Craig's Area

Welcome to my website. It's quite new so most of it's under construction.  I hope to put more interesting projects up in the near future.  If you want to give me any feedback, or make suggestions for future projects, then email me at craig@craigsarea.com.

News

1) Ferrite Core - I've now got a large ferrite core. Conservative estimates rate it at 5KVA. This will be used for a homemade high voltage switch mode power supply. I've got all the equipment required to vacuum pot a homemade transformer so I should be able to reach quite high voltages. This provides interesting challenges in high frequency, high voltage insulation.

2) Weather Balloon - I've also got a weather balloon which I'll use to lift a camera high up into the sky. The camera circuitry will be homemade using a CCD or CMOS chip. This will use Mototola processors and FPGAs. The images will be received and decoded on a homemade PCI based frame grabber running in Linux. I've actually got quite a lot of extra things planned for this project but it's still in the early design stages. I would rather fill the balloon with hydrogen as I think hydrogen is much more fun than helium. I need to design some apperatus for dealing with the large amounts of hydrogen gas.

3) Pulse Caps - I might possibly be getting over 30KJ of pulse rated capacitors. This may or may not happen depending on the shipping costs (the caps weigh over 30 stone and would come from Japan). It maybe that I look for similar caps in the UK to save money. The large ferrite core could be used in a capacitor charger supply for these caps.

17 Feb 2006
BIKE : I've bought a brand new motorbike. Check out the new motorbike section.

FURNACE : I've also started a new furnace section.

High Voltage

My most interesting area of research is high voltage. Not only is it very dangerous, but it's also very expensive. Although big, heavy, noisy, dangerous high voltage equipment makes a nice change from delicate sensitive processor based applications. I've got lots of plans for the future so check back regularly. Solid State Tesla Coil Spark Gap Tesla Coil Little Spark Gap Tesla Coil Induction Heating Dissecting an SM NST

Craig's Chemistry Page

I'm quite interested in chemistry, although I confess to knowing little about it. I think the idea of playing with the building blocks of the universe (the atoms) is truly amazing. Chemistry gives a true understanding of why things are the way they are. Mercury and Aluminium Mercury Vapor and High Voltage (under construction) Hydrogen (Hydrochloric Acid + Aluminium) Hydrogen + Oxygen (Electrolysis) Sodium Metal Reactions Thermite Reactions Distilling Nitric Acid 2-Acetoxybenzoic Acid Cellulose Nitrate 2,4,6-Trinitrophenol

Furnace

I'm currently building a furnace which can be used for both metal casting and high temperature chemistry experiments. The Furnace

VHDL

When it comes to speed and I/O, HDL based applications are miles ahead. Personally I favour VHDL over Verilog although I have no real reason for this. My VHDL PCI System (Linux) My Final Year Project Xilinx in Linux VHDL to HTML (inc. WIN32 source)

Prime Numbers

Prime numbers are the building blocks of the integers and are comparable to the atoms in chemistry. The problems posed by the primes are simple to understand yet remain unproven. Prime Number Islands Prime Number Islands (Application + WIN32 Source) Prime Number Lines

Micro Controllers

Micro Controllers are cheap and easy to get going. I've used 68HC11's, PIC's, and AVR's. At the moment I like the AVR's as they are supported by the GNU GCC compiler. I usually use a micro controller in most of my projects. Atmel Ultrasonic Ranger

Linux

Free open source software. What more can I say? My Linux Setup Painting my Laptop

Motorbike

I've recently bought a brand new Yamaha DT125X. This section will document the modifications I make to the bike. Once my furnace is up and running I'll be able to cast custom parts for the bike. My DT125X

Jogging

I've been jogging on a regular basis for almost a year now. Jogging Diary

Links

It wouldn't be a webpage without links. Links