Author Archives: Chris Holden

When cutting mirrored acrylic, always cut with the mirrored side down. This means you need to flip the text so it cuts out the right way around! It only took us one attempt to get it wrong before cutting out a massive 58 different names for wedding tab… Continue reading →

Often when people make the move from through-hole components to SMT, there’s no going back. Why bother with all that messy drilling and flipping boards over and soldering and trimming legs, when you can simply plop a miniaturised component onto the boa… Continue reading →

Ok, maybe the red LED is just a little brighter – or perhaps should have been put on one of the “wider” or closer-looking beams. Or maybe replaced with a green/yellow LED. Or maybe had a higher value inline resistor or something.But the end result is p… Continue reading →

Last night, at BuildBrighton, we helped Justin to get his flashing-LEDs-and-UFOs birthday card ready for this weekend. And, as ever, Steve made it not just look like a finished “product” but like the most awesome you wished you owned yourself. Where mo… Continue reading →

Thursday nights are BuildBrighton Open Nights, which means getting stuck in and helping out with other people’s projects a lot of the time. Last night it happened to be Justin who needed a little help completing a fancy greetings card. It’s his girlfri… Continue reading →

We found an old 16×2 character LCD display knocking around from a previous project which already had a 16-way 0.1″ pin header soldered to it. It seemed a shame to mess it up so we left the pin header in place and  hacked an IDE ribbon cable to fit… Continue reading →

…unless you’ve got a big blob of blu-tack to hold the pesky thing in place and stop it sticking to your soldering iron!(Ok, the Brighton Poundland only sells white-tack, but the idea’s the same!) Continue reading →

Thanks again to Andy at handprint.co.uk who emailed with some more advice about our miniature silkscreen idea. Below is an abridged copy of his email:The size thing…To get good results you need to have sufficient room on screen to load it with e… Continue reading →

While it was really tempting to just chuck some LEDs onto a bit of veroboard and just plug it in (ok, we did exactly that) we’ve since decided that it needs a bit of time and effort spending on it. While we’ve got a board full of LEDs that lights up wh… Continue reading →

Andy from handprint.co.uk kindly offered some help with our silkscreen idea. He sent some diagrams to explain why exposing UV emulsion on a silkscreen is better done from a distance and not from the minimum distance required, based on the lens angle of… Continue reading →