Build Shit - DIY - What's On Your Bench?

[FAP]

Bonehead engineering at work: A wheel broke off my chair and because I didn’t feel like standing while I plan to invest in a new chair, I just screwed the broken parts to a piece of scrap wood as a sort of hillbilly splint. Pilot holes were of course used: I’m not a complete barbarian, after all.

[FAP]

More info to follow:

[FAP]

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to take a crack at for a while now: it’s both an optical tremolo controlled by a fidget spinner, and a set of bass pickups that can, well, pick up the sound of the fidget spinner itself. Inspired by two videos, one from Simon The Magpie and the other from LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER, each separately explaining the tremolo and pickup concepts, respectively. Should be easy enough to find them so not going to repost them here.

Here’s the schem I came up with but I do not recommend doing it this way. There’s probably better ways to go about this but I just worked with what I had. The enclosure is a cigar box I bought for a buck yesterday, the bass pickups I’ve been sitting on for years and the “debug” switch (top right) was a last-minute fix to correct an issue where the input signal would still bleed-through while the pickups were activated: even with this fix in place, there’s still some ambient bleed-through. Also, I had to extend the shaft of the LDR (itself housed inside an empty patch jack, which fits marvelous btw) by breaking off the spindle of one of those holding cases for bulk blank CD-Rs and cut it to size. The eyeball is just decoration used to cover up a hole for a different component (1/4” jack) that ended up being too big for a top-mount.

And lastly, some gut shots:

It’s a fairly simple build that can definitely be made simpler by someone with more patience than I had. Recommended.

[logorok]

Working my way through the STM32 / IDE / synth library / interrupt jungle

[FAP]

DIY strain relief for 1/8” stereo jack, from a cancelled project:

[FAP]

A minor DIY tip I discovered today: you can get a bunch of ribbon for super cheap at wal-mart. This is helpful to know because some older electronics (e.g. tape recorders) have a ribbon inside the battery compartment; this is used to quickly dislodge batteries as often times the spaces they occupy are rather snug, so having something to pull up on to change them out can be helpful if not outright necessary. I had to replace a ribbon recently and was pleasantly surprised not only at the inexpensive replacement material, but the ease of implementation: just cut whatever length is needed, hot glue at two or more key points then maybe add some tape for extra security and voila, battery ribbon fixed.
You can also burn the cut end(s) of a ribbon to prevent fraying, or even burn two ends together simultaneously to make a loop, like I did here:

[FAP]

It’s been two months since I started working on my current DIY project; it’ll likely need another month or two to complete due to more pressing life obligations, however I’m happy to say the bulk of the research & debugging work is now complete and it’s only a matter of time before I start putting everything together. In the meantime, here’s a cool (albeit uninformative) little sneak peak:

[FAP]

Finally installed these two 'new' Napa cassette organizers:

shelves

But the real reason I'm posting this is because I found a novel way to store my resistors:

zoom

Just ordered 200 of those soft poly tape cases: all I need to do is make the j-cards (spine labels) and I've got myself an easy, portable solution to store my resistors by both base value AND multiplier.
Now obviously the traditional bin system for storing resistors would've been considerably cheaper, but what I like about this method is there's less fear of accidentally spilling the contents than there is with a cover-less bin. Plus I like having access to a specific base value and multiplier of a resistor instead of just shoving all multipliers of a given base value into a single bin (e.g. putting 240Ω, 2.4kΩ and 24kΩ resistors all in the one same bin). Of course you could buy more bin storage units to expand the space you've got to work with, but then at that point it'll cost about as much or possibly more than my method.

[Indeterminacy]

That is pretty clever.

S.O.D. \m/ \m/

[crochambeau]

Yeah, that is a cool organization scheme.

Viewed 1635 times

Viewed 1635 times

Finishing up a build that will be bound for Germany (IIRC, I'll confirm beforehand of course)