Category Archives: Hardware

Sony TV Repair

Posted on December 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

While building things like the Beep It or a Plasma Speaker is fun, the result isn’t always the most useful or practical.  That’s why it’s always great to be able to put some of my EE skills to a use most people can appreciate.

When my dad was offered a broken Sony Trinitron(Sony KV-30HS420), I was very excited to attempt a repair to revive an otherwise perfectly good HD TV.  The guy giving the TV to my dad found an online guide that offered a possible way to fix the 6 or 7 blinking LED error code the TV was experiencing.

http://k0lee.com/2011/05/fixing-a-sony-wega-with-6-or-7-blink-code/

The link comes from Lee Devlin, and his site reminded me a lot of my own, with a great collection of guides on a variety of technology.  I’m happy to report that his repair instructions were spot on, and the pictures in the guide proved very helpful.

Ordering the chips needed for the repair went great.  The online store was located in Evansville, Indiana and the order shipped quickly.  After receiving the chips, it was a simple case of opening the TV, removing the board, unsoldering the chips, soldering in new sockets and replacing the chips.  The whole process took about an hour and the hardest part was moving the 150 lb TV on and off of it’s stand.

If you run into a small error with some of your own gadgets, I encourage you to do some research online and put some simple repair skills to use.  By finding guides like Lee’s or some of the information I hope this site offers, it should be easy to keep your old electronics alive.

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Posted in Hardware

FiveFish SC1-mk2 Update

Posted on December 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

A little more than a year or ago, I bought two channels of FiveFish Studios  SC1 mk2 microphone preamp kit.  One of my previous posts show my initial progress and some pictures of the old RadioShack home theater amplifier I gutted to get the case to put this new project in.  Unfortunately, I was still troubleshooting at that time and haven’t had given an update sense.

I’m happy to report that after some simple troubleshooting, I was able to get the two channels running perfectly.  After playing around with the grounding scheme some, I was able to get both channels operating at very high gain levels with no noise.  Above you can see my mobile recording rack where the preamp has been since I completed it.

I’ve used this preamp on just about every recording since finishing the kit and would recommend FiveFish products to anyone based on audio quality alone.   It also helps that they have great support for a DIY kit and helped me troubleshoot the few issues I did run into.

 

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Posted in DIY Music Projects, Gear, Hardware

Robotic Egg Hunt

Posted on December 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

Usually I only post about music technology, but a subject that is always fun to talk about is Robotics.  My Autonomous Robotics class (ECE 564) is one of the more fun classes I’ve taken in college.  The whole class builds up to a final robotic competition where each team builds a robot to compete head to head against another robot.

The competition for this semester was a robotic egg hunt.  Robots got 1 point for bringing a pastel colored egg back to their base and -3 for a brown egg in their base.  You can see our robot (designed by myself, Michael DeVeau and Mostafa Farag) running a test to bring back pastel eggs below.

For more details about the robot design, construction and more videos, please keep reading after the break.

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Posted in Hardware

DIY Ableton Live Foot Pedal

Posted on June 12, 2011 | 1 Comment

Those of you that use Ableton for looping know how nice it is to have a foot pedal to start and stop recording when your hands are full playing an instrument.  The problem is, many MIDI pedals are expensive.  So I developed a workaround solution that involves using Ableton’s great keymap feature.  By gutting the inside of an old PS/2 keyboard, and rewiring the keys to a series of buttons, you can make a great footpedal for very cheap or even free.  Keep reading below to find out how!

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Posted in DIY Music Projects, Hardware, How-To, Looping

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Plasma Speaker

Posted on May 17, 2011 | 1 Comment

This post is a brief overview of a design project done for a senior design class at the University of Louisville.  The idea originated with Paul Faget and Seth Tucker.  In addition to Paul, Seth and myself, we also had two mechanical engineers on the team: Shawn Day and Phillip Shepard.  All the information below is drawn from some of the documentation we had to do for the course credit.  It should be enough to give a brief overview, but feel free to comment or email me for more information.

Background

A plasma speaker is an audio playback mechanism that uses an arc between two electrodes as a sound source. By modulating the current through the plasma channel in conjunction with an audio input, thermal changes are induced on the air around the arc, resulting in a sound wave.

Traditional speakers are limited by their mass and directionality. The inertia in a traditional paper or film tweeter causes small distortions when playing back high frequency audio. Using a plasma speaker in place of a traditional tweeter provides a possible way to create a more accurate audio playback system.

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Posted in DIY Music Projects, Hardware