While preparing for Piwars, I've needed to drill out or file round things. I found that the clamps I had wouldn't do the job, which led me to find this tool, new to me, the v-block. The V-Block is a tool I will be able to use in my robotics Lab to build robots, specifically for cutting, drilling or filing round things like axles. I designed and made simple 1-1 90-degree​ gearboxes for my robot with a 3D Printed housing, but then found gear slippage or simply keeping gears in place needed the axles to be filed down. PiWars is a Robot building competition building autonomous robots with the Raspberry Pi. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWiQgxfQsFg

Today Pheobe and I open drawer number 8 of the PiHut Codemad Calendar (19th December), and find a temperature sensor (a Dallas DS18B20 in a waterproof housing). We wire it into the Raspberry Pi Pico, and test it on things around our lab. We get to see how nicely the Onewire library integrates in Micropython on the Pico. This is not a paid promotion ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONWhnxhQIyo

I'm going to attempt to use tinkercad and Cura to make a really quick and simple replacement for broken feet on a set of scales. I'll follow up with the result. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLh2nhOWWKo

In the previous live session, I soldered together a recording light on perf-board (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_g3Zb8F69c) - in this video I start testing and troubleshooting it. The plan was to try and talk to it via serial and then WiFi, then clean it up. What happened instead was lots of troubleshooting part by part. In theory it should still have the original code I made, so this is mostly a test of my perfboard design and soldering. I needed to move some of the wires, measured voltages plenty (Thou Shalt Measure Voltages) and found I needed to tie different sets of pins to get more sense. Unfortunately I did not get it fully working - and will probably need to analyse it with the scope. Later testing (After the video) I found that the bootloader is outputting on 76800 - which I didn't try in the video. I suspect there will be more debugging but we now get: "rst cause:1, boot mode:(3,0)" - which may still indicate a GPIO pin at the wrong state (needing to be pulled up or down). To help with translating and transcribing my videos: http://www.youtube.com/timedtext_cs_panel?tab=2&c=UCVllQ0CH357h7jTpzLB9hCA Support me on Patreon - so I can remove ads and make more videos: https://www.patreon.com/orionrobots (ps there are perks for supporters!) ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs2-_9Dd9mM