Category Archives: project

people

A Little Lazing

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I popped over to pre-engineering to do a little experimentation with the laser cutter and the lace wood sample that I’m going to use on the front of the peoples amp.

The first step was to adjust the mirror assembly to the correct height.



I drafted up three holes to check clearance on pots, switches, and jacks. I also created several lines to test etching line weight. I set up the line weight and vector etching properties in Corel (yuk) The lace wood was .15″ inch thick but it’s fairly dense so I had to use .18″ to get all a clean cut. 51 Grey was about midway on strength and created a well defined etch without flaring up.



After tweaking settings I found .19″ hardwood to work well with the lace wood.

project

New life for a dead HDD

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Great weekend project I found on the instructables website. Take an old HDD, a USB hub, and a few thumb drives. Remove the HDD guts and replace with the critical parts of the USB hub. I used a dremel tool to chop the strain relief from the hub housing and hot melt glued it in place.


repair

Monitor Repair

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My 22″ Acer monitor died about a month ago. I did a little googling and found that this model has an output transformer prone to failure. It was a $20 gamble that paid off (new transformer from lcdparts sitting on the bubble wrap in the photo below ). About 45 minutes round trip, the majority of the time was spent figuring out disassembly. Photos were an important trail of digital breadcrumbs that I used to get the monitor back together.
Awesome video on the basic function of an LCD monitor here.

The only soldering were the 8 pads circled in red above that needed to be desoldered to install the new transformer

OT transformer in red again, the white blobs of silicone popped off with tweezers and glued back in place after soldering with a little roasting with a heat gun.

Back in business!

cmoy

CMOY FIN!

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Great project from tangentsoft! I’ve been looking for a good headphone amp to push my Grado SR125’s on the road. The CMOY is a great solution, based on the awesome Burr Brown OPA132 Op Amp. I plan on building a large cap version for my desktop.