Category: Uncategorized

Today was ultra-awesome productive! I got up, fixed the lawn mower, mowed the lawn, cleaned up a lot of the mess in the backyard that Flux has made, went for a long motorcycle ride (Woodinville, Duvall, Monroe), almost pooped when a train blew it’s horn like 5 God damn feet from me, charged Courtney’s car battery and got that running, tested my generator to prep for sale, cleaned up the garage, scoped out the iron pipe offerings at Lowes (for future “shop air” project), put the hinges and clasp on the box for the eBay clock (coming soon!), got nicely buzzed and stuffed at Rock Bottom and am looking forward to a very nice night of blissful sleep.

Also, Courtney took an Introduction to Electronics class at Metrix which sounds like it was very informative!

And I spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out if I can really stick a 3 ton milling machine in my garage. Survey says? Yes we can!

Been getting a lot of spam recently on this site. Lots of stuff where someone will post a comment that almost sounds like a real comment but it’s just bullshit and their URL points to a poker site, or a porn site, or a SEO site, or in the case of one of my posts titled “Tranny”, a site you don’t want to know about.

For that reason, I’ve removed the ability to include your “website” URL when you post a comment. I’ve also caused any post that contains one or more URLs to be moderated by myself. Hopefully that will stem the tide. You can of course leave a URL in the comment if you want to, it just means I’ll look at it in person before approving it.

In a rapidly assembled, last minute (although intended for quite some time) wedding, Courtney and I got married on Saturday, March 13th! We were married by retired judge Hayek at her office in Kirkland and it was very low key. Adam, JoLynn, Scott and his new woman Anissa were in town for Courtney’s birthday party (also the 13th) so we asked them to come along. It was a 5 minute ceremony and then we headed to the Irish pub around the corner 🙂

So, that ends one era of my life and begins another. I’m very much looking forward to what it brings!

The other night I finally finished buying all the supplies I needed to try to anodize some aluminum parts. Anodizing is a process that causes aluminum hydroxide to grow into and out of the surface of aluminum metal. Aluminum hydroxide is very hard, which provides scratch protection and is also porous which allows dyes to color it. Dying the metal is reason for a lot of commercial anodizing and is the main reason I am doing it.

The basic process of anodizing is to form an electrical circuit between the part to be anodized (the anode), dilute sulphuric acid and (usually) another piece of aluminum which is the cathode. Voltage is passed through the circuit which causes the anodizing to take place. The part is then dyed and finally the pores are sealed to keep the dye in.

This post describes how I did it.

First, some safety. Most of the stuff that I am doing to anodize parts can blind or kill you. Always wear gloves. Always wear goggles. Never mix chemicals unless you know what will happen. A few of these chemicals mixed will produce horrible gases that will kill you and your family and probably your dogs too.

Next, the supplies. I bought the following:

• Battery acid, 5 gallons, from NAPA Auto Parts
• Lots of distilled water
• Several plastic buckets from Home Depot
• 1 pound tube of 1/16″ aluminum tig welding rod from Central Welding Supply
• 40 amp battery charger from Harbor Freight
• Black RIT Dye from the supermarket
• 2 single burner hot plates from Target
• 2 6 quart pots for the hot plates

The first step is to get the parts nice and clean. I first washed them in warm water and hand soap and then in a dilute mixture of Simple Green and distilled water.

Next I used the welding rod as simple aluminum wire and attached pieces about 6 inches long to each part I wanted to anodize. You have to make sure the wire is attached very well, and also keep in mind that wherever the wire is attached the metal will not anodize. Lots of people use threaded holes and jam the wire in. I just made some little clips by bending the wire.

Next I took 1.5 gallons of my battery acid and mixed it with 1.5 gallons of distilled water. I kept in mind the AAA rule. Always Add Acid. If you add water to acid the water can boil and “explode”. I put 1.5 gallons of distilled water in a plastic bucket and slowly poured the 1.5 gallons of acid in. Very slowly. Probably took me about 5 minutes.

Next I used some aluminum scrap I had laying around to make a cathode and used some as a rack for the anodes to hang from. It’s pretty clear from the below picture:

I drilled a bunch of holes into the anode rack to use as hook hangers and bent the ends of the anode wires into hooks. Hang the parts.

Next step is to apply the juice! Hook up the negative from the battery charger to the cathode and the positive to the anode rack. I’ve read that it’s best to start at low current and ramp it up. My charger has settings for 2 amps, 10 amps and 40 amps so I set it to 12 volts, 2 amps and let it run for 5 minutes. Almost immediately there were bubbles forming around the cathode. The bubbles are hydrogen gas which comes to the surface. Make sure you have some ventilation so you don’t blow up your house. Remember the Hindenburg.

5 minutes later I turned it up to 10 amps and then 5 minutes later I turned it up to 40 amps.

(I should probably note that I am running this batch as I type this post. Most of the experiences for this post come from a batch I did the other night with slightly different gear. )

At this point I let the anodizing bath run for about 80 more minutes. I have read that anywhere from 45 minutes to 90 minutes is good.

There’s a few ways to tell the anodizing has finished. The current draw should drop quite a bit. An anodized surface does not conduct electricity well, so as the surface becomes more anodized the part conducts less electricity. You may also notice a slight lemon yellow tint to the part. I just let it run for 90 minutes and called it good.

Once the parts are finished, turn off your power supply and rinse the parts very well in cold, clean water. The water must be cold or the parts will start to seal.

Next up is the dye. I used RIT Dye which seemed to work pretty well. There’s lots of places to get proper anodizing dye but RIT seems to work for me. I dumped a bottle the black, liquid RIT into 1 gallon of distilled water and put it on the hot plate. The dye works best heated and most people recommend about 140 degrees so that’s what I used. Once the dye was up to temperature I put the parts in and let them soak for about 15 minutes. I have read that you might get the color you need in as few as 15 seconds depending how dark you want it. I wanted dark, dark black so I left them in for 15 minutes.

At this point you can pull the parts out and you may find that some didn’t take any dye or the dye drips right off. This happened on my first batch with one part. What this means is that you didn’t have a good electrical connection to the part. You can remove the dye and anodizing by etching it in a bath of water and lye. I used a few tablespoons of lye in about a half gallon of distilled water.

Once the parts are dyed the only thing left to do is seal them. This is done with boiling water. I read that steaming the parts before putting them in boiling water can help you lose less dye, so I put a pot of water on my other hot plate, put a rack over the pot and placed the parts on the rack. Then I boiled the water letting the steam wash over the parts for about 10 minutes. Then into the bath they go. 30 minutes in boiling water and the parts should be sealed and ready for use! Hooray!

I’m still a total newbie at this, and I’m actually going to a professional anodizing shop next week to see how they do it. That said, I did get really nice results and it seemed pretty easy. Takes some time and a few dollars but the result is amazing!

My pictures of the finished results are here and Courtney’s pictures of the process are here.

Update: All the design files and build information is now available at http://vonnieda.org/tc18

So, back in September the company I worked for, Displayware, ceased operations. That’s a fancy way of saying we went out of business. We did that because we ran out of money and didn’t have enough coming in to sustain the very meager workforce we had. Since then I’ve been unemployed, but mostly as a choice. I had money in the bank and was pretty burned out from the Displayware days so I decided to just take some time off and work on my own stuff and chill out.

Right before that happened, Ladyada of Adafruit released her design for a clock based on an old Russian vacuum fluorescent display tube called an IV-18. I thought the clock circuit was really cool and the tube was great but I didn’t care much for the acrylic case. A day or two later I somehow came across a Slashdot article about it and was reading some of the comments when I saw someone comment on the case and post a picture of his own design.

THIS was the clock I wanted. I totally fell in love with the clock design and decided I must have one. This short conversation, via Slashdot comments, followed:

I never did hear back from John. I assumed he just never saw the comment. I spent some time trying to find an email address but eventually gave up and instead decided just to build it myself.

One of the things I decided to do when Displayware croaked was spend some time learning how to use my CNC mill. I bought a 3 axis mill in November f 2008 but had never really took the time to learn to use it. So, I spent many days getting up early, going out the garage and not coming out till Courtney got home from work. Those were very enjoyable days. My hands were dirty and cut, I was chopping up bits of metal and programming the mill and learning new stuff every day.

Eventually I got to the point that I felt like I could make stuff on the mill so the next step was to learn how to use CAD and CAM. I downloaded a CAD system and set to work learning how to use it. That took some time but eventually I was able to design the three metal plates I saw in the clock picture. Since all I had to work with was a single graphic from one angle I had to guess at a lot of things but I think I eventually came up with dimensions that were pretty close to original. The only real dimensions I was sure of were those of the tube itself, so I used what I knew about that to take educated guesses at the rest.

Once I had designs ready to go I bought some sheets of stainless steel and went about trying to cut the clock parts out from it. I used stainless because from the rendering of the clock that’s what I thought it was supposed to be. It turned out that it was nearly impossible for me to cut stainless on my little mill, so I switched to aluminum sheet and had much better luck. I cut the six plates out and sanded them a bit and set them aside.

The next step was to make the metal pipes that connect the whole thing together. From the picture I thought these were polished aluminum so that’s what I started with. I bought some 6061 aluminum tube from Online Metals (where I get everything in this post) and set to trying to make it pretty. The process I eventually came up with is that I would take these 12″ sections of tube and stick one end into the chuck of my drill press. Set the speed to the lowest it would go and turn it on. Then I started with 250 grit sandpaper running up and down the spinning tube. Then 500 grit, then 1000, then 2000. After all that the tube is looking pretty smooth so I took some polishing compound to it and that really made it shine. It looked just like the picture.

I cut out 8 1/2″ sections and 4 4″ sections, drilled the small ones through to widen the inner diameter to 1/4″ and then tapped both ends of the larger ones so they would accept bolts.

The next step was to find a LOT of o-rings. If you look at the picture you’ll see there are 24 o-rings used between all the pieces of tube. It’s an awesome design element and I wanted to stick with it. Unfortunately, when I went to the plumbing store I could only find about 4-6 of the ones I needed and they were almost a buck a piece. The o-rings would cost more than the rest of the clock! Eventually I decided to check McMaster-Carr, who I had never ordered from before, and it turned out I could buy bags of 100 for something like $1.34 total. That worked!

The final step in the design was the black perforated metal sleeves around the ends of the clock. I had been worrying about these for a while. I figured I could get perforated metal just fine, and bend it into shape maybe, but I had no idea how I would connect it at the bottom and make it look nice. I started researching welding aluminum and I started looking for used TIG welders.

Since I couldn’t really afford any of the welders I was seeing I decided to just try hacking it together. What I ended up doing was using my mill to cut down a sheet of perforated aluminum to a 1″ thick strip about 14″ long. Then I made another CAD model. This one was of the shape that would fit inside this sleeve. I used this on the mill to cut out 2 3/4″ MDF forms which I glued together to make a single 1.5″ form. Using this form, a heavy pair of leather gloves and a heat gun I heated the aluminum up till it started to be easier to bend and then wrapped it around the form. I stuck a clamp on it to hold it shut and then I broke off a 1/2″ long strip of the same stuff from another piece. I put this inside the sleeve and super-glued it down to hold the sleeve together.

The super-glue worked okay but I knew I could pop it apart pretty easily if I wanted to. So, my next idea was JB Weld. This worked great! I mixed up some JB Weld, smeared it all over the inside of the sleeve and over the little brace and let it set up. After that it was rock solid. I sanded the whole thing down, spray painted it gloss black and called it good.

Once everything was dry I finally was able to put the whole thing together. After many weeks of work, here’s what I had.

I was pretty happy with it! I thought it looked quite a bit like what I was seeing in the image and for having started with nothing but a picture on the Internet I thought it was going pretty well. So, it was time to work on some electronics.

Somewhere along the way I ordered 5 of the IV-18 tubes from eBay. They were surprisingly cheap. I think I paid like $15. They actually came from Moscow, so that was pretty exciting. Unfortunately, they did not come with a datasheet and I didn’t really have a a pinout for the things. I spent an hour or two with a loupe and headache looking at all the little wires inside and figuring out a pinout. A day later the seller emailed me a datasheet. Oh well.

One of the enabling elements of this whole thing was that when Ladyada posted her clock design she also posted schematics and notes. This allowed me to learn about boost converters, which are circuits that allow you to take a very low voltage and make a very high voltage pretty easily. I knew about boost converters, but I had no idea they could be so easy to build. Ladyada’s designs really made that clear and she even posted a calculator for figuring out the proper values.

The IV-18 tube requires about 20v (volts) to light up and 50v really makes it look great. She was using a 9v wall wart to power her clock and decided that sounded good to me, so I set out to design a boost converter that could convert 9v to 20-50v. The way a boost converter works is that it takes the input voltage, runs it through an inductor and then chops it off to increase the voltage. An inductor is a electronic component that is as simple as a piece of wire wrapped around an iron core. The interesting thing about inductors is that they have electrical inertia. Once you start running power through them they like to keep it going. So, if you suddenly cut off the power the inductor tries to keep the power flowing. Ohm’s law being what it is, since the inductor can’t keep the same amount of current flowing the voltage starts to increase. By simply running a low voltage through an inductor and then turning it off the voltage inside the conductor can suddenly jump to many times what you put in, albeit at a much lower current.

So, to make a circuit that turns 9v into 50v we run 9v through an inductor and turn it off and on many times per second. We store these high voltage pulses in a capacitor until they make up enough to flow the current we need and we have a high voltage power supply. The ratio of how long the inductor is on versus off determines how high we boost.

You can learn more about boost converters at Ladyada’s page: http://www.ladyada.net/library/diyboostcalc.html

So, with all that in mind I bought a bunch of components and more specifically, I bought a bunch of different values of inductors. I wanted to see how different values affected the output. I built the boost converter circuit on a breadboard and used an Arduino to drive the pulses and started plugging in different inductors. Using my oscilloscope I was able to learn about constant conduction and learn more about ripple and power draw on my circuit. I eventually learned that I could run my converter using a 220uH inductor and a 22uF capacitor and easily get 20-60v out of it at the current I needed without pulling the inductor out of constant mode.

So, I had a power supply. The next step was to try to drive the tube. I used the same VFD driver Ladyada was using in her clock and I got Maxim to send me a few samples for free. The driver is a MAX6921 chip. It is basically a shift register that controls 20 output at up to 76v each. It’s pretty awesome. At this point I needed a circuit board to wire everything up so there’s a solid week or two where I tried different ways of making boards. I won’t go into it all now, but the basic process I came up with is using my laser printer to print a transparency, use a UV tube to expose a positive resist board through it, etch with the sponge method using ferric-chloride and then drill all the holes using the mill. I have another long post in the works that describes that whole process.

I ended up making my first ever home made double sided board that had pinouts to hold the IV-18 tube and the MAX6921 chip. Once that was all hooked up I wrote a bunch of code and used an Arduino to drive it and I had a working tube! That first board looked like this:

Using this board and my Arduino I was able to basically write the entire program that runs the clock. I wrote all the driver routines, communication and time keeping. I considered at one point just making my circuit compatible with Ladyada’s code to save some time but after looking at her source I had some different ideas of how I wanted to do things so I just started from scratch.

The next step was to start working on the real board. I had known all along I wanted to make a single board that would fit inside the black sleeve and I knew I wanted it to be surface mount. I really enjoy working with surface mount components and I knew I’d need to use small components to get everything I wanted in the sleeve. This took a pretty long time. It was the most complex circuit I had ever designed and I ended up adding a lot more to it than I expected to. After working on keeping time in the Arduino for a while I decided it just was not accurate enough for me and I decided to add a DS3231 real time clock. This chip basically has everything needed to keep super accurate time and it’s easy to communicate with. So, I ordered up some free samples and went back to the garage to build a breakout board for that chip.

After getting this board made and soldered up I was able to start using it with the Arduino to handle time keeping and things really started to come together. At this point I had this giant mess on my desk consisting of an Arduino, a breadboard holding the boost converter circuit, another breadboard holding the click chip and the tube + driver board. I soon added some long wires and a rotary encoder to the mess and I finally had all the major components of the clock actually on my desk and working. I wish I had a picture of the mess.

Mess or not, this allowed me to write all the code I needed to run the clock. The code handles talking to the DS3231 for getting the time, talking to the MAX6921 to drive the tube, drives and monitors the boost converter, read interrupts from the rotary encoder to drive a menu system and a dozen other little things. It’s extremely interrupt driven and I think it’s the nicest AVR code I’ve ever written.

With all the parts together and working it was time to “capture” the schematic. This is what engineers call it when they take the mess on their desk and turn it into a nice, tidy computer drawing. I used Eagle to completely design the circuit and I got to work designing the board to match it. A few weeks later I had a board design and I sent it off to Gold Phoenix for manufacturing.

This board worked really well, except for a few small errors. The main errors were that I forgot to hook up one pin of the CPU which meant I couldn’t put any code on it and the other was that I determined I needed a pull down resistor on my boost controller’s MOSFET for protection. I soldered these fixes on manually and put the board together and I finally had a clock!

This board allowed me to do all the final bug fixes and get everything ready to actually build the clock. One big problem though was that I had put components too close to the four holes around the edges and had no way to really bolt the thing down. With the electrical errors in mind and this physical issue I decided to do another version of the board and for fun decided to get the board made black. Another payment to Gold Phoenix and a week of nail biting and I had my final, final board.

While I waited for those boards to show up I ended up redrawing the CAD drawings for the three metal frames. I needed them to be a little bigger to make everything fit nicely. I also determined I needed 1/4″ long versions of the small tubes instead of 1/2″ ones so I made those. I got that work done and eventually the boards and parts showed up. Yesterday I finished final assembly, drilled a few holes in one of the sleeves for the power and rotary encoder, put the thing together and finally, after nearly four months of work I was finished*.

The eagle eyed among you (like anyone is actually still reading) will notice some flaws. I scratched up the right sleeve while drilling it, so it needs to be repainted. I think I’ll repaint both of them and put a layer of clear coat on them for protection. The holes in the back are also sloppy, so the right sleeve will probably get remade completely. The small tubes on the left are longer than the right and I’ll probably fix that today. Just need to cut four smaller ones like the right. And the middle pipes need to be about 1/4″ longer to show the entire display.

Aside from those minor things, the project is done! It was a ton of work, and a ton of learning but it’s been great fun and very rewarding.

Last night, to clear up loose ends, I finally spent some time tracking down an email address for John. I wrote him a long letter explaining all this and he wrote back and was very cool about the whole thing. He asked that I give him credit for the design, which I am very happy to do.

I make no claim to the design of the enclosure. It’s wholly dreamed up and designed by John Pfeiffer at http://blog.giantpachinkomachineofdoom.com/

I’m really glad he designed it, and posted that picture of it and even more so that he was very understanding about my little obsession. I think the enclosure is gorgeous and had I not seen it I never would have started this project.

I’d also like to thank Ladyada of Adafruit at http://www.adafruit.com. Her clock design gave me the understanding I needed for the electronics side of this project. While the end result is, I think, quite different from her design it’s definitely got it’s roots in the Ice Tube clock kit that she sells. The kit looks great and you should probably go buy one now!

From here, I intend to open source the whole mess. I have some cleaning up to do but once it’s done I’m going to post the code, schematics, CAD drawings, bill of materials and everything I used to build it. Unless you have a machine shop at your disposal, or a massive obsession like myself, you probably won’t make one like it but maybe you’ll see something that gives you the idea to make something even cooler.

There are more photos of the clock and some of the parts at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vonnieda/sets/72157622935775931/ and below is a video of me showing some of the features of it.

It’s Thursday early evening and we’ve been pretty busy! We’re currently relaxing at our new hotel and getting ready for dinner, which will be traditional. Turkey in Tokyo! Hooray!

Wednesday we slept in a bit and took our time getting ready. We had to change hotels cause we only booked three nights at the Sunroute Plaza. I think if we come back to Tokyo we’ll plan to stay there the whole time. The location is killer and the room is very nice.

Once we got ready and planted our luggage with the staff we head back out to Akihabara to hit some stuff we had missed on Monday and some stuff that was closed. I got a card reader I really liked and Courtney got an iPhone case. We were both feeling kinda run down from all the walking of the last few days and after a quick lunch at Yoshinoya we went back to the hotel to lounge around in the lobby till it was time to move.

Our next hotel was The Hotel Villa Fontaine Shiodome in same. So far it’s very nice! The staff speak excellent English and it’s even a little more swanky than the previous. The entrance to the hotel is an 11 story atrium which is really imposing and very cool. We checked in and lounged around for a while, being a little toured out. We finally decided on dinner at The Oregon Bar and Grill next door which was awesome. It’s on the 42nd floor of a high rise and had great views of Ginza and surrounds. We both had Japanese steak which was very tasty. Kinda fatty for me, but the fat was delicious and buttery so it was great. The Oregon was pretty funny. They had some kind of weird fetish with Oregon and everything was all about Oregon. Oregon approved beef, Oregon wines, a big American flag, a picture of the governor, etc. It was strange. I felt very under dressed and was a little uncomfortable, but they treated us well. One of my favorite memories will forever be the maître d’ helping Courtney into her hoody.

After dinner we were done in, so after a quick stop at the Am/Pm where I found a red colored cola in a bottle with a  logo that was clearly ripped off from Tabasco we headed back to the hotel and crashed. We had to be up very, very early this morning.

Which brings us today. We got up at 4am to make the pilgrimage to the Tsukiji fish market to see the tuna auction. The auction is where all the tuna caught the day before are bid on and purchased to fill the restaurants of Japan with the day’s fish. Courtney found a little trivia factoid that said 1 of every 5 fish caught in the WORLD pass through the Tsukiji fish market.

We eventually found our way to the market but it’s very tourist hostile and had a hard time finding our way. There are thousands of stalls, hundreds of people and hundreds of these little one man fish carrying carts that blast down little rows no more than 6 feet wide. You quickly learn to have eyes in the back of your head, the side of your head, the backs of your ankles and everywhere else. Frankly, it’s terrifying.

Since we had no idea where we were going, we made a mistake and entered the market just a few feet too early. If we had gone another 20 feet we would have seen a sign, a map and a info book. Instead we wandered into mass insanity and got totally lost. We eventually decided to just run for it and got out of there. As we were looking for the way back to the hotel I decided we should just cross the street and look down a road and there was the map and everything else. That helped us pretty quickly get to the tuna auction and we caught the last 15 minutes of it.

The tuna auction is pretty wild. There are hundreds of giant tuna fish laid all over the floor with their heads off and a cut in the tail that I assume shows the quality of the meat. A dude starts to ring a bell and everyone crowds around a fish and then everyone starts yelling. I had no idea how much they are selling for; I’d love to know. Finally, when you win your fish you grab it and drag it out the door. It’s all very, very low tech and visceral.

The long walk and the insane energy put us back at the hotel pretty quickly, and we cleaned up for breakfast and then a long, long nap. Finally, we headed back out to Roppongi to check out Roppongi Hills, which is a 56 story shopping mall. We skipped the shopping part and went right to the top and then the TOP called the Sky Deck. There is an observation deck at the 52nd floor which is enclosed but for another ¥300 you can go to the Sky Deck, level 56, which is actually the roof of the building. You are up there in the open air with the helipad and all the machinery that lives on the top of a modern skyscraper. It was a geek wet dream and I took lots of pictures of giant AC compressors and window cleaning cranes and machines.

And now we are back at the hotel resting up again before dinner. We’re having American Thanksgiving dinner at Roti Roppongi at 9pm. It’s going to be great. Roasted turkey and all the fixings. We’ll have to see how it compares to the last turkey Thanksgiving I had – at Ruth’s Chris in Seattle.

Goodnight!

So it’s Tuesday evening and we’ve been having a wonderful time in Tokyo. Monday we started the day wandering around Akihabara. We spent a ton of time in Radio Departo, which is a 4 story building full of tiny stalls where old guys sell every kind of new and vintage electronics you can think of, and in Radio Center which is a one story version of same with a little more focus on consumer stuff. I really wish I had access to this place back home. It wouldn’t replace Digikey, but it would be really handy when I needed a certain fan, or enclosure, or weird ass wire wound resistor from 1950. We also went to Yodobashi Camera which is the largest electronics store in the world. It’s something like 9 stories with each one being as large as a good sized Best Buy. It was a lot of fun to look around and Courtney picked up a few small gifts and such. And we also spent some time in the small robots and hobby stores. Fun!

After Akihabara we came back to the hotel to rest a bit and then we headed out to wander around Shinjuku. We ended up in an English pub called Hub that was pretty good. Good beer, good fish and chips and really bad company. There were a trio of Americans sitting a few tables away being complete assholes. One guy spent a solid hour telling the others about how many models his friends fucked at the top of his lungs. I noticed he never mentioned how many models HE fucked. Not surprising. They were loud, brash and rude. Exactly what people expect of us in foreign countries. I was sad to see it. It’s the first time I’ve seen that kind of behavior from Americans in another country.

After Hub we went over to Tokyo Tower to enjoy the nighttime view from 330 meters and eventually made our way back to the hotel where we passed out hard.

Today we got a bit later of a start but we made up for it in seeing stuff. We spent a few hours roaming around Shibuya and saw Hachiko’s statue and the famous Shibuya crossing which looks like all those scenes from Braveheart every time the light changes and we went to Asakusa which is the “old town” in Tokyo. Most of Tokyo is neon and craziness, where Asakusa is a little more like old Japan. It also boasts a very, very large lantern.

In Shibuya we were looking for a place to eat lunch and we came across a pizza place. We decided to check it out and it turned out to be a pizza buffet with a totally reasonable price and it was great. Some of the pizza was a little weird, and some of it was very weird but there was plenty that was really good. Check out Shakey’s if you are in Shibuya!

Now we are once again back in the hotel resting up for the evening. I think we’re going to have a pint or two at Hub again and then maybe hit some bars in Roppongi. Woo!

It’s sad for me to see that as I write this post from our hotel in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan I can still see posts from last year’s Japan trip on my front page. I used to post a lot but I’ve stopped! It’s not that less is going on; there’s more, if anything. It’s just that every time I sit down to write I realize it’s going to take hours to catch up and instead I post something pithy on my Twitter feed and get back to work.

Anyway! We’re on vacation again in Japan. It’s pretty exciting! This time we’ve decided to stick purely to Tokyo and really dig in. We have lots of stuff planned this time around and intend to really make the most of our time. We’ll be going to the International Robotics Exhibition at the end of the week which is super exciting and we intend to spend a full day in Akihabara this time around. I’m for the the stalls of Radio Town and Courtney for the highrises filled with 8 bit history. It’s gonna rock.

We’re staying in Shinjuku for the first half of the trip due to some excellent hotel sleuthing by Courtney. It’s totally affordable and we’re about 1 block from all the action. It’s great. We also found out we could take the Narita Express from the airport straight to Shinjuku by paying a 170 Yen fare adjust when we got off, so that rocked.

It’s Monday morning here, pretty early since we’re a bit jet lagged. We’re about to head out and hit the city.

We’re staying at the Hotel Sunroute Plaza Shinjuku. So far, highly recommended.

I’ve been struggling for years to come up with a good process to make quality prototype PCBs at home before sending them off for professional manufacture. It seems like I’ve always run into one problem or another. Recently I decided to just work on it until I got a process that works and I think I’ve done that. Or at least I’m pretty close.

I’m documenting this so that I have a reference, and hopefully it helps you too.

Make your schematic and board in Eagle.

Put a vRestrict rect around all components. This keeps you from having to solder vias and then put components above it. If you use a plating method you can skip this. I use bits of wire.

Put a tRestrict around all through hole components that will be placed on the top of the board and a bRestrict around ones that will be on the bottom. This keep you from having to solder the top and bottom sides of components. You can skip this for easy things like resistors and capacitors. I recommend it for things like ICs and any component whose body is close to the board.

Set up your DRC for minimum clearances of 12 mil and minimum trace size of 16 mil. The larger you can go here the better. I like to start very high and go down until the board is routable. The larger values you use here the more likely your board will come out correct.

Pour ground planes on top and bottom. Choose the POLY tool, select the top layer, set width to 16, isolate to 40, and spacing to 50 if you are using hatching. I prefer solid. Draw the poly around your entire board. Choose the NAME tool and set the name of the poly to GND (or whatever your ground signal is) and then hit RATSNEST. This will pour the ground plane and connect it where appropriate. Do the same for the bottom layer. The ground serves two purposes: One, it’s good design and decreases noise and two it’s less copper you have to etch off which makes your etching go faster and saves your etchant.

Probably need to use RESTRING here to increase size of vias. They were too small.

Draw your board outline on the dimension layer. It’s important that you draw it in one operation, or at least keep in mind the direction you draw the individual lines. You should choose a starting point and then draw  your outline clockwise, never reversing direction or crossing the board. The is important for milling out the outline later.

Save your board, show all layers, select the entire board and CUT.

Create a new board separate from your schema. This will be the board we use to actually etch and mill.

Place three registration marks on the new board. I’m using the 1/8″ marks in the JVN library. Place the marks at:
0.25″, 0.25″
1.25″, 0.25″
0.25″, 1.25″

These marks are used to zero everything for the rest of the process. You’ll use them to line up artwork, drills, milling, etc.

Use the PASTE tool to paste in your board and place it at about 0.50″, 0.50″.

Use the CHANGE tool to change the layer for the outline of your board from Dimension to Milling.

Open LAYERS and select None, then Top, Pads, Vias, Milling.

Print to transparency using Mirror, Black and Caption options.

Open LAYERS, unselect Top and select Bottom.

Print to transparency using Black and Caption options.

RUN pcb-gcode to generate top drills and top milling.

Go to the garage…

Measure the dimensions of the board artwork including the registration marks and cut out a chunk of board using these dimensions.

Drill a 1/8″ pilot hole in the bottom left corner of the board. This will become the bottom left pinning hole for the registration marks.

Pin the board to the mill using this hole and a clamp trying to make it line up reasonably square with the table.

Using the location of the center of the pin as 0,0 use the mill to drill two more 1/8″ holes at 1,0 and 0,1. The board can now be pinned down in two axes and we know it will be straight when we bring it back.

Take the board to etching station and align the top artwork with the registration marks toner side down.

Expose for 12 minutes.

Flip the board and align the bottom artwork with the registration marks toner side down.

Expose for 12 minutes.

Develop and etch the board.

Pin the board back to the milling machine and run the pcb-gcode top drill file.

Run the pcb-gcode top milling file.

Celebrate!