Remade Bag

I was asked to remake a bag a while back. The original was made of thin nylon type material.

The material for remaking the bag is on the left. It's an old curtain and is considerable thicker than the original. I took the handle off and unpicked the bag to make a pattern. Then stitched it all up again.

The bag just fitted in the material available, so I'm hoping it's big enough. I think I've made it a little bigger than the original. We'll see.

Zip

A while ago we bought a changing bag for the ongoing project. It was pretty cheap on ebay as it had a broken zip. At the price it was going for, about a tenth of retial price, it was worth it. It looked like the zip was fixable as it had just pulled away from the bag in one place.

After a quick fix we started using the bag, and found that the zip had pulled away as it had failed. the zip wasn't very smooth in that area and needed to be pulled harder in that area, which led to a failure.

Plan B was a new zip. Off to ebay again and a few quid later we have a new zip. Yesterday I finally had a slot available to get the sewing machine out.

Removal of old zip:

The new zip was then sewn into the bag:

The internal piping was re-attached which tidies up the zip edges:

Bag now usable. We just have to see how long this fix lasts...

Broken Keyboard

To control the Maslow I use a wireless keyboard, which is very useful as I can operate the Maslow at close quarters rather than being tethered by a keyboard cable to the control computer. Unfortunately I was using it recently and dropped it on the floor. This has happened beofre but this time when I picked it up and tried to use it, it wasn't working. It looked like the supply wasn't connected any more.

I took the keyboard apart and there was a dodgy looking inductor from the batteries to the PCB. I checkd with a multimeter and it was open circuit. I replaced it with a wire and checked. The keyboard started up and the keys worked, but the trackball didn't work and the low battery LED filckered. So it looks like the inductor is necessary to smooth out the supply voltage or help with transients. I didn't have any inductors, at least 100uH ones.
I chipped the paint off the inductor and found a ferrite core. The problem was the connection to the windings. The core seemed sound so I got some wire (the same wire I used when connecting the eMMC chip to the USB adapter) and rewound the inductor:

This fixed the keyboard, the trackball now works well.