DroneBot Workshop Tour - Welcome to the Workshop!

today in the workshop we'll be taking a look at the workshop I'll show you how it converted a rundown work area into an efficient electronics workspace with custom work benches and storage areas get ready to start the tour and welcome to the workshop [Music] well hello and welcome to the workshop into a very different and rather special edition of the drone bot workshop today we are going to go on a tour of the drone bot workshop now I've been asked to do this by many of you I've had emails comments and videos from people saying could we please have a tour of the workshop some other people have emailed me to ask about specific items in the workshop such as my storage area such as the items I have on my workbench the power supplies etc that I have built into it and they have asked could you please do a video and show us all of this well I have to MIT initially I was a little reluctant to do this and the reason is this is a very small workshop I thought that a tour of a workshop this size with rather silly I mean after all I'm sure many of you have bathrooms that are larger than this workshop however in thinking about it the small size of the workshop is actually something that makes it unique I've think I've done a fairly good job if I do say so myself of using all of the space to its optimum potential there is very little space in this workshop that has not been used and what I really want this video to be is not so much a tour the show-off the workshop although I have to admit I'm rather proud of the workshop it is more something to give you an idea of how to build a workshop or work area of your own now I don't of course expect you're going to duplicate this workshop but some of the things that I've done over here some of the things that I've built into the workshop some of the ways that other range things may inspire you in building your own work area and if that's the case and the video has certainly served its purposes now I don't actually have any video of the workshop being constructed and that's probably a good thing however it was an interesting construction project and I do have a number of pictures of that now let me show you some of those pictures in a moment I have to tell you that I've never done anything like this before in my life I've never done any construction work I've never done framing drywall and I have done wiring of course before but all of the other techniques were virtually foreign to me have done very little painting and so most of this was a learning experience and one thing that I'm rather proud of if I can say that is that I did this entirely myself I didn't have any assistance whatsoever and that even includes drywalling the ceiling and if you've ever drywall the ceiling by yourself you know that it's not the easiest thing in the world to have an 8 by 4 sheet of drywall on the ceiling and try to fasten it into place all by yourself but I managed to do it somehow and I managed to do it relatively unscathed in fact the only accident that I had during the entire construction process was that I cut my thumb taking the price tag off of the 2x4 but otherwise I was very careful and took my time and I think the results were actually quite good I'm quite proud of it myself and I think that's going to show in that video now the amount of construction time this workshop was created at the end of 2015 I started at the end of September 2015 and I worked on it basically every evening in every weekend because I was doing a consulting job at the time so I couldn't work on it during the day and I was putting paint on the walls while most of you were out celebrating New Year's Eve 2016 and most of the equipment and the workshop started to follow in the few weeks after that so the January of 2016 this workshop had finally taken place so let's start off and take a look at a little slideshow of how the workshop went together and then I will show you all of the features of the workshop in detail now the workshop didn't always look like this as a matter of fact it once looked like this a complete disaster area so time to clean it out and bring in some construction materials I started off by doing some framing framing takes a lot longer than I expected it would I've brought in some drywall and bought some parts cabinets I started to do some of the electrical wiring as well getting ready to mount the pegboard area and building a box around some pipes up on the ceiling now here's the pegboard and here's the pegboard in blue it's starting to look a little bit better already and the box on the ceiling is ready to now I added some new insulation and started drywalling the ceiling and then the walls it's looking a bit more like a room now now it's time the mud to drywall and primer it and paint it now some of the frames and baseboards can be cut and painted the pegboard is up now and so is the mount for my video monitor I've got my HDMI cable running through the wall and now I put my LED lights up finished up some of the wiring and let there be light I assembled my drill press and put some carpet on the floor and the baseboards now it's time to start building some work benches one workbench completed now the second workbench here's a board that's going to mount the parts cabinets and a small shelf as well to hold them and the parts cabinets are up and the video monitor makes an appearance now we'll build the drill press stand and the keyboard tray and it's starting to look like a workbench the drill press stand is ready and the bench place has been mounted I'm just about ready to get work now and the workshop is completed welcome to the workshop okay now you've seen how I put the workshop together it's time to begin our tour now I'm going to start with one of my work benches many of you who've seen the videos before will know that I have to work benches one on each side of the workshop I refer to one of them as my electronics workbench and the other one is my mechanical workbench and the electronics workbench is where I do most of my Arduino work raspberry pi work where I do all my soldering where I do my work with electronics and the mechanical one is where I would put things together and use a lot of bigger tools etc although there is a cross between the two work benches so we're going to start off by looking at the electronics workbench now here's the electronics workbench I'll just show you everything on it going from left to right first of all starting on the bottom of the workbench you'll notice that there's a pad over here sort of a cream-colored pad this is an anti-static mat and it's grounded in the back corner over there so that it dissipates any static electricity so this door I like to work on electronic components I do not however recommend soldering over that now going from this side over here are the items that I'm sure a lot of you have interest in because many have asked about it this is the output for some power supplies I have behind my workbench I have two power supplies a 12 volt and a 5 volt supply the 12 volt handles more current than the 5 volt one but they're both fairly high current and they're switching power supplies they're very small and very efficient now the reason the 12 volt has more current than the 5 is that it also drives some LED lights that I'll show you in a moment that are up on the ceiling if you recall that little box that when I built the workshop I had to put around those pipes I turned that into a light fixture and so these are the outputs of the power supply and this green one is a ground that goes this to the household grounds and I've connected the anti-static mat to now over here I've got some jacks that do a variety of things there's a computer a desktop computer that's buried behind the workbench you can't see it right now it's a small computer that runs a bun to Linux 1604 and has a solid-state drive and the computer's USB I've got an extra connection to that it goes up over here so when I'm working with Arduino for example and want to connect to the USB port that's where I connect to now this one that says KBD mains keyboard it's actually keyboard and mouse it's rather interesting I've got that as you recall I've built a keyboard shelf over here and I've got a keyboard and a mouse the keyboard and the mouse are actually connected to an active USB hub a powered USB hub and one thing that I don't think you can see at the moment is on the side of the workbench I've got a switch that lets me switch where it the output of that is going to I can either be switched to go down to the computer below and in that case the keyboard and mouse does control the computer or it can be switched to go up to this jack so if I'm using something like let's say a Raspberry Pi that needs a keyboard and mouse I just connect into that and I can use the workbench keyboard and mouse with it this HDMI connector I've got a small switch an HDMI switch buried behind here it's infrared and this is actually an infrared sensor for that switch and in position number one of the switch it just takes the HDMI output from the computer that's attached to the workbench the desktop computer in position 2 it goes over to here so again something like a Raspberry Pi I can feed the HPI out HDMI excuse me output into that and view it on the video monitor that I've got mounted on the wall beside the workbench and then finally this is an Ethernet connection I've got a four port Ethernet switch a gigabit switch mounted below the workbench and one of the ports goes to here another one goes to the desktop computer and the other to go to the other workbench I'll show you those in a moment now over here I've put a small audio amplifier it's got a stereo audio amplifier module behind here and this over here and behind there over there our speakers for that amplifier is the volume control for it a power switch for it and this switch allows me to select the inputs when it's in this position on the far side it takes the inputs from these two jacks so if I'm doing any circuitry that has an audio out I can feed it into that in the other position it goes to the sound card in the computer that's below the workbench so I can get sound from the computer I actually don't use it all those in life as I thought I might now this is the control for the light that I mentioned that I've got built into that box above the workbench I use two five meter LED strip lights and because the controls I have these little boxes that already came with controls it took the controls out of the boxes they just use pulse width modulation to control the brightness of the light they can only handle one five meters per peak so I've got an A and a B so I've actually got it divided into two different segments and that just powers a light on and off now this of course my soldering station if you look behind the soldering station there seems to be a third speaker there actually isn't that's just a hole because behind here I've got the power supply as I mentioned that I use for the workbench and so this just allows some ventilation and there's also ventilation on either ends behind the workbench to allow air to pass through so that the power supply can get some ventilation for the record even under load I've never really seen any appreciable heat from the power supply you probably can't see too far into the corner but I've just got a little storage thing where I keep things like extra tips through the soldering iron extra soldering pads solder braids etc now over here this is a circuit board holder that I find very handy for holding circuit boards and I'm soldering I have this blue pad and this blue pad is a silicone baking mat actually and it's supposed to be good to up to 600 degrees Fahrenheit and I keep it over here so that when I'm soldering if any little bits of solder drip down which they inevitably do they'll just get caught by the baking mat so that's the top of the workbench as you can see I've got a power bar mounted on it look I do another workbench here is the keyboard drawer that I mentioned earlier and showed you earlier with just the keyboard and mouse as I said that's connected to an active USB hub now below this I just keep a couple of things and I've got test cables some wall works over here some power supplies more soldering things with a soldering gun and some other soldering irons I also keep the little containers I left these little containers a lot for sorting things up this is what I use for all of the jumper wires that I use on solderless breadboards I've got them sorted by size over here so I find that very convenient and have other things and containers as well down here now below here I've got two drawers this one over here is this some parts that I happen to just be using at the moment so I want them on hand and this drawer is where I keep a number of solderless breadboards for experimental wood then I just have more storage stuff below over here like for example these are a number of test leads for things like my oscilloscope and frequency counter resection and more test equipment about wire and this one over here and finally on the side over here if you can see you'll notice that I've got a anti-static strap and it plugs in I've got a jack here and there's another Jack probably out of your vision you might be able to see that another jack on this side so I can plug this in on either side and these jacks are grounded these anti-static straps already have a resistor built in so you're not actually connecting yourself directly to ground which be dangerous I just have a little hook to hang that up over here so that essentially is my electronics workbench so now let's move on to the next segment of the drill bot workshop tour all right now that we've seen the electronics workbench let's move over to the mechanical workbench now as I said this is where I would assemble items use heavier tools etc this is where I'm assembling the robot and also beside the workbench is where I have my drill press and a lot of storage for tools and such so let's go and take a look at that right now now I refer to this workbench as my mechanical workbench but it's a bit of a misnomer I mean I've got things like power supply on it and I've got test equipment above it so it's clearly not all mechanical but what I really mean by that is this is where I will do things that require assembly like a Cassie or something like that or if I need to use chemicals like I as a propyl alcohol or flux remover or if I'm using adhesives and glues or greases or anything like that I'll work on that on this workbench as opposed to doing it on my electronics workbench so let me give you a little view of it there's really not as much to this workbench as it was to the other one now as you can see I've got a mat on here a cutting mat and it's permanently fastened down to the workbench on the far side over here I've got a bench vise and in the spirit of using up all of the space that I can I had a little piece of perfboard left so I created a little frame and hung a few tools on to that there's a computer over here on this workbench as well this is a little netbook it also runs a bunt to Linux and it's got an SSD in it and it's connected directly to the Ethernet it uses one of the other ports from the Ethernet switch that I've got I like connecting things directly to Ethernet as opposing to using Wi-Fi whenever I can there's also another Ethernet connection over here so again it can be used for electronics and I've got my power supply down over here now this probably would have been more useful on the other work bench but I simply didn't have the space and I do make a lot abuse out of it as well now as you can tell going on this side I've got the drill press and I've got a vise on the bottom the drill press advise and this is very handy I've got some screws over here that I can loosen up so let's remove this vise back and forth and clamp it wherever I want it and it lets me hold the material down which is a very important safety thing and one that's dear to my own heart because when I was a younger man I had a very serious accident by not clamping something down on a drill press now some may say that my drill press is a little close to the wall and I can understand what you mean but bear in mind that immediately drilling things like printed circuit boards or chassis so the distance over here is an earlier problem for me now over here I've got a little Android tablet and it's mounted on one of these USB charger stands it has a few USB outputs on it these little drawers here and those are really just more accessories for the drill and now down over here if I move back the table of the drill press is on is where I store some other tools as well now it's no coincidence that this set of drill bits fits in here because I literally model the table after this set of drill bits and below here we've got some other tools such as a socket set it's happened I set a number of accessories from my rotary tool down here I've got a couple of different electric drills and an electric jig saws little bird back in here the very bottom there's a heat gun and a hot glue gun and back to the rest of the workbench over here I've got some storage underneath here and this is really just for things like tapes and adhesives and other various screws and things like that actually would like to reorganize that in a little while now let me just move in front of your field of view for a second and show you that underneath here I've attached another one of my home-built LED lights to one I made with strip lights and got a slips on the wall here that I can use to vary the amount of light over here and that provides some extra illumination on the workbench and then of course on the top over here I've got a shelf where I'm holding my oscilloscope and my frequency counter and my signal generator now over here some of you may have noticed these little clips I have I use these the clip pieces of paper things like schematic diagrams or pin outs so that I can look at them when I'm working on things and that's rather handy and so there you go it's a fairly basic workbench really not nothing spectacular about it but I like it it's very handy and between it and the other work event I have a lot of workspace to get things done so now let's move on to the next segment of our tour so now that we've taken a look at the two work benches it's time to focus and all the stuff that's behind me there's a pegboard behind me and there's storage areas for wire and for nuts and bolts and other pieces of hardware now I also should mention that despite all of the tools have got back here and all of the storage areas that you've seen and that you're about to see it's not the complete story the rest of my basement also has other tools other storage areas in fact they have probably twice as much storage outside of the workshop as I do inside the workshop now I'm not going to show you the rest of my basement today that would make this to it away too long but for those of you who are watching the video series on building a real robot you're going to end up seeing a bit of it anyway because this workshop is so small I don't have enough space to run my robot around so when the robot starts moving around I'm going to take it out of the room and into the rest of the basement so you'll get a glimpse of that so that's just something to look forward to in the future if that's the kind of thing you look forward to but at any rate let's go and take a look at all the things I have behind me the pegboard and all the items below it now the pegboard did you see behind me on most of my videos of course just a place to store a lot of tools and I like storing tools on pegboard you might even have noticed in the slideshow I showed you of the horrible workshop that I used to have there still was a piece of pegboard up over there I like Pig board for storage of tools just because I find it very easy to access them and because there's a definite place to put everything away when you're finished and I like keeping the workshop neat and putting things away not because that's the sort of person that I am although I think I'm a rather neat person but it's really just so that I can find them again whenever I need a pair of pliers or a screwdriver I can just go and grab it and as opposed to putting them all into a toolbox I like to have the tools that I use the most on a pegboard now I have other tools in other places you saw some that were mounted below my drill press but also in the other rooms I do have a toolbox with some additional tools but the ones I use the most you're up here in the pegboard interestingly enough the thing that I'm proudest the most about the workshop has to do with the pegboard and it's not the beautiful shade of blue that the pegboard is but it has to do with the square and the ruler over here and one thing that really amazes me is that when I built this room one thing I certainly noticed was that the four corners were not the same size this is the corner of a basement and the floor tends the slope and so the difference between the corner over here and the far corner over there is a full inch and yet despite the fact I'm on a slope in room I managed to hang this pegboard up perfectly aligned and you can tell with the ruler and the t-square because the way that they're hanging there is supported by gravity they are lined up perfectly with the holes in the pegboard so I was really proud of that at any rate I just have a number of tools stored over here the screwdrivers I use the most some larger pliers and that these cables up over here a small Ethernet cable a USB cable and an HDMI I use on the electronics workbench to go to the Jax I have a set of pliers over here of some smaller ones plier diagonal cutters wire strippers etc I use those things all the time I've hung my rotary tool up over here as well I've got two sets of nut drivers these are SAE and these are metric ones and over here what I want to show you is the wire that I've got over here now I've got all sorts of wire here this wire over here is what they call wire wrap wire but I find that great for wiring projects on perfboard this stuff is a bit larger it's 20 gauge stuff this is bus wire over here and here's some heavier wire this is 16 gauge speaker cable this is 4 conductor cable this is so called power cord the type you see coming out of a lot of the USB adapters and these are both 18 gauge red and black wire what I've done over here is I've got little dowels holding all the wires and I have these I guess you call them doors or something where I can open them up and I can push the dowel out so that when it comes time to replace a spool of wire I just pushed the dowel back now this parts cabinet back here is acting a throwback from the original workshop the drawers are not the drawers are new I bought some new parts cabinets and use the same frame which if you'll notice from the original slide show I built into the wall over here but the frame comes from some parts drawers that I purchased way way back in the 1970s and the original drawers were all cracked and brittle but I use these to store nuts and bolts and things so I've got them organized I've got metric ones and SAE ones I've also got things like tire apps and I've got DuPont connectors every size over here and then all the pins you need the male and female pins for the DuPont connectors here and here's a little shelf where I just put a few other things these are those sets of standoffs and things that I pick up and a few extra tools and that on the shelf and another shelf that I put here and again the whole idea is that I don't want to let any space here go to waste so wherever I can put a small shelf or something I put the shelf in order to store a few more things and down on this side over here way in the back if you can see I've got some hooks where I've got a number of jumper cables hanging got some more tiny screwdrivers a number of screwdrivers over here and screwdriver bits I've literally got just about every bit that you can think of including all the security bits so I can work on just about anything with that and because I can't reach over here being vertically challenged I decided to use that space to hang my resistor color code chart and so that is my pegboard arrangement now one thing that you might have observed when I was showing you the storage area that I have over here the little drawers and also the drawers at the bottom of my workbench is that they're lined with a pink material well that is actually anti-static material I've got one of the drawers over here for you this just has a number of our dueño nanos and pro minis in it and this material lines the plastic drawers in order to prevent the build-up of static electricity and it is a fairly inexpensive material the only problem with it is you can't seem to buy it in small quantities and so this is what I've got left over from doing all of the drawers and all of those drawers down there and a number of other things in the other room so it's great stuff it's inexpensive but you have to buy quite a bit of it now before we finish our tour I wanted to share with you a rather amusing little video that I found when I was digging through my archives of photos of the construction of the workshop now as I said I didn't take any video of myself constructing the workshop but I did do a number of test videos once it was essentially complete I did these test videos just because I wanted to see what it would be the film in the workshop underneath all of these LED lights so as trying a number of different lighting combinations and I ran into a video which shows the power supply's among other things that I'm using in the workbench and you weren't able to see those because they're buried behind the workbench right now so this will give you a glimpse at one of the power supplies and also the LED controls before they were taken out of their boxes but one thing I need to warn you you might want to send any small children or people with squeamish stomachs out of the room right now because there's a rather rough character in the video it's only 50 seconds long the sound and it is not very good because they didn't have any microphones out so it's just basically the sound that came out of the camera but I think it is a bit amusing so the rare never-seen-before drone ba workshop video for your enjoyment okay this is a test recording over here to see how this actually works in the workshop haven't done this before so is trying to get an angle on how things are any rate what we're going to do over here is we're going to just take a look at some stuff here at this wonderful power supply here that I'd like to show you isn't it beautiful yes and these little dimmer are doohickeys we're going to take one of these apart it's not gonna be great and here's a beautiful solderless breadboards so let's just see how that turned out all right well that last video was a little bit scary and if you ever see that scruffy guy I wouldn't approach him but other than that I hope that you've enjoyed this tour of the drone ba workshop and I especially hope that it's inspired you to build or enhance your own work area now I've had many many hours of fun inside this workshop and I'm sure that if you put something like this together yourself you'll experience the same thing now unlike some of my other videos or most of my other videos there is not an equivalent article in the drone bot workshop website for this video however I invite you to go to drone bot workshop comm where you will find all sorts of tutorials and projects for you to build in your own workshop and while you were there if you haven't already please subscribe to the newsletter and I've got an announcement about the newsletter I'd like to make right now now I know it's been a little while it's been over a month actually since I've managed to get a newsletter out I apologize for that I've just been very very busy especially building a robot which I'm sure some of you have seen on the Thursday series of build a real robot but I will be getting a newsletter out this week I'm going to use the time I save not creating an article for the video in order to get out a newsletter and in the newsletter I'm going to be announcing a new method for suggesting content for the workshop because the real purpose of the newsletter is for you to be able to tell me what it is you would like to be seeing now I've got a lot of suggestions by email many suggestions and comments on the videos in fact this video itself was a result of many suggestions you have made but going forward I have a new method for doing this and I'm going to be announcing that in the next newsletter and in every subsequent newsletter as well as in the Welcome letter that you're going to get when you sign up for the newsletter and this new method will allow me to find out exactly what it is you would like me to make and what videos and articles you would like to have from the drill MOT workshop and if you haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel well please do I'd be very thrilled to have you as one of my subscribers so until next time take care of yourself if you have a workshop have fun in it if you don't well have fun building one and I hope to see you again very soon here in the Durham bot workshop good bye for now [Music]

Channel: DroneBot Workshop

Views: 119,800

Keywords: DroneBot Workshop, electronics workshop, electronics workshop tour, electronics workshop ideas, build a workshop

Id: n838ifEFGTk

Length: 36min 17sec (2177 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2019