Tyler's Invention Blog
Hello fellow enthusiasts, This is an apology and an explanation. Over the past several years I’ve benefited a TON from the open-source community and had lots of fun coming up with my own designs. I’ve worked hard to document and share those designs online. This pandemic has opened up a couple cool opportunities for me ... Read more
Using Speedlight Strobes for High-Speed Photography Thanks to various sources on the internet, I learned that speedlight strobes are fairly fast but not quite fast enough to truly freeze a bullet. Speedlights work differently than studio strobes in that the flash exposure is controlled by the amount of time that the IGBT is turned on ... Read more
Another Microsecond Flash? Yup, I’ve been working on a new design for about one year now. Here it is! My first high-speed LED strobe design was the Edgerton. The goal was to build a strobe that could be used to photograph supersonic bullets for as little $$$ as possible. It was functional and I was ... Read more
A FULLY Plug-and-Play Tally Light My church (like many others) recently began streaming sunday services. The staff had quite a job on their hands adjusting from a live audience with a small online presence to an online-only presence. Subtle communication between the ‘techies’ and ‘actors’ was difficult, but a simple tally light made it simple ... Read more
A 3D Printed Ballistic Chronograph for $70 – $100 USD! This ballistic chronograph is based on my original design, the MK1 (which can be viewed at https://td0g.ca/2016/07/28/ballistic-chronograph/). I’ve used the MK1 to take many high-speed photos, including a shot of a mach-2 bullet hitting a nice wine glass! The new MK2 has the same performance ... Read more
The Bubblegum Chip, Now With Steroids! The Atmel ATTINY85 is a great chip (cheap, easy to use, supported in the Arduino IDE). Unfortunately it only has 5 IO pins, which limits its usability. There are guides on using a High-Voltage Programmer (HVP) to change the Reset pin into an IO pin. However, that prevents you ... Read more
Measuring Air Flow – Made Easy A sonic anemometer is a device that measures air velocity using sound. A speaker on one end of the device emits a ‘ping’, and a sensor waits for the ping to arrive. If the air is not moving, then the delay between ‘pinging’ and ‘receiving’ is always the same ... Read more
I recently added a couple home-build devices to my home lab. The first is a well-designed PCB jig engineered by an electronics forensic expert. The second is a very cheap lab power supply using a Chinese step-down converter and an old battery charger. The Jig It seems I never have enough hands, especially while testing ... Read more
Preamble Converting a toaster oven into a reflow oven isn’t a new idea. I have to credit DJ Legion for bringing it to my attention. What makes this oven unique is its ‘Rapid Delivery’ system. No need to walk over to the over and remove the parts when it is finished! Hardware I stopped by ... Read more
You Get What You Pay For While building my CNC mill, I bought a 500W spindle with a motor controller off eBay for less than $80 CAD. The spindle and power supply needed some TLC right out of the box, but seemed to work fine. Then the incident happened… I was adjusting the ‘MAX’ potentiometer ... Read more