While I was a guest I had the opportunity to try out a charcoal BBQ for the first time. After tasting it I can see why people like it. There is a distinct flavor even without adding any extra wood for flavoured smoke. If I di end up getting one, I'll definitely invest in a chimney and fire lighters because it's a pain in the A$$ to light charcoal without them.

Crunchy Skin-On Salmon with Crunchy Salad. One of my favorites. We add some fried noodles to the salad with a lime and chilli dressing. Delicious.

The rack is now levelled and has a shelf in the bottom for storing excess gear. I created some timber blocks this time round and used the levelling feet rather than relying on the castors. The concrete slab is not very flat at all.

The drawer cart thing has now received some decorative finger jointed bumpers and a coat of clear poly. It looks great. I ended up modifying my screw advance box joint jig to work on the table saw. Click the image to see more photos.

Today I unpacked my electronics gear and got it set up on my updated bench.

I have built some shoes to retrofit my electronics lab bench with castors. They are a cantilever design that should require no modification to the existing table feet. They lock into the existing feet. When the castor is swivelled to the rear, the shoe is pushed up and kept in place by the end of the shoe. When the castor is swivelled to the front, the vee part that locks into the existing desk feet take the force and prevent it twisting. Left to right is kept under control by having a tight fit on the square tube of the desk.

I started work on a sled / stand thing with casters to hold two sets of drawers which will store electronics bits for the lab. This will make them mobile and allow cleaning underneath.

I built a set of giant Jenga for the work christmas party. Lots of sanding involved! They were a great hit.

The shelves I built about two years ago received a coat of clear poly to make them look the part for their new home inside the house. They came up really nice and it also gave me the opportunity to redo some of the edge banding which was loose and allowing the shelf to sag (they are only mdf).

Today we built a kitchen counter for the new place. The bench space in the kitchen is a bit small so this will help a bunch.

Lost or misplaced the the power supply for your HTPC? No worries, just fire it up on a lab power supply =)

Blueberry Pancakes with Bacon! =)

I decided to unwrap these old BP Solar panels and see what they could do. I built a basic SLA charging circuit that would allow an SLA battery to be charged and to supply power to an ESP8266. This will be for use outdoors as a weather station "or something". I haven't decided yet. Mostly I just wanted to see if the solar panels that I've had for over a decade still worked.

Grilled Chicken Breast ready to go on burgers. Sometimes the most simple recipies are the most popular with the kids. Just lemon juice, olive oil, minced garlic and some parsley. Easy.

What's a Loxone and why does the stupid thing have such a low input impedance? The reason is this chip. HVS882. It's an industrial input serializer chip. The input impedance is only 10k. This chip operates in a "window" mode for detecting "on" vs "off". With the recommended 4.7k pullup on a 24V supply, this leaves things very close to the 16V threshold that the chip requires for an "on" state. So I've started using 3.9k pullups which gives a little more room for movement on longer cable runs where a few volts can potentially be lost bringing it under the required 16V.

I built an aircon mount today. It is a cantilevered design that holds the AC in and is secure, but does not screw into the house or into the window frames at all. The house is rented, so there are rules preventing us from fixing it permanently to the structure.

Gnocchi and Chorizo with grilled peppers. I've seen this before but never tried making it. It was delicious.

Toured the DC facilities today. We walked past one of the "smaller" load banks at 200kW.

Having some fun with some PIRs for lighting. I'm using CAT-5 flex. The sensors are daisy chained allowing for six sensors per run.

Internet Enabled Night Light. I made this out of an old wall wart and an ESP8266 SOC module. Basically took the guts out of the wall wart and replaced them with the contents of a much more modern wall wart (smaller) which left space for the ESP8266 module, the PIR sensor and other bits. The device uses MQTT to communicate trigger events and periodic measurements to a custom cloud service.

• Temperature - DHT11
• Humidity - DHT11
• Brightness - LDR (Light Dependent Resistor)
• Movement - PIR Module (DSN-FIR800)

Gallery