Welcome to ElectronicsNerd.net where you will find a collection of personal projects involving electronics and my other fun hobbies like photography, gadget hacking, and music writing. I live in Cleveland, Ohio, and I'm always willing to chat about cool projects, maybe get something going with other people. So if you see something you like, send me an email or something.When I was a kid, movies like WarGames, E.T., Weird Science, Real Genius, Cloak & Dagger, D.A.R.Y.L., and a bunch of others got me interested in making cool stuff with science. If you want a great modern-day movie, I don't think Primer can be beat. After all, it was made for $7000. Hot-diggety. A genuine science-is-cool movie whose creepy aura takes a long time to shake off.
January 26, 2010. New on the Projects page: a 3-button laundry timer. Originally built using an LCD, now in a blistering yellow multiplexed 7-segment display! At left, tournedos au poivre; the photo is indicative of my sporadic updates here. I take my hobbies very seriously, and the payoff from good eatin' for a time outweighed that of electronics diddling. On the right, Chateaubriand potoatoes. I was trying to replicate my favorite (and most expensive) dish at a local eatery, and I roundly exceeded my expectations, as well as the quality of the restaurant's offering.
Besides, I've been working on bits and pieces that really didn't merit a post but I assure you, there is more goody to come. One refinement to my working technique is wiring in the programming connections so I never have to unseat the microcontroller when I make a slight modification to its program. This saves a great deal of time and frustration, and is worth the few extra wires and pullup resistors.
December 17, 2009. In October I quit my job. Ten years of getting up every day, spending all day, and then spending some more time after an unsuitable dinner had given me a lot of time to consider just what it is I was doing for my livelihood. I just shot off a comment on Alan Parekh's excellent www.hackedgadgets.com blog to some guy who made a noisemaking electronic thing out of a boot, and in it I wrote about overlapping circles of knowledge. For about five years now I've had this idea in my head, that all the disciplines one studies overlap in certain magical places. More is forthcoming...
Wednesday, October 28, 2009. Here's the prototype for a transportation warning system, done up in grownup busy-box style. The client was surprised I hadn't ordered the shell off the Internet, but I assured him I did it all with hand tools. I have to admit, the hardest thing is getting the buttons all square and in line, but as I said it's a prototype. The finished product will be much smaller and sport a barrier strip for all connections. Advice: go slowly with the Dremel.A PIC microcontroller accepts contact closures and triggers playback of thumbdrive MP3s through a twin TDA2003 amplifier into a hot yellow horn speaker. Boy does this thing scream. Sounds are generated through an online Text-to-Speech system, so the resulting files are bandwidth limited and noise-free. Once normalized, they are perfect for belting out voice warnings at top volume at the halfway point of the input pot. I considered buying a canned amp; the folks at Radio Design Labs offer a line of stick-on utility amplifiers, but at $135 a crack I'll be better off including my own amp in the final board.
Monday, October 26, 2009. Right now I'm working on a voice warning system for an industrial project, and trying to find people to collaborate with on stuff. A great little amplifier, the TDA2003, has really proven itself for what I'm working on now. This little $1.25 10W mono amplifier works right out of the box using the circuit in the datasheet. It's very cool listening to music through my homemade amplifier as I make dinner and do other stuff around the apartment, even though it's not a hi-fi piece of audio gear. What's neat is that the circuit fits on a 3"-square breadboard and is too much power for the junk speaker I had lying around. Consuming only 300mA at 12V when the music is at its loudest, not much heat is generated for the amount of sound it puts out. The amp in bridge configuration is a much better circuit, but beware! I've seen a couple of just plain wrong schematics floating around. I'll be providing the link to something that works soon.
I'll be combining the finished product with the VMusic module to playback MP3s for the project, and will be posting the finished thingy here. Also, now I know what I'm making my guitarist friends for holiday presents. It shouldn't be hard to combine this with some basic audio effects and create custom practice amplifiers...
Is anyone interested in a Cleveland Electronics Club? It's strange that there's no hit on any search engine for "Cleveland Electronics Club," so I figured I'd post this and see what happens.
The proposed group would have a very open and flexible membership, pursue projects together, and be a forum for learning and experimentation. If you are interested, please make contact through this site.
The proposed group would have a very open and flexible membership, pursue projects together, and be a forum for learning and experimentation. If you are interested, please make contact through this site.
