Lamming SYW Range - further discoveries

I have recently acquired some largish reinforcements of Lamming SYW foot figures. Nothing new here but there were a snall number of cavalry figures. There are dragoons with two horse varieties - these look similar to those already posted earleir, I have only compared the photos so far rather than the figures themselves; a cuirassier who seems different to the Prussian figure I have seen before; and a hussar variant with busby rather than Mirliton.

I am mainly concentrating on Medievals at the moment but once I start painting up the SYW foot I will have a go at constructing some kind of listing of all the Lamming SYW figures of which I am aware.

Electronic scale .. just because..

Bought a bunch of stuff on Ebay, here among: HX711 strain gauge A/D converters, 40Kg. load cells, 2,8" TFT touch display Arduino shields.

These items were all bought for different projects but screamed to be put together into a Arduino powered scale:

All components were just mounted on pieces of CNC cut plywood:

With this set-up I will be experimenting with different weight related issues such as:
counting items, mediated chemical recepies, food monitoring, paint usage ...

More to come on this.


Arduino source (as is!) for a couple of experiments

Induction heater

At FabLabRUC we have been experimenting with differnt kinds of metal casting. One of the methods is "lost PLA casting" where a 3D printed PLA model is covered with plaster and made to melt away when molten metal is poured over it.

Problem is that the metal (aluminium in this case) cools off too quickly when it contacts the plastic.

I wanted to find a method to keep the metal molten while inside the mold.

One solution seemed to be using induction heating.

A lot of people on the Internet seemed to have success with a simple induction heater circuit so decided to build one inspired by these:

A video (Danish) of an early prototype from FabLabRUC:

More about this heater and the casting process later..