2025 was the first full year in the new house and although pretty much everything is unpacked there's still been a lot to do around the house and garden such as decorating, DIY and lots of enhancements to the garden.
In February, I managed to get an electronics bench built and painted which made it more practical to do soldering and other electronic work as I can leave the power supply and soldering iron setup and ready to go.
In March, I headed over to Cambridge to see their technology museums and saw lots of lovely computers and electronic equipment.
Through the spring I used a Cheap Yellow Display and got nanoFramework working on it which was presented later in the year to Liverpool and Sheffield dotnet groups. And along side these trips I visited the Element 14 UK Distribution centre and Pimoroni. I'm also quite pleased with the USB camera rig I made to allow these talks to go really smoothly.
I've also been reverse engineering an LCD monitor purchased the previous year in order to make it run on 12v and designed a tiny power adapter to allow thicker cables to be used. I then revisited my old TV Test card generator project to allow the screen to be tested. And for the power controller have been experimenting with the new ATTiny chips that are programmed via UDPI. After a board from Tindie failed to work, I swapped to using a serial based adapter and hence built a tray for 2 serial adapters to be used at once for programming and debugging.
Other experiments include an experiment with LED filaments to make a jumbo seven segment display, I quite like this but it needs to be bigger and madder.
The same ATTiny chips used for power control have also been used for some experiments into creating a temperature fan speed controller. Hopefully I'll get that finished off before the summer when it will be needed. I've also been working on a rugged computer for the workshop but this has been slow progress due to some of the metal work needed.
At the end of the year, we've had solar power fitted to the house and some cabling added for a new Workshopshed. The garage is ok but is damp in the winter and there's issues with light and power. For this to happen I needed to clear out and demolish a couple of old sheds. For details of that and other work around the house visit the Workshopshed review of the year 2025.
This spring we'll be putting down foundations for a new workshop and getting a team in to make an insulated and dry workshop.
One thing that's been missing is any project videos. So hopefully I'll be able to pitch some projects worth of a video for 2026.
