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I have been building a binary clock lately and although in reverse order, here is the design template for the final case/display build.
All will become clear when I post up my PIC design and prototype of the EasyPic dev board.

Binary Clock - design templates

Several months on and I have just received a Shumatech 350 at a bargain of a price! The Shumatech 550 has just been released so I suspect that there will be a few of these 350`s come up for sale. I`m really impressed with it, I need to mount it properly on a flexable arm or similar but it is good enough where it is for now.

It was used on a lathe by the original owner and so came with two custom cables with plugs that fit neatly into the Chinease scale inputs, the thrid axis I had to buy a 4 pin DIN, cut the ends and solder it to the scale:

Something I didn`t know when I bought it was that it actually powers the scales! No more leaving them turned on by mistake and no more batteries…

The Shumatech just sitting neatly on the shelf behind the mill … I`ll make a proper arm but for now it is great just where it is!

And to all you net nannies, my milling vice is in bits ready for a mod and the little drill vice is mounted on there just to calc. the accuracy of the surface and edge finding with my new DRO setup. I`ve been thrilled with the DRO since I installed the scales but with all three axis together, this is going to make things 100% easier than the awkward places the displays use to get into.

Chris

I received my EasyPIC 6 dev board a few days ago and I`m thrilled with it. It really is a super slick bit of kit! Ease of use is just immense and I had it running and programming within about 5 minutes of plugging it in and installing MikroC.

Here is my vid of a few clips of me playing around with the board and its functions:

I`m not going to do a huge review as there are already a few out there by people much more knowledgeable than me but I`m just going to mention some of the bits that I like …

This board has an inbuilt COG LCD display so a display is always on hand:

It of course has the LCD port as well so you can have a second display (or more likely use the COG for debugging). Mikro only sell a 2 x 20 char display but I purchased a couple of 4x20 LCDs of ebay for about £5 and my mate soldered a standard IDE socket on the back - it plugs into the board just fine. You can see it in use in the video along with the COG.

It also has an expansion port, which obviously expands the number of available ports. As of yet I`ve never filled the available pins on a 40 pin PIC so have no use for it yet but it does the job. The COG is actually attached to this so you have to enable the expansion port to get the COG to work.

Also, the easyPic6 has the new matrix keypad which is a really smart extra! Along with the direction and button pad below. I am sure this will come in very useful and saves having to buy the add-on matrix pad.

It also has some “cool” improvements over the earlier models such as an ice blue “program” LED - which of course makes programming go much more smoothly

I have just purchased the G-LCD with touch screen adaptor but as of yet I`ve not even plugged it in. I`ve heard very good things about it.

I have seen the Arduino development boards a few weeks ago and had the opportunity to play around with one for a couple of hours and for both ease of use and actual board content, the Mikroelectronica stuff blew it away in comparison - IMO!

A bit of an update. I`ve been doing some updates to my mill at the moment but I`m hoping I should have some time over the next week to get a first simple prototype built. Quite a bit to do yet.

Here is the clock frames assembled with the pillars and washers - camera phone so not the best quality.

There was an explosion on the forums a while ago with people making these little rocker engines. I couldn`t afford to spend much time on this project I just fancied having a go at the engine concept. It doesn`t look great, but runs just fine. It wasn`t running great in the video but seems to be running much better now!

Not amazing, just my first attempt at using an LCD and to be honest, with MikroC library there isn`t much too it. I need an LCD on my next project so I thought I would give it a go on a working code that I had wrote. Please see my other vid for the version without lcd and just flashing leds.

This is the first run of my Boxford 8″ Shaper that I have been trying to restore. I have converted the motor from the original 3ph to a single phase supply, re-made the drive pully which had chipped and finally cleaned and oiled as well as getting over some other mini hurdles! I got this some months ago and it has taken a good while to get running. I have made a bit of swarf with it and it looks to be working fine but more video`s to come shortly of it cutting the metal stuff. I`ve never used a shaper so please feel free to leave any info or words of wisdom.

This is totally pointless but again I`ve learnt a lot from it, specifically using functions.

It is based on the old Ball and Cup game - you know the one where you have to select which cup the ball is under. Basically, there are three buttons and the first row of leds lights to show your selection. The top row then starts to count and then stops on the computer selection (or under which cup the ball actually was!). If you match the leds, you win and the leds flash. If you don`t you lose and the leds come on solid and then reset.

Here it is, the build and then finally a video of it in action: