Corona Designs is dedicated to showcasing designs and ideas for Do-It-Yourself robotics, electronics, photography gear, and anything else that involves getting your hands dirty, and building something useful. Most of the ideas are related to photography (and more specifically time-lapse photography), which is another hobby of mine.
Workshop & Tools
All of my creations come from my tiny hole-in-the-wall workshop. My shop is only about 10×10 feet, but it’s not the size that counts, right?
My current inventory of tools includes:
- A sturdy workbench with 4″ vise
- Printrbot Simple Metal 3D printer (modified with DIY heated bed)
- Skil benchtop drill press
- Skil 9″ band saw
- Rigol 1054z Digital Storage Oscilloscope
- Extech EX330 multimeter
- Hakko knockoff soldering station
- Mostly Printed CNC router
- Wide assortment of hand tools and other power tools
Software Tools
The current software tools used for my projects include the following:
- Autodesk Fusion 360 for mechanical design (free for hobbyists!)
- KiCad 5.0 very capable and fully open source (free) electronic schematics & PCB layout (I’ve switched from Eagle to this)
- PlatformIO open source editor for any software development (based on Microsoft Visual Studio Code platform). This integrates the Arduino IDE capabilities into a light and fully featured editor.
Other good, but no longer used applications:
- Apple Xcode with embedXcode plugin for Arduino programming
- Autodesk Eagle for electronic schematics & PCB design (free for hobbyists!)