Some time has passed since my last post, and for that I am sorry. I like to write about my technical endeavors, however, I’ve been feeling “out of time” lately. Its not that I work late or anything like that, time just seems to disappear. I get home from work around 6, catch up on personal emails and some news, then its time for dinner, and before I know it, it’s 11 pm! Where did those 5 hours go!?
I have a list of things to write about, and I’ll be taking a little time off from the daily grind over the Independence Day holiday to catch up on stuff. Hopefully I can get some of these things written down, and make room in the ‘ol brain for keeping better track of time.
On a maintenance note, I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my wordpress to 2.0.2. The constant stream of spam which I hope to keep hidden from my readers has prompted this move. I have some new spam-fighting plug-ins working behind the scenes, hopefully they won’t interfere with valid comments.
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Nice blog. I’ve been doing something similar myself, though I haven’t done any electronics work for a while. The “LED matrices as sensors” articles look very interesting - I’ll have to see about buying a few bags of LEDs and build a few sensors up.
I’ve just bought one of the Paladin CrimpAll crimpers (mentioned in your MAX1668 project pages), along with the RJ11/12 and RJ45 dies - just waiting for the Molex pin die to arrive from the USA. Apparently the 2092 pin crimp die has been discontinued for a couple of years, but a couple of suppliers (Unicorn Electronics and Action Electronics spring to mind) claim to have some stock left over.
To be honest, I’ve been using the Molex C-Grid III connectors instead of the KKs. They’re cheaper, but just as good for low-voltage DC stuff. It’s just a shame the crimp tools are so expensive - £150 plus VAT (17.5%, think ’sales tax’) around here, and they’re only rated to last 25,000 crimp cycles.
Phil Pemberton
July 18th, 2006