Tag Archives: DIY

Temperature/weather station

via Dangerous Prototypes

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B. Perry writes:

I’ve always been fond of the popular Nixie clocks made from old surplus Soviet nixie tubes. Nixie tubes are no longer made, so they’re hard to acquire. Instead, I took inspiration from “Lixie” displays and made my own Nixie-inspired, LED-powered display. And in an unusual twist (for me, anyway), I didn’t make a clock this time! It’s a weather/temperature display.  I made the parts myself, starting with the electronics. These circuit boards were created on the CNC machine. The “brains” are an ESP8266 chip, which grabs the current weather from the Internet.

See the full post in his blog.

6CY7 dual triode valve amplifier

via Dangerous Prototypes

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Josh built this 6CY7 dual triode valve amplifier:

I’ve always wanted to know what the “tube magic” was all about. There is much opinion in the science of music production, probably because music and its perception is highly personal and subjective. Ive always imagined that since transistor amplifiers were “perfect” with their large amounts of negative feedback, great linearity, and low THD that tube amplifiers must add something to sound that generates their appeal. From the reading I’ve done it has to do with harmonics.

More details on imsolidstate blog.

Hack your old Raspberry Pi case for the Raspberry Pi 4

via Raspberry Pi

Hack your existing Raspberry Pi case to fit the layout of your new Raspberry Pi 4, with this handy “How to hack your existing Raspberry Pi case to fit the layout of your new Raspberry Pi 4” video!

Hack your old Raspberry Pi case to fit your Raspberry Pi 4

Hack your existing official Raspberry Pi case to fit the new Raspberry Pi 4, or treat yourself to the new official Raspberry Pi 4 case. The decision is yours!

How to hack your official Raspberry Pi case

  1. Take your old Raspberry Pi out of its case.
  2. Spend a little time reminiscing about all the fun times you had together.
  3. Reassure your old Raspberry Pi that this isn’t the end, and that it’ll always have a special place in your heart.
  4. Remember that one particular time – you know the one; wipe a loving tear from your eye.
  5. Your old Raspberry Pi loves you. It’s always been there for you. Why are you doing this?
  6. Look at the case. Look at it. Look how well it fits your old Raspberry Pi. Those fine, smooth edges; that perfect white and red combination. The three of you – this case, your old Raspberry Pi, and you – you make such a perfect team. You’re brilliant.
  7. Look at your new Raspberry Pi 4. Yes, it’s new, and faster, and stronger, but this isn’t about all that. This is about all you’ve gone through with your old Raspberry Pi. You’re just not ready to say goodbye. Not yet.
  8. Put your buddy, the old Raspberry Pi, back in its case and set it aside. There are still projects you can work on together; this is not the end. No, not at all.
  9. In fact, why do you keep calling it your old Raspberry Pi? There’s nothing old about it. It still works; it still does the job. Sure, your Raspberry Pi 4 can do things that this one can’t, and you’re looking forward to trying them out, but that doesn’t make this one redundant. Heck, if we went around replacing older models with newer ones all the time, Grandma would be 24 years old and you’d not get any of her amazing Sunday dinners, and you do love her honey-glazed parsnips.
  10. Turn to your new Raspberry Pi 4 and introduce yourself. It’s not its fault that you’re having a temporary crisis. It hasn’t done anything wrong. So take some time to really get to know your new friend.
  11. New friendships take time, and fresh beginnings, dare we say it…deserve new cases.
  12. Locate your nearest Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller and purchase the new Raspberry Pi 4 case, designed especially to make your new Raspberry Pi comfortable and secure.
  13. Reflect that this small purchase of a new case will support the charitable work of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Enjoy a little warm glow inside. You did good today.
  14. Turn to your old keyboard…

The post Hack your old Raspberry Pi case for the Raspberry Pi 4 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Making a SPL dB meter

via Dangerous Prototypes

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Shawon Shahryiar over at Embedded Lab shared a how-to on making a SPL dB meter:

Sound needs a medium for propagation or travel. It can’t travel in vacuum. Normally air is that medium but sound can also propagate in liquids and other states of matter. I am not going to lecture on how sound travels and its properties as Wikipedia details everything well here. Everything we see around us has a measurement and a unit. In case of sound pressure, the unit is decibel. Our basic requirement is to be able to measure Sound Pressure Level (SPL) in decibel scale with a typical 8-bit microcontroller, an ordinary microphone and without involving complex algorithms.
Measurement of sound has a number of uses. For instance, monitoring sound pollution, security system, monitoring the quality of an amplifier, detecting sound profile of an environment, etc.

Building a DIY SMT pick & place machine with OpenPnP

via Dangerous Prototypes

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Erich Styger has a nice write-up about building a DIY pick & place machine based on OpenPnP:

This article is about a project I have started back in January 2018. As for many of my projects, it took longer than anticipated.But now it is working, and the result is looking very good: a DIY automated pick and place machine to place parts on circuit boards. In the age of cheap PCBs, that machine closes the gap for small series of boards which have to be populated in a time consuming way otherwise.

See the full post on MCU on Eclipse blog.

Check out the video after the break.

 

DIY Arduino FM radio

via Dangerous Prototypes

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Nick over at educ8s.tv shared detailed instructions of how to build this DIY Art Deco style FM Radio project using Arduino:

Let’s see what we are going to build today! As you can see, we are going to build an Art Deco style FM radio receiver. The design of this radio is based on this spectacular 1935 AWA radio. I discovered this old radio while searching online and also in this book about the most beautiful radios ever made. I loved the design of this radio so much that I wanted to have a similar one. So I devoted a month of my time to build my own.

Full details at educ8s.tv.

Check out the video after the break.