Made my joule thief at York Hack Space last night. Most tricky part was winding the coils around the ferrite bead. I was supposed to get 20 turns onto it but I think the beads I brought where a little on the small side. I managed to get 13 or 14 turns on in the end and it works a treat. The final version is running on my desk right now and I have upgraded the bluetak to an elastic band. I will put printing a case for it on my reprap list.

It looks to be only oscillating at 2khz rather than the 50khz I was told to expect but is working great for a battery that was showing less the 1v.

Reading how the circuit works it looks like you could drive any voltage from the coil with a diminishing return in current. I wonder if there would be an optimal number given the components I have.

I brought at efergy energy meter from Oxfam and have had it running for a couple of days and it is already starting to annoy Sarah. Next up is to try and grab some of that data and graph it.

I sent an email to efergy asking if they could let me have some more information about the specs of the signal. I got a really good reply from them saying that they could not really give me any more detail than is on the box which is what I expected but the guy there did seem interested in what I was doing and took the time to write out quite a detailed reply so I like the company already.

The spec says that every six seconds the transmitter spits out a signal on the 433Mhz band so my next step is to try to capture that. If I had more than a multimeter then this may be a lot simpler but hey lets give this a go. I am going to get a 433Mhz reciver for a garage remote so that I can get the baseband signal. Assuming they are sending very little data then the bandwidth should be pretty low so I think that if I can get the arduino to capture the output at say 20kb/s then I should be able to examine the signal if it is less than 10Kb/s. It may be simpler to just try and grab this direct from a parallel port.

Built me a remote for my new camera.

On the side of my camera is a 2.5mm stereo jack socket that can be used to remote control the shutter release. During the last few dark shots I have been using the timer to try and avoid camera shake but this means that you have to wait an extra ten seconds before the shot fires.

After a bit of research I found a couple of sites that showed how simple it was to create a switch box to control it all. After digging around my box of bits for a while I decided that I would leave the speak and spell controlled remote for another day and head down to Maplins.

After a slight error of buying the wrong type of switch ( Hey it was in a row of push-to-make switches and had no label saying any different how was I supposed to know it was a push-to-break version!) I now have constructed what looks like a nicely homemade version a remote control complete with a latching switch for long bulb exposures. Time to get out tonight and grab some photos.