Andy Clark's Blog

New Workshop

Workshopshed — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:47:46 GMT

The garage and studio that came with the house in Suffolk have shown not to be really fit for purpose. The garage is leaking and the roof is made from asbestos making repairs problematic. The studio is ok other than needing to block out the light fro...(read more)

Year in review 2025

Workshopshed — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 12:42:55 GMT

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...(read more)

Tray for serial

Workshopshed — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 21:44:33 GMT

I've been working on a project with a small microcontroller that's programmed via UDPI. So have been using a USB to Serial adapter with a resistor to do the programming. I also wanted to do some serial monitoring for debugging so have a secon...(read more)

Visit to Element 14's Distribution Centre in Leeds

Workshopshed — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 09:42:08 GMT

Last week, e14phil from the element14 community invited me to see the Farnell office and warehouse in Leeds. The office is located next to the old warehouse near to the centre of town. Once we were past the big security gates and guar...(read more)

Cheap Yellow Display Talk 29th July, Liverpool

Workshopshed — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 11:17:07 GMT

Later this month, I'll be over in Liverpool giving a talk on putting dot Net nanoFramework onto a Cheap Yellow Display (ESP32). https://dotnetliverpool.org.uk/ The ESP32 CPU is supported by the framework out of the box but there were still chall...(read more)

Technology Museums in Cambridge

Workshopshed — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 16:46:00 GMT

The other weekend I had the chance to visit both the Centre for Computing History and the Cambridge Museum of Technology. We first visited the Centre for Computing history, the entrance houses a small shop and seating area, serviced by a tuck shop....(read more)

Testcard generator revisted

Workshopshed — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 17:58:20 GMT

Back in 2016 I created a test card generator to help check a small composite monitor that wasn't working. For an upcoming project I need to test a HDMI monitor so I thought I could just use that again. But when I came to dig it out the SDCard was...(read more)

Year in review 2024

Workshopshed — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 12:36:45 GMT

I've not been that active on Element14 the last year due to working on fixing up the new house. Have found some "shocking" electrics such as this socket which was live but the loose wire was not. So the socket tester go a good work out...(read more)

Moved again

Workshopshed — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 20:54:07 GMT

Just finishing packing up and moving out of Scotland. New home will be in Ipswich, expect some photos of the new workshop in up coming weeks (read more)

Makers Central

Workshopshed — Thu, 11 May 2023 21:24:00 GMT

Makers Central is on this weekend at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. When I last visited in 2019 it was mostly focused on woodworking. But I thought I would check it out again as there's quite a lot of other types of makers there t...(read more)

KiCAD-GPT is here

Workshopshed — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 08:36:06 GMT

I’ve been experimenting with a Beta version of KiCAD that adds an AI based interface to the a popular electronics design application. It has been trained on example circuits found in datasheets, old magazines and discussion forums. Rather than ...(read more)

Setting the default hardware for Pulse Audio

Workshopshed — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 15:47:54 GMT

Mycroft.AI recommends using Pulse Audio for audio inputs and outputs. This can be installed using: sudo apt install pulseaudio Once you've plugged in your hardware you can configure the default devices for input and output so that ...(read more)

Simple Fan Controller

Workshopshed — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 06:35:00 GMT

As mentioned at the end of my last video for the remote temperature monitoring, I've a problem with the base unit having a noisy fan. So I designed a simple control system to reduce the fan speed when it's not needed. https://github.com...(read more)

Coil Winder

Workshopshed — Sat, 23 Apr 2022 14:55:00 GMT

So that I could wind 6 identical coils, I needed some way of counting the turns. So I made a simple addon to my milling machine. This consisted of a few 3D printed parts. Firstly a cam that could be bolted onto the milling machine spindle. And also a...(read more)

A big RGB LED

Workshopshed — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 19:39:00 GMT

Whilst I was building the book nook project I got reading about the WS2811 chips, these are the controller chips behind the NeoPixel RGB LEDs. And that got me wondering if I could make a big version of an RGB LED in a similar way to I'd created o...(read more)