This is a tale of going to TOG to do one thing, but ending up doing something completely different. The intention was to write some code to talk to some electronic hardware. Actuality was taking the lathe apart. You can’t get more different than that.
One of our members reported that the lathe was unusually noisy and also a faint burning smell. We thought that it may be splashes of oil burning on the hot halogen lamp, but soon ruled that out. We disconnected the drive belts from the motor. The motor turns freely by hand, but seems to be hesitant in starting. It’s also drawing way too much current. Needs a bit more troubleshooting. Hopefully just a bad capacitor or something else simple.
Update…. so its bad news. One of the motor windings is burnt out. But it’s no big deal really. We’re sourcing a new motor. They’re not that expensive. A nice project will be to add some overcurrent and thermal monitoring to it, as well as an RPM readout. Sounds like a job for an Arduino!
Hey All…… Sorry for the very short notice but…. this month’s Open Social evening takes place this evening, Saturday 15th April at 7PM.
We’ve posted before about our tinkering around with Ebikes. One of our members had a faulty Ebike battery. Opening it up, the battery management circuit was found to be toast. We sourced a new one online from China, fitted it, and the battery is back up and running. We are thinking of making some spare batteries from old laptop batteries. We’re also thinking of having a TOG loaner Ebike. If you have any old laptop batteries that you could donate to us, we’d be interested. If you’d like to take a look at our Ebike works, drop in to our regular Monday evening Electronics night.