I've been pretty lax in updating my blog lately. Part of that is that I haven't had a whole lot of time to tinker in the workshop. Let me give an outline of some of the projects on my plate right now.
First, I want to finish my sous vide cooking controller. I've developed the schematic and am in the process of selecting parts. Then I'll lay out the PCB and either etch one myself or get one fabbed. With the low prices offered by Seeed Studios and iTead, I may opt to get a board fabbed. I want to design this with mostly SMT parts. The industry is headed that way and most of the newer and cooler chips are only available in SMT packages. I might as well jump on the bandwagon now. There will be some through-hole parts on this project; notably the power transformer, the LCD display, and the TRIAC. Maybe some others as well. We'll see what it looks like when parts selection is finished but it's going to be mostly SMT with some through hole stuff in there.
Second, I'm building a combination-lock solving robot. I have this combination lock on my desk to which I've forgotten the combination. Rather than doing what a normal person would do (throw it out and buy a replacement lock for $6), I'm designing a rig with an Arduino and a setpper motor to try all possible combinations until the right one is found. I bought most of the parts with my Free Day coupon from Sparkfun. The code is written and the motor turns as expected, I now have to build the physical structure to hold the lock, mount the motor over the lock's shaft, and pull on the shackle. There are other projects that have done this before, but I enjoy the process of making so I'm going to build one myself.
Third, I've been inspired by a project by Markus Gritsch. He built a digital music box that plays beautiful, music-box-like sounds from a PIC32 and no analog parts whatsoever. He uses the PWM peripheral as a DAC to drive the speaker. I want to expand upon his project.
Fourth, I bought some thumbwheel switches from eBay that have digits 0-9. I want to build a cheap resistance decade box from those.
Fifth, I have a superprobe board that I got from the Dangerous Prototypes free PCB drawer. I need to order parts and populate that board.
Sixth, I want to work on a timer for the low voltage lights outside my house.
The main cause of delay is that I want to submit one parts order and order all the parts for all the projects to save on shipping costs. I've found that sitting down and doing parts selection can be an incredibly time consuming chore and I just haven't found the time to do finish that. I'm working on it.