I attempted to print the part again on my 3D printer, but it was not extruding properly and failed midway into the print. However, I printed off a nice little case for my Bus Pirate. I may end up redoing that one though. It was a bit thin for my taste and I have the OpenSCAD file, so thickening it shouldn't be a problem. Plus it's a relatively simple design.

I had another idea for a project. One of the things that annoys me about my dremel tool is that it takes like an hour to charge the battery and it runs out in about 5-10 minutes. I do like the option of having it be cordless though. So my thoughts were to get a larger capacity battery for it and modify the old battery so that it allows an AC adapter to plug into the end of it and be cordless. I believe I could take apart the battery, remove the cell, and replace the insides with a barrel connector. Another option would be to 3D print something that goes inside. I think there are a lot of possibilities and it would allow me to have the best of both worlds.

My oscilloscope came today. There were a number of options that I know used to come as trial functionality, but since last December they now come pre-enabled. One of the functions that was hackable was the ability to run the oscilloscope at 100MHz instead of 50MHz. I followed the hacking instructions for that one feature and it's now enabled. I also went and calibrated all 4 probes.

Now that I have a working oscilloscope, I've been toying with an idea for a new project. Of course I want to finish my calculator first, but like any good author who always keeps a collection of story ideas, I like to keep a collection of project ideas. Anyways, my idea is to build an affordable arbitrary waveform generator. I'm still learning about how they work and I know the key to them is to use a DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) along with mathematically calculated signals. For instance, Assuming an amplitude of 5 Volts, a DAC could output anything from 0 to 5 Volts depending on the digital value like say 0-255. For a Sine Wave, it could be as simple as a for loop from 0 to 359 degrees with the digital value being something like (int) Sin(X) * 255 with X being the degrees. and a Triangle Wave would be (int) X/360 * 255. and a square wave would be (int) Round(X/360) * 255. I was thinking of exploring something like the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or Beagle Bone Black to start out with. Also, it may end up being a good FPGA project.