[Patrick] has a pair of Klipsch speakers that continually needed the volume knob cleaned. After a bit of research, he found it was a common problem with the potentiometer chosen for the task. He decided to resolve the problem, not by replacing that potentiometer, but by modifying the speakers to be passive and running them from an external amp. While this does sound simple at first, he wanted to retain the rest of the electronics in the unit, so a bit of hacking was required. You can follow along through the whole process on his site.
Cool mod, I wonder if it would have been possible to make a touch or digital volume control that would be “immune” to the dust instead. Either way, seems like a reasonable solution to finding purpose for the speakers.
What is even more impressive is that there is a N64 in the background of the picture.
@aw: Something with a touch switch, tact switch, or rotary encoder and digital pot would be much more resistant to dust. It would never crackle but would be quite expensive (compared to a pot).
100-256 steps, non-volatile memory, and up/down clock interface is what you want to look for. Unless you’ve included a micro for say, quadrature decoding, then i2c/spi could be used.
elementary..
my dear watson….
damn they’re ugly
@aw
@jproach
There are digital pots that support up/down buttons or digital encoders without a separate MCU chip. I’ve seen them on digikey for a few bucks.
I would have replaced the potentiometer with a nice sealed pot. 5-6 bucks later and you’re done.