You can see mine now. He rarely leaves my side. I even bought him his own padded case for travel. He will be heading to Chicago with me for VapeBash.
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You can see mine now. He rarely leaves my side. I even bought him his own padded case for travel. He will be heading to Chicago with me for VapeBash.
Not really much to say. I am anxiously waiting for my Billet Box. I've watched the vids over several times.
And I just know, DD is working his magic as I type this short note. ;-)
And I just know, DD is working his magic as I type this short note. ;-)
Hey, thanks a bunch!!!
I'm working on the weekly update right now, will be a bit to get all the pics formatted and i think my wife may give me some food soon too, but will have it up tonight!!!
Hah hah, that would be awesome. I don't dare to dream that big, though. I'm hoping he says he made a lot of progress, and that they might be finished by the end of next week.
biLLet BirTh Feb9th Update:
hey guys, yahoo, we had a good week kinda. We done good. My sanding and polishing monkey drank to much and didn't show up one day this week but he made it up today (Saturday) and he's getting pretty good at making these puppies gleam like magic. One bummer this week was just the power kept going out (Utah, snow), Dev dose not like when this happens, and you can just about scrap anything she's making when it dose lost some tanks, nothing major, not a setback, just a little sucky. Now a lot of what we did this week I'v already showed you guys, (more aluminum bodies, slide covers and such) but I got some new stuff to show so lets get to it.
The electronic bits
first we got to make a circuit board. We start out with a copper clad board (fiberglass covered with a layer of copper one side), and suck it down to Devs vacuum table.
then she traces the paths of the circuit, cutting through the copper into the fiberglass with a sharp, pointy type cutter.
then she drills and cuts out all the little holes for our components to go through, and separates all the boards thanks Dev.
now we got a good little stack of boards ready to solder some parts to.
k, I'm going to try to go into some detail about this, for the benefit of anyone who may want to tinker with the board later. If your not into electronics at all this will may put you to sleep but hopefully it will be of some use to someone . To move on is not quite as straight forward as just grabbing a component and soldering it to the board. The billet box used a potentiometer to adjust its voltage output, with resisters providing the limiting ranges of output . but unfortunately, potentiometers are about as uniform as a potato.. A 20k potentiometer is rarely REALLY 20,000 ohms. One could be about 16,000 ohms and another could be 24,000 ohms thats a big spread.. so to make the output of the BB's board accurate, we first have to measure the resistance of each pot individually. Here is a close up of the pot we use in the BBs brains, it happens to be a 20k pot, but it doesn't have to be. Some of the pre release molds have 50k pot's, some have 10k's, it really doesn't matter much as long as the resistors provide the correct relationship for the desired output (in this case 4 ~ 5.5v).
so we check the max resistance of the pot and find it's not all that off, 20.620 ohms, well thats nice. These pots are made in Spain bty, in case anybody wanted to know.
so now that we know the resistance we can do the math and see what resistors we need to keep the voltage doing what we want it to do . and the math is
well that got old doing that on the fly with each pot, so i just sat down and did the math for each value between 16k and 24k in 100ohm steps, and made a list i really should have laminated before i ripped, spit coffee, and dirtied with cutting oil.
so in this case we find our 20.6k on the list, and find it's associated resistors to dial in the voltage to min 4v max 5.5 volts. For anyone who wanted to modify the ranges, this could be more (about up to a sustained 7 volts) or less (about 1 is as low as it could go).. The reason i range the voltage from 4 to 5.5 is because of resolution of the dial, and safety. The dial only turns so many degrees. If the dial range was 1v to about 8v, the slightest movement of it would be really dramatic. If the voltage is allowed to go to low, that is just a wast of native battery power, and the excess wattage would be dissipated as heat. But, to each there own, and if a mod'r wants to alter it, thats super fine!
so we match up a pair of resistors to make R1, that our list dictates to be 16,161 ohms.
and our R2, that is 37,00 ohms,,,, well, thats not going to happen exactly, but within 50 ohms is pretty darn good.
i know radioshack has gone downhill in recent years as far as components are concerned, but still, it is sad to know that i have at least twice as many resistors in my shop than every radioshack in the state combined.
ok, so we got our resistors now that match our pot. R1 and R2.
R1(lower value) is soldered into the outer chase closest to the side of the board, and R2(higher value that is added to the pots resistance) is soldered into the chase closer to the pot.
then all the other junk is soldered into place. This is finally straight forward, just grab a part and stick it in there The black box on the back is pretty much the brain and workhorse of the board, it regulates the voltage using the comparative resistance of the pot and resistors as a reference and spits out whatever we ask it for. Over current, temperature protection and reverse polarity shut off are also built into the architecture of that semiconductor. The black tubey thing is a capacitor that i threw in there just because i though it looked nice (not really, but it would work without it. It dose however smooth out the circuit very slightly so it's worth the realestate). And the part with the little green top is the switch (made in France)
now we solder up the battery contacts that we made last week, with the positive entering the circuit just under the capacitor, and the negative in the corner opposite the switch.
and then add the voltage output contact (that delivers our voltage to the carto/or other vapor making coil) on the corner closes to the switch.
allllmost done with the circuit board (not that fun to talk about i know), but now we need to mask the mounting hole where the board is attached to the main body of the BB and transfers the ground to the device. Then brush coat the board with conformal (nitrocellulose lacquer ) to protect from shock and corrosion.
and done, here we can see the slot in the BBs body that accepts the voltage regulator chip, and acts as an overkill heat sink.
test fitting it into place,
can see the switch lining up under where the mechanical button will go
and the dial goes in the hole in the board and lines up inside the potentiometer.
agggh, glad that write ups over, now i get soup.
in other news, look at this thing
this is another vacuum work holder for the second operation on the tanks. Last update I showed the fist operation and they looked kinda like this
well they get flipped over and sucked into this super neat looking jig like this..
then Dev separates each one and shaves each one down to the right thickness,
[
turn off the vac, and they pop on out,
now they need holes in the top and bottom for the carto and channels milled for the o-rings, for this they go into this jig
Dev goes to town on um', I flip um over, and then she cuts the other side.
Oh, we got our batteries in the other day nice to have a few hundred on standby in case i run out of power . for those of you on the list with a kit, these are the bad boys you'll be gettin'.
and chargers for kits. Here I had to do some thinking and testing. I have a LOT of chargers, some really nice multi hundred $ ones that do tricks, some cr@ppy junk ones that hardly work. I know a lot about chargers, and i'm not going to send anybody out anything I'm not happy with. I also had to figure that the majority of the pre orders we got for complete kits, were overwhelmingly NOT destined for the USA. Heck if i know what everybody has for power outlets in every county round the world, nor could i get cables and adapters for each one, there is simply to many.. but we all have one thing in common, and that is USB. The charger we are sending out with the kits is the Xtar MP2, and I am happy with it. It charges two independent channels at 250mA, operates very cool, is not junk, and looks nice to boot. I know it will be the most functional charger i could supply, as it will work off your computer, most people have a few USB wall warts from cell phones chargers, and also those USB plugs for car analog lighter.
We are getting really close guys, the carbon fiber needs to show up and will this week for sure. I have a feeling we will have some ready to go just after next weeks update, then it will be a steady stream of sending them out every few days in the order we got ya on our list.. We have a few more bits to carve up this coming week, so more to share next update... but we are ever closer to making those trips to the post office....
thanks guys,
sorry if this update was a little shy on eye candy, electronics just an't super sexy, but we need um.
I'll be back on tomorrow to tackle the PMs,
hey guys, yahoo, we had a good week kinda. We done good. My sanding and polishing monkey drank to much and didn't show up one day this week but he made it up today (Saturday) and he's getting pretty good at making these puppies gleam like magic. One bummer this week was just the power kept going out (Utah, snow), Dev dose not like when this happens, and you can just about scrap anything she's making when it dose lost some tanks, nothing major, not a setback, just a little sucky. Now a lot of what we did this week I'v already showed you guys, (more aluminum bodies, slide covers and such) but I got some new stuff to show so lets get to it.
The electronic bits
first we got to make a circuit board. We start out with a copper clad board (fiberglass covered with a layer of copper one side), and suck it down to Devs vacuum table.
then she traces the paths of the circuit, cutting through the copper into the fiberglass with a sharp, pointy type cutter.
then she drills and cuts out all the little holes for our components to go through, and separates all the boards thanks Dev.
now we got a good little stack of boards ready to solder some parts to.
k, I'm going to try to go into some detail about this, for the benefit of anyone who may want to tinker with the board later. If your not into electronics at all this will may put you to sleep but hopefully it will be of some use to someone . To move on is not quite as straight forward as just grabbing a component and soldering it to the board. The billet box used a potentiometer to adjust its voltage output, with resisters providing the limiting ranges of output . but unfortunately, potentiometers are about as uniform as a potato.. A 20k potentiometer is rarely REALLY 20,000 ohms. One could be about 16,000 ohms and another could be 24,000 ohms thats a big spread.. so to make the output of the BB's board accurate, we first have to measure the resistance of each pot individually. Here is a close up of the pot we use in the BBs brains, it happens to be a 20k pot, but it doesn't have to be. Some of the pre release molds have 50k pot's, some have 10k's, it really doesn't matter much as long as the resistors provide the correct relationship for the desired output (in this case 4 ~ 5.5v).
so we check the max resistance of the pot and find it's not all that off, 20.620 ohms, well thats nice. These pots are made in Spain bty, in case anybody wanted to know.
so now that we know the resistance we can do the math and see what resistors we need to keep the voltage doing what we want it to do . and the math is
well that got old doing that on the fly with each pot, so i just sat down and did the math for each value between 16k and 24k in 100ohm steps, and made a list i really should have laminated before i ripped, spit coffee, and dirtied with cutting oil.
so in this case we find our 20.6k on the list, and find it's associated resistors to dial in the voltage to min 4v max 5.5 volts. For anyone who wanted to modify the ranges, this could be more (about up to a sustained 7 volts) or less (about 1 is as low as it could go).. The reason i range the voltage from 4 to 5.5 is because of resolution of the dial, and safety. The dial only turns so many degrees. If the dial range was 1v to about 8v, the slightest movement of it would be really dramatic. If the voltage is allowed to go to low, that is just a wast of native battery power, and the excess wattage would be dissipated as heat. But, to each there own, and if a mod'r wants to alter it, thats super fine!
so we match up a pair of resistors to make R1, that our list dictates to be 16,161 ohms.
and our R2, that is 37,00 ohms,,,, well, thats not going to happen exactly, but within 50 ohms is pretty darn good.
i know radioshack has gone downhill in recent years as far as components are concerned, but still, it is sad to know that i have at least twice as many resistors in my shop than every radioshack in the state combined.
ok, so we got our resistors now that match our pot. R1 and R2.
R1(lower value) is soldered into the outer chase closest to the side of the board, and R2(higher value that is added to the pots resistance) is soldered into the chase closer to the pot.
then all the other junk is soldered into place. This is finally straight forward, just grab a part and stick it in there The black box on the back is pretty much the brain and workhorse of the board, it regulates the voltage using the comparative resistance of the pot and resistors as a reference and spits out whatever we ask it for. Over current, temperature protection and reverse polarity shut off are also built into the architecture of that semiconductor. The black tubey thing is a capacitor that i threw in there just because i though it looked nice (not really, but it would work without it. It dose however smooth out the circuit very slightly so it's worth the realestate). And the part with the little green top is the switch (made in France)
now we solder up the battery contacts that we made last week, with the positive entering the circuit just under the capacitor, and the negative in the corner opposite the switch.
and then add the voltage output contact (that delivers our voltage to the carto/or other vapor making coil) on the corner closes to the switch.
allllmost done with the circuit board (not that fun to talk about i know), but now we need to mask the mounting hole where the board is attached to the main body of the BB and transfers the ground to the device. Then brush coat the board with conformal (nitrocellulose lacquer ) to protect from shock and corrosion.
and done, here we can see the slot in the BBs body that accepts the voltage regulator chip, and acts as an overkill heat sink.
test fitting it into place,
can see the switch lining up under where the mechanical button will go
and the dial goes in the hole in the board and lines up inside the potentiometer.
agggh, glad that write ups over, now i get soup.
in other news, look at this thing
this is another vacuum work holder for the second operation on the tanks. Last update I showed the fist operation and they looked kinda like this
well they get flipped over and sucked into this super neat looking jig like this..
then Dev separates each one and shaves each one down to the right thickness,
[
turn off the vac, and they pop on out,
now they need holes in the top and bottom for the carto and channels milled for the o-rings, for this they go into this jig
Dev goes to town on um', I flip um over, and then she cuts the other side.
Oh, we got our batteries in the other day nice to have a few hundred on standby in case i run out of power . for those of you on the list with a kit, these are the bad boys you'll be gettin'.
and chargers for kits. Here I had to do some thinking and testing. I have a LOT of chargers, some really nice multi hundred $ ones that do tricks, some cr@ppy junk ones that hardly work. I know a lot about chargers, and i'm not going to send anybody out anything I'm not happy with. I also had to figure that the majority of the pre orders we got for complete kits, were overwhelmingly NOT destined for the USA. Heck if i know what everybody has for power outlets in every county round the world, nor could i get cables and adapters for each one, there is simply to many.. but we all have one thing in common, and that is USB. The charger we are sending out with the kits is the Xtar MP2, and I am happy with it. It charges two independent channels at 250mA, operates very cool, is not junk, and looks nice to boot. I know it will be the most functional charger i could supply, as it will work off your computer, most people have a few USB wall warts from cell phones chargers, and also those USB plugs for car analog lighter.
We are getting really close guys, the carbon fiber needs to show up and will this week for sure. I have a feeling we will have some ready to go just after next weeks update, then it will be a steady stream of sending them out every few days in the order we got ya on our list.. We have a few more bits to carve up this coming week, so more to share next update... but we are ever closer to making those trips to the post office....
thanks guys,
sorry if this update was a little shy on eye candy, electronics just an't super sexy, but we need um.
I'll be back on tomorrow to tackle the PMs,
Oh Dear Lord .... I Always Knew the Billet Box was from the future ....
My eyes are wide open just looking at all the photographs Doug Sir ....
Also i am finally in Thailand , and the Billet box is sitting right next to me and i have a nice and content smile on my face
Love to all
Happy vaping
Sahil .
My eyes are wide open just looking at all the photographs Doug Sir ....
Also i am finally in Thailand , and the Billet box is sitting right next to me and i have a nice and content smile on my face
Love to all
Happy vaping
Sahil .
Nothing better to warm up the vape senses than BB porn on a chilly Saturday nite in February... Thanks DD!
Absolutely lovely DD! Thanks for the update-LUV the electro-bits! Soup looked interesting too.
ps. Hope you are enjoying yourself Sahil ! Any beach - BB - Beer, R&R pics to post yet? Thailand was the only place I felt homesick leaving. When I visited it was via the USS Ogden, named after BB's home town! Here is my beach pic-View attachment 176947
ps. Hope you are enjoying yourself Sahil ! Any beach - BB - Beer, R&R pics to post yet? Thailand was the only place I felt homesick leaving. When I visited it was via the USS Ogden, named after BB's home town! Here is my beach pic-View attachment 176947
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these updates may just be the greatest in history..I was startled and amused, simultaneously, by the soup.
DD, your work ethic and sense of humor are outstanding...the goofy bird drawing on the page with the formula is a great example.
You are welcome to the beach anytime to just hang with my wife and me and...uh...maybe...ummm...you could bring me a nice gift..??..
I'll even cook you dinner for a whole week, and I'm not bad !
DD, your work ethic and sense of humor are outstanding...the goofy bird drawing on the page with the formula is a great example.
You are welcome to the beach anytime to just hang with my wife and me and...uh...maybe...ummm...you could bring me a nice gift..??..
I'll even cook you dinner for a whole week, and I'm not bad !
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