Nick's Digital Shed

It's been a little while since I last wrote a blog, but unfortunately any spare time lately has been spent trying to move the project a little further on. I think last time I had just started looking at Autodesk Eagle and found it to be quite un-intuitive but managed to glean enough from the internet to get moving. So eagle is a program which does a couple of things (that I've discovered so far). The first use is for designing nice legible electronic schematics, using real life components that can be pulled from an internal library - which can be expanded via the internet to pretty much anything you can buy, and that which you can't can be created by hand. It's pretty easy to use once you've understood the basics and took me right back to my school electronics classes with resistors and LEDs, kind of fun even! My first problem came when I realised that the servo motor I wanted to use was not available anywhere online - in fact the units themselves seem

After much research, I managed to track down the Arduino source code from the example project that sparked my interest. It wasn't complete, but it at least gave me some insight into how it is supposed to work. Having coded visual basic to a reasonable level the coding didn't scare me too much, but the language was quite foreign, so it took a bit of time to figure out how to talk to it. To help me understand, I purchased a couple of pre-made projects from skpang.co.uk. One was a CAN bus reader, the other a CAN bus emulator - the plan was to emulate a CAN bus signal, and then write my own code based on the source code I already had to replace that on the reader. Once I had a working model, I could build out from there and add functionality. This took quite a while, and a lot of failing and error messages until finally after about a week I got something to compile. Within a few more attempts I actually got it to work; reading a CAN signal, and displaying it on the OLED di

Right then, a blog. I have never really been one to write things down, but having recently read a blog featuring the engineering adventures of a friend, I decided that having a go myself might be a nice idea - particularly as I embark on a new project to learn some new skills and realise an idea I have for the centerpiece of my next car project. In the past I've never written things down and months/years down the line I forget what I've done or how I did it, so perhaps this will be a nice chronicle for the future. If it helps a few like minded tinkerers out then all the better! So on to my new project... I have owned my TVR Chimaera for about 13 years this year, and have always been bothered to some degree or other of the little or large niggles with it. TVR of course didn't design a fantastically well engineered car to begin with, and on top of that years of shake rattle and rust generate further work still. Having fixed, upgraded, enhanced and developed the car,

My GEMS Story From the moment I first climbed into my beloved Chimaera on a freezing winter’s night in 2006 I had already visualised its future. Setting off from the home of the (visibly upset) former owner onto a pitch-black motorway with the ice warning light emblazoned before me, worrying that I had just bought far too much car for my level of driving experience, when I really should have been thinking about simply enjoying my new car; I confess that at this point I was already plotting my first modification. I am going to take the time right now to place the blame for this squarely on one person: Mr. Chris Manley. Unfortunately for me, Chris was and still is very good friends with Tim Lamont of ACT and even more unfortunately around 2004, had recently sold his S3 and bought Tim’s own highly modified pre-cat Griffith – a lovely car that he still owns today. One evening Chris kindly invited to take me out for a short ride in his new car. I gleefully agreed – knowing nothin