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Archive for the ‘How To’ Category
Take Apart Tuesday No. 8: Saw III Digital Voice Recorder & LOST Homage
Posted on May 18th, 2010 • Filed under Events, How To • 1 Comment
Yay! Another Take-Apart-Tuesday write up! I’ve been distracted by CRASH Space meta, but here’s one of the several dismantlings we’ve done since the last time I posted.
I’ve written about how nice it is to be able to buy electronics supplies locally a few times. All Electronics is one of those LA vendors. Tom brought in one of the SAW III digital voice recorders they sell for around 2 bucks in January, but, lets face it, it creeped me out. So what better to do than to Take it Apart!
Toys and random schwag are great resources for hacking projects. Frequently you can get whole working circuits for cheaper than an IC alone. I tried to source comparable boards / chips and the next cheapest thing I found in a board was $6.95 (What looks like the Aplus APR9301 at Electronics123). I found a chip alone at Digikey for $3.84 (The Nuvoton ISD1700 ChipCorder® Series)
As Make Magazine pointed out back in 2008, GetLoFi has a write up showing what resistor to replace with a potentiometer for pitch control (R4) how to add a phono jack, etc. Briefly mentioned is hooking one of these up to an Arduino board via transistors, so that’s what I’m going to show in this article.
Home Depot Rocket Science
Posted on May 7th, 2010 • Filed under How To • No Comments
In this clip, Crash Space member and founder of Acceleren, Clive shows how to make a basic rocket out of under $100 worth of parts from Home Depot. As you can see he’s doing a lot of this at the space and we’ll likely have some kind of a rocket night in the very near future. Check out the Acceleren YouTube channel for more vlogs and updates.
Take Apart Tuesday No. 7: Keypad from Canon MP27D
Posted on March 16th, 2010 • Filed under Events, How To • 1 Comment
Running way behind, but I think y’all will forgive me. We’ve been doing some great Put-Together-Tuesdays since the last time I posted with a SpeedMake on March 2nd and BrushBot assembling on the 9th. If you’ll look waaaay back with me to February 23rd, though, I’ll tell you about the Canon MP27D.
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While there is some fabulous motor fun in this machine, there is also a keypad that uses something called row column scanning to do it’s business. I bring this up because it is pretty common to want more buttons in your project than your micro-controller has pins. Also, the board they’re using is one of the easiest circuit boards to completely reverse engineer that I’ve seen in awhile because it has no parts on it. So for keypad circuit stealing, keep reading.
Take Apart Tuesday No. 6 – HP 1120C
Posted on February 22nd, 2010 • Filed under Events, How To • 5 Comments
So a bit of a rewind on Take Apart Tuesday. This is the write up for February 9th. I was going to skip it and just go straight for hard drive we dismantled on the 16th, but a potentiometer actually smoked (sorry, no flames). It seemed like a requirement to share what that happened.
So this week a bit on optical encoding, then some on stall torque and how it relates to component power ratings. Just for giggles I threw in some DC Motor code on the Arduino at the end. So keep reading… The Case of the Smoking Potentiometer
Take Apart Tuesday No. 5: Electric Toothbrushes
Posted on February 6th, 2010 • Filed under Events, How To • 1 Comment
This week’s Take Apart Tuesday is going to be a little light because we really spent the time after the meeting watching LOST. LOVED IT.
I had dismantled two electric toothbrushes over the weekend preparing for an Introduction To Electronics class I’m teaching at Machine Project in March. I pretty much threw the parts on the table like chum saying “keep the talking to the commercials people.”
That said I have written up a little bit about the nature of DC motors and provided links.
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