Andrew Kilpatrick

You know, it feels a shame to delete things forever. So instead I thought I’d at least leave a little blurb about stuff on here. These are projects that I used to have full pages for but they really don’t matter that much to me anymore. If you want to ask questions about them, please just email me.

6 Output Bench Power Supply

I just couldn’t justify spending $500 on a proper bench supply when I built this. It has some split supply outputs for opamp circuits (+/- 12V and +/-18V as well as a +5V output and a variable (0-25V) output. Each output can provide up to about 1A. It’s still in regular use although I hope to get another supply sometime soon.

Telephone AC Load Control

When I had a basement office in an un-air conditioned house I found it necessary to install a large fan in the window. The problem was that when people would call I couldn’t hear them on the phone. So I made a quick hack to turn off the AC power to the fan when the phone was off the hook. Eventually I added a relay to mute my stereo at the same time, which ran off a small wall wart. A simple hack, but everyone was duly impressed with its usefulness.

Colourcam (Black and White to Colour Quickcam Hack)

Way back in 1997 I saved up and bought a black and while Quickcam. It connected to my 486 with a parallel port and drew power from the keyboard port. The colour version was far too expensive but I still wanted to take colour pictures with it. So I built a wheel with coloured gels driven by a stepper motor, and wrote software to take three images and merge them into full colour. You had to hold still for all three shots, but the results were fairly impressive. Shown is an image taken in 1997 with the actual camera.