The SkyBean SkyDrop is a great small and light paragliding vario that contains even some advance functions like airspaces warnings and task navigation. I've bought a second hand vario few years ago. It worked pretty well and I really enjoyed its features and the open source philosophy of the desig...
I've recently bought a TIG welder from Kowax and was facing a challenge of grinding the tungsten electrodes.The grinding is very common task when you start with TIG welding as maintaining a precise distance of a millimeter or two between the electrode and the welded surface is a challenging task f...
If you want to use a LinuxCNC for your machine, you either take old PC with parallel port from scrap, or buy an expensive MESA card, but there's a better and cheap way, you can use the OrangePi directly and do all the stepping magic on the internal RISC coprocessor.
Introduction
The LinuxCNC i...
Even though the covid times, the Picoballoon challenge in 2021 was planned on last Monday of June. As in previous year, I've started designing my very own picoballoon probe to participate in the challenge. The rules stayed the same, the probe has to weight below 20 g and has to report at least it's...
As in 2019 the Brno Observatory and Planetarium organised a Picoballoon Channelnge in 2020. It's a competition of high altitude ballon probes, the one that sends it's altitude as the last one wins. Each probe must weight under 20 g and share at leas an approximate altitude in the telemetry messa...
For some time I was looking for a GPS tracking solution that would run from a single battery for several days. Smartphones are too power hungry, all GPS loggers I found are designed to track animals, cars, etc. by sending positon on request over GSM, but there are no loggers that would just save GPS...
In 2017 I became a member of Pneumobil Racing Team Brno, a group of students designing and building pneumatically powered racing cars for the Aventics Pneumobile competition. My task was to design and build electronic control and telemetry system. The first iteration was far from perfect. The pn...
In 2019 Brno Observatory and Planetarium together with Slovak Organisation for Space Activities organised a competition of high altitude balloon probes. The rules were simple, build a probe that weights below 20 grams. It should be able to send it's own position. They will launch it on a small ballo...
The original headlamp Darkstar was working well for me and for few of my friends, but the light output was not that high, there were few details I would make different today, etc. Therefore I decided to build another version as my balchelor thesis topic. This time I wanted to get as close as possi...
Few years ago I was facing simple question. Should I invest a huge amount of money to one of the top headlamps like Scurion or am I able to build my own with similar parameters? Well, buying stuff is easy and boring, building my own is a great way to learn and save some money (in theory).
After br...
