Dead mouse, before autopsy, repair and cleaning

This afternoon I drowned my mouse with a cup of tea and killed it. The mouse was a Microsoft Wireless 4000 Notebook Optical Mouse which I’ve had for over 2 years and liked a lot… Electronics + tea don’t mix

As previously promised on Google Buzz, I’m going to “autopsy” the mouse and see if I can revive it, below are the photos (gadget lovers may want to look away).

I’ve killed or nearly killed a few peripherals with tea… the trick to keeping things alive is to disconnect power ASAP after the spill, hopefully before things short out and the magic smoke gets let out.

Open Mouse

First thing to do is get the screwdrivers out and strip the mouse, as usual some of the screws are hidden under the little “slick” pads that the mouse glides on.

Tea in the bottom of the mouse.

Once you’ve got the mouse apart you can check for damage, I was lucky that the electronics was mostly dry and most of the tea was confined to the plastic areas, some tea had got between the lenses and the little “camera chip” on the board.

Plastic Mouse parts drying.

All the plastic was stripped off and carefully taken apart and put in some hot water with dish washing liquid and brushed clean then left to dried and finally finished off the last bit of drying with a dish cloth. The electronics were dried off with a tissue, but surprisingly enough weren’t that wet.

Re-soldering the battery contact.

During re-assembly I found that the battery contact was broken, this explains some of the intermittent problems I’ve had with the mouse. After some careful positioning with the helping hands I re-soldered the battery contact.

Finally I finished screwing everything together, put a battery in and the mouse lit up, always a good sign when the thing you’re fixing lights up correct when its assembled again. Tested it on a computer and after a few seconds of windows trying to initialise it I could move the mouse pointer and click… Success!!!

Coffee Table Workbench

Special thanks to my wife who allowed me to turn the coffee table into a make shift workbench for these repairs, I can’t wait till we’re in our own place and I have a garage I can setup a proper workbench in.

Sieg X2 Mini Mill

I’ve been looking for this and can’t find any info online for companies selling mini mills or lathes in South Africa, except oddly enough my posts on this blog. I can find plenty of the big machines but they’re too big and expensive and overkill for what I’m looking for. I’ve noticed that a few of the hits for this site have come from people searching for CNC machines, mini mills and lathes so I guessed that perhaps by writing a post about them and what I’m looking for someone might be able to point me in the direction of a local supplier.

Firstly I guess I should point out that this is a pipe dream, I won’t have the space to set one up till I move into our new place (in a few months time), I’m not sure if I’ll have the money (I now have a house bond to pay) and I’m not sure if I would get approval from the wife to buy an extremely expensive, noisy machine that allows me to turn metals, plastic and other stuff into shavings while probably injuring my self. But those are all minor obstacles and they don’t prevent me from dreaming of one day having a workshop filled with awesome machines.

I’m looking for what is often called a “mini mill” essentially its a small version of the big mills used to machine metal into all kinds of wonderful shapes. My ideal machine would be a table top machine that allowed me to machine metals such as aluminium, brass, certain types of plastics etc. It’s ok if it couldn’t machine the really hard metals or anything big, I’m not going to be using it to make car engines or parts for the space shuttle replacement but rather it will be used to make small parts for things like hobby engines and parts, parts for things like paint ball or air soft guns, little robotics projects other similar things. While precision is always important its unlikely I’ll need anything machined to extreme tolerances and I’m unlikely to make anything that will be spinning at high rpm’s or anything.

I also would love a small lathe that can turn metals, similar to the mill this would also be used to make small parts things like screw threads, gears etc (I know these kinds of things are hard to do, but I would like to at least give it a try). Again this is for garage/hobby use, I’m not starting up a business machining stuff for people I just want to be able to make those weirdly shaped metal parts that my various crazy project may require.

I’m not looking for a CNC machine as they’re alot easier to build your self and would be a “project” that I could use the mill and lathe for.

While this is all a pipe dream at the moment, I would love to know where in South Africa I could buy these kinds of things and how much they would cost. That way I can determine how much of a “pipe dream” this would really be… if anyone reading this knows where in South Africa I can find that info please leave a comment.

Found it via makezine

I really want to build one, although it’ll have to wait till after we’ve moved house… then I’ll be able to do it in the garage. I have a suspicion if I started this on the coffee or dining room table the wife will kill me.

The biggest problem with this radio is that it appears that the battery only lasts a few weeks and they cost R 25.00 a battery… the radio was only about R 45.00 (it didn’t come with a battery though). The conspiracy theorists in me says the reason it goes through batteries so quickly is because its made (or at least branded by) a battery company.

Battery

Yesterday the battery started to die and the wife wanted me to buy another battery for it… Thats when I had a light bulb moment (to quote Oprah) and decided instead of buying another battery I would hack the radio to run off the mains power.

I got approval from the Wife for this project, although it couldn’t cost more than the battery or a new radio.

Multi Voltage "Wall wart"

So yesterday after work I went in search of one of those “wallwart” multi voltage power supplies, the only one I could find at the local mall was a fancy switch mode power supply that put out up to 2.5amps but it cost R 199 a little over budget. A visit later to my in-laws saved the day when my father-in-law found a box of the little wallwart’s in the garage that he inherited, I grabbed a few in case one of them didn’t work and took it home.

I scratched through my parts bins and found a DC jack that the wallwart’s plug fitted and a few bits of wire and I was ready.

First job was undo all the screws on the radio and get it open, once open I quickly traced all the wires and worked out where on the board they all go. The plan was to wire the jack in so that when the plug was in it would disconnect the battery and run off the wallwart but when you remove it, it’ll work off the battery again. 20 minutes of soldering, cutting, wire stripping and fiddling with various screws and it was done.

I double and tripled checked everything with my multi-meter so that I didn’t blow anything up when I plugged it in, stood back and switched it on… and didn’t let out the magic smoke. After the successful switch on, I drilled a hole in the back to mount the jack, routed all the wires round the board and put it all back together.

Don’t worry my wife hardly ever reads this site so I doubt she’ll read all this and anyway she’s unlikely to puzzle out what I’m up too, but because I don’t want her to know what I’m building I’m going to stick to describing the technology and tools I’m using and show snippets of code but try not give it all away.

Without giving too much away about the project, I’m busy re-purposing things and trying to squash them into a new housing. One of the bigger problems is trying to do this without my wife finding out what I’m up to, so I can’t unpack everything and spread it all out on the dining room table.

I’ve decided to modify a store bought item to be the casing for the project mainly this is because the project is going to be displayed in the lounge and I’m not sure if my wood working skills are good enough to ensure it looks good.

I’ve been doing all my design and test fitting on my laptop using a free tool from Google called Sketch-Up, its an easy to use 3D design program. The cool thing about Sketch-Up is that it does things in millimeters (or other units of measure) so its easy to transfer measurements from the real world into the 3d one. I recreated all the components whose sizes can’t be changed in Sketch-Up and then did test fits of the items to see if they fit correctly.

Sketch-Up has allowed me to virtually build the entire present and solve many problems that I had not originally foreseen without the Wife finding out or it costing me anything in lost time or materials. Once I’ve designed and worked out what the individual parts are going to look like and how big they’re going to be it just requires a quick trip down to the shops to buy the items and then a few days of cutting, sanding,  painting and soldering.

I’ve also been using Sketch-Up to design furniture for our flat, the biggest problem is that a lot of store bought furniture is very badly made and rather expensive and its never just the right size for a room if you live in a small flat. On the right you can see a 3D diagram of a desk that I’ve been working on for the 2nd bedroom.

Sketch-Up can also be used to do 3D buildings and once you’ve built the building you can pull it into Google Earth to see what it’ll look like in the real world.

Sketch-Up is a very nice, relatively simple and easy to use application. There is a basic free version, which is what I’ve been using although you can upgrade to rather fancy pro version if you need too.

Check the site out.

The Sunbeam Professional 8 in 1 Haircare Pack.

What gets me is that the shop had about 10 of these on the shelf are there really that many people in George that need a whole special kit to do there hair?

Which brings us to CAD software, I’m not looking for anything fancy, my needs are simple. I want something thats easy to use and that I can draw any kind of technical drawing. Ideally I want to be able to in the same program do the floor plan for my million dollar mansion or the design for my new tv cabinet or the case for the ultimate HTPC. The problem is that I have a minimum requirement that the program works on Linux and it would be nice if it also ran on MacOSX and Windows and that it shouldn’t cost anything.
And so the search starts for an open source CAD program.

It’s been awhile since I went in search of a CAD program, I don’t really need it for my day job and when I do need to draw something InkScape or something similiar does ok. What I really hate is there is no such thing as an “easy to use” CAD application, they go from extremely cryptic to “I need an engineering degree to just understand what they talking about.”. That said I’m rather impressed with some of the applications, there was a bit of a learning curve but with abit of fiddling and reading up you’ll be able to design the new garden shed or the all important secret weapon that’s holding up your plans for world domination.
So here is the list of CAD programs I could find and that I tried out. I started my search by simple searching in Synaptic on my ubuntu Linux machine for “CAD” and seeing what popped up and then also doing a bit of searching in google.

PythonCad – This one is rather interesting, it’s written completely in python. It doesn’t have lots of nice buttons with pictures on so it takes a bit of learning to work out how it works and what todo. I was able to draw up a few things and I think with a bit of time I could get the hang of it. One problem though is it is a bit hard to use if you’re new to this CAD stuff. Because it’s written in Python & GTK it runs on Linux, Windows and MacOSX or at least it should, it’s OpenSource and scriptable to.

QCad – There are two versions of QCad the Community Editiion which is free and open source and then the Professional version which you can buy. This application uses the QT library so it looks a little out of place on a Gnome desktop but it does work and it’s alot easier to use than PythonCad it’s also got a lot more features and comes with a huge library of parts that you can use in your drawings. The ‘pro’ version is available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX I wasn’t able to determine if the Community Edition was available for anything other than Linux but admittedly I didn’t look that hard. The community edition is Open source so I can put it on this list without a problem.
Dia – Now technically this is not a CAD tool but more a diagramming tool but I’m putting it on this list because it does work. Dia is probably closer to a tool like Microsoft Visio than a true CAD tool but I’ve used it in the past to draw all kinds of basic diagrams and designs normally for simple things like a bookshelf or a simple electronic schematic. This is kind of like using a knife as a screwdriver it was never designed to the job but it can and does work sometimes. It is though a brilliant easy to use tool for drawing things like network layouts, UML designs and database. It runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX and it is an Opensource application and you can write simple “plugins” for it that do things like generate code based on your designs.

VariCad – this one technically does not belong on this list as it’s not open source, but I want to mention it anyway because for along time it was the only CAD system for Linux (Well the only one I knew about.). They do offer a 15day trial of the software and it’s not that expensive if you want to buy it. It runs on Windows and Linux.

This list doesn’t contain a complete exhaustive list of CAD programs for Linux, but these are the ones I found and tried out. I must admit that while PythonCad is cool I’ll probably be using QCad to do most of my drawing and designing. Also don’t discount applications like Blender and Inkscape if you all you’re doing is drawing something too see if your idea is crazy or not, I also won’t be throwing away my piece of paper, ruler, pencil and eraser because as much as I want everything to be “electronic” I haven’t found anything that can beat it… yet.

I hope to make this a more regular occurence on this website as I seem to stumble across alot of sites that other people enjoy.

I’m not sure why but today I’ve been in a bit of a DIY mood and while I have made anything or fixed anything I have spent plenty of time browsing sites that should you how to make and fix things. So of course most of the links reflect this.

I’m not really a ring wearing guy but I really like the idea of having a ring made out of a coin. How to make a coin ring – this site explains how to make a ring out of a coin, very cool.

Ever wondered how Lava Lamps work? Wanted to know how to make your own or who invented them ? OozingGoo is a cool site that gives lots of info on lava lamps.

RainyDayMagazine is a really cool site thats got all sorts of stuff and links to sites on things like making candles and weird lights to coffee tables and even got reviews of cell phones and stuff. Nice site to go waste a few hours on. I really like the bit about making a Tensegrity CellPhone Holder I’m going to try make one when I’ve got some free time.

I really like this coffee table and think I might actually make one if I get some time although I think I’ll make the cell phone holder first as a test.

LifeHacker is one of those sites that have links to pretty much everything nice place to waste a bit of time.

And then finally a link to a site that is probably not of much interest to the normal readers of this site but I’ll put it up any way. 5 Bears is a site about a guy who has built up his own machine shop. He’s got CNC Milling equipment and plenty of writeups about the turbines, engines and mill’s he’s built.