Audio Crossover Back in Service


Audio Crossovers are an essential tool for any high end speaker system. Because most individual loudspeakers are unable to cover the entire spectrum of audible sound as well as multiple drivers are, it is necessary to split the input signal into low and high frequency parts. When a friend of [Anthony]‘s was about to send off a classic Klipsch AA Crossover to be repaired professionally, [Anthony] insisted it was possible to save some money and do it himself.

The oil can capacitors of the Crossover had gone bad, so a new set of metalized polypropylene capacitors were ordered to pick up the task. After carefully removing the old caps, [Anthony] assembled the new set on a breadboard, and mounted the board to the old Crossover base (along with some tasteful McDonalds straw spacers). The entire process is detailed on his blog, and we are sure his friend saved a good deal by this home repair method. Capacitor issues are a common problem in repairing electronics new and old alike, and always a great place to start looking when devices start acting funny.

Broken laptop recovered using an Arduino

We see Arduino boards used in a lot of projects but we’ve never thought of using one as a USB crossover cable. That’s basically what [Jack the Vendicator] did to get his broken laptop running. When his video card stopped working he found himself unable to access the laptop. Newer machines don’t have a serial connector, which could have been used for a serial terminal, so he was at a bit of a loss since neither SSH nor VNC were installed. But he thought he might be able to use the Arduino as a serial terminal connector over USB. He plugged the Arduino into the laptop, and connected a USB serial converter from his desktop computer to the Arduino’s serial pins. In effect he’s just taking advantage of the FTDI chip, translating those signals back into USB on either end. Once he booted the headless laptop it took just a couple of blindly typed commands to get SSH running in order to regain control.