/optical-encoder/dp/62K3108

3000rpm, 200,000,000 revolution lifetime, minimum.