Telescope...

... I have a feeling bad things will happen if I point this at any Royal Navy ships..

I'm a little out of my depth with this..I have absolutely no idea how to use it... I did very little research into these things and was a little surprised to find it worked on mirrrors and not lenses.. I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting..  Although having done a little retrospective research it seems this will be able to produce much clearer pictures than a regular telescope... plus I might even be able to take some night time shots of the sky over the Plymouth Sound!

TAMAR TAG!

I know it has nothing to do with this website.... but here it is.. my TamarTag finally arrived.. I feel like a real Devonshireman now!  Cornwall here I come!

no dice..

Well, I went out and got the telescope yesterday.. I spent a fair bit of time making an adaptor that would attach the webcam to the telescope eye piece.. it worked but the picture quality was awful.  On further reading I've discovered that there are two different types of image receivers on webcams.  1 type is called CMOS, the other is CCD (you might recognise this from your digital camera).  Anyway, the better webcams for this sort of thing have CCD.  Annoyingly they're rare and expenise.. I will continue my search for one.  I will not be defeated!

T

...the adaptor I made....

t

the little bits you need to remove from the webcam after pulling it apart..

Todays the day...

I'm too impatient to wait for the ebay items to come around.. I've just seen a National Geographic telescope in Argos for £20.. i'm going to give it a go!  Apparently you can see things on the moons of Jupiter with it, so it should be powerful enough to look at ships etc in the Sound... stand by for the results!

My next project and someone who's doing it much better than me...

Whilst looking through the interweb and seeing all the different things people are doing with shipping info etc, I came across this site http://www.ais-live.co.uk/aismap/AIS%20Maps/aboutthissite.html its pretty amazing and the guy who is running it has put a lot of time and effort in.  Its given me a couple of ideas, having my own AIS  receiver for a start then I saw his binoculars.. I'm going to have a go at combining a webcam with a telescope.. I'm already checking ebay now for telescopes, don't see the point in buying a new one if A) i bugger it up B) it doesn't work as intended... i'll let you know how it goes!

The weather cam mutates further!

This things really getting carried away with itself now.  I went a bit mental on ebay and ended up with 4 old Olympus cameras.  Before buying I made sure they were all compatible with the Pine Tree Computing camera controller software.  As much as I like this software it does have a few little bugs.  I've found that I need to power up the cameras in a certain order otherwise the computer seems to confuse them all.  Once up and running though the software is pretty stable and hasn't crashed once in the whole time I've been running it.

The cameras were all sat on my kitchen window sill peering outside towards the see.  Even I thought it looked a little jumbled and messy so decided that I needed a solution..

 

The above picture isn't very clear thanks to the darned overcast/bright sky.. I'll try and take another picture later.. anyways, as you can see in the picture the cameras have all been raised up off the window sill and are now all looking out the top window.  But how did I do this.. an anti gravity field around the window perhaps?

Alas not, after R&D problems I decided to go with a shelf instead.  I wanted something light and as inobtrusive as possible (yes, inobtrustive with 4 cameras sat on it..) I just didn't want it to look any worse...

After considering a number of shelfing options, then best one I found was the glass shelves you get at homeware stores like B&Q/Wickes etc that go in bathrooms underneath mirrors.  The best one I could find was at Wickes as it had nice small fixing points for the wall, or in my case, window.  They were adjustable brackets too which means you can be a little less acurate in drilling etc.

this image makes the shelf look wonky.. i can assure you, its not!

 

PVC windows have an aluminium frame covered in the white plastic that we can all see.  Its pretty sturdy stuff so don't panic too much about drilling into it.  Mark the points you want to connect your shelfing brackets to and drill a couple of small pilot holes.

Then just follow the destructions that came with the shelf et-viola!

...can you tell I'm single...

I intend to get some white cable trunking to run down the right hand side of the window frame to tidy away the cabling...

My weather cam website has just been listed on BBC Devons site!  2 of my cameras are now being used by them.  I'm famous!

Fixing my little Dell LCD.. my first ever PCB repair...

I recently bought a second hand Dell LCD monitor to go with my FTP server.  I just wanted someone small and cheap that could be used every now for maintenance etc.  I went on Ebay and managed to pic one up for about £15.  Not bad I don't think for a 15" LCD.

After using it for a few days I noticed that it would flicker on and off.. sometimes off then never back on again.  If I jiggled the power lead around at the back I could hear a crackling sound.. not a good sound to hear.. arcing electricity etc.

I decided to have a go at fixing it, the fact moving the lead around causing the monitor to start/stop I was hopeful it wasn't going to be anything too drastic.

Firstly, find a nice fluffy/thick towel to lay on a flat surface.  You'll be resting your monitor against this whilst you're working on it and dont' want to scratch/dent the LCD panel.

To remove the back of the monitor, you firstly need to remove the stand.  there are 3 small black screws visible at the rear, take these out, then ease and plastic cover off with a screw driver.  You will find a 4th (gold) screw here.  Remove that, then the stand should come away from the bottom of the monitor.

 

Next remove the 3 black screws that run across the bottom.

Then you need to pop the rear away from the front of the monitor.  The line you can see around the edge of the monitor is where the two parts separate.  Slip the two clips at the bottom apart then be brave and ease the two sections apart.

You'll find that a small ribbon cable will run from the front section of the monitor to a lttle PCB containing the brightness/menu buttons.  Just disconnect the plug on the PCB side and then put the front of the montior to one side.  Rest the lcd panel face down on to the towel and pull the rear of the monitors case away.

Next remove the 8 gold screws that run around the metal cover then remove, you'll see across the top of this metal cover that there are little metal clips that the top lip of this cover slides under.

Now you can see the PCBs for the monitor.  You can see that the power lead connects to the PCB on the left.  Disconnect the ribbon connections as with the button panel from the case.  Then remove the 2 screws.
The PCB will now slide away from the chassis like the previous metal cover did.

Looking closely at the soldered joints on the rear of the panel I could see a little carbon ring around one of the pins on the power socket.  This as well as dull solder is a sign that the joint has failed.

A soldering iron with a fine point is generally the best idea for repairing PCB's as its a lot neater and reduce the risk of soldering across 2 joints.  A little bit of solder later and the joint is nice and shiney and ready for putting back together.  Before completing I sprayed contact cleaner across the whole PCB just for luck.

The picture above shows the power PCB removed, note the right hand panel has a ribbon connector at the top. This pushes against a sponge insert attached to the rear case panel.  This will often disconnected when removing the rear panel so make sure you reconnect if before putting back together!

For putting back together, literally do the reverse of what you did to take it apart, I found it easier to place the frame section of the cover of the case on the towel, then rest the LCD panel on top before cliping the rear back on.