Hacking Harvest

Had a great night's hardware hacking at Ken's shed last night. Plenty of Arduino hacking and a couple of CNC machines attached to LinuxCNC to keep us busy:

I made some progress on the wind turbines I'm making from a couple of "dead" Fisher & Paykel smart drive washing machines from which I'm also trying to recycle as many components as possible. I desoldered a swag of switches and LEDs, some of which will end up in a lightsabre for Hamish:

When you disassemble these machines, the motors and magnets come out looking like new and can be re-used for many things, including being the heart of a wind turbine:

An innovation I'm partcularly enthused about is John Hugh's usage of a car clutch as a clutch for the wind turbine. After only 10 minutes of filing, John had a perfect fit. The clutch fit snugly onto the shaft from the washing machine.

It's all starting to come together.