Sweet Guitar Practice Amp Is A Literal Work Of Art

September 13, 2014 by Rich Bremer 19 Comments

Check out this ~~odd~~ different looking guitar practice amp. It looks like a professionally manufactured product but it certainly is not. [Bradley] made it himself, not just a little bit of it either, all of it.

One of the first things you notice is the quilted maple wood grain of the case. There is no veneer here, this started out as a solid maple block. The front radius was shaped and the recesses for the control knobs and input jack were bored out using a forstner bit. The case was sanded smooth and several coats of high gloss tung oil was rubbed on to give the wood a perfect finish. A small piece of grill cloth protects the speaker while adding a little more class to the amp. The bottom of the case is actually a cover for a computer hard drive. A rectangular hole cut in the hard drive cover makes way for a 9 volt battery compartment.

There are two control potentiometers, one for volume and one for gain. Any old knobs wouldn’t do for this project. [Bradley] knurled and turned his own aluminum knobs and they look awesome! The units power is turned on when the guitar cord is plugged in. An LED not only indicates that the power is on but it also gets brighter with the volume input from the guitar. The LED also pulses if two strings are out of tune with each other giving the guitarist an opportunity to tune one of the strings until the LED stops pulsing. When it is time for some private jamming headphones can be plugged into the amp and doing so cuts power to the speaker.

The electronic circuitry is [Bradley’s] design also, but unfortunately he doesn’t share the schematic. I suppose he wants to keep his amp one-of-a-kind.

Pro-Quality Pickup Winder You Can Make At Home

September 12, 2014 by Rich Bremer 24 Comments

A lot of people find the art of building a guitar to be a worth while and pleasurable hobby. The task can be as easy as buying pre-made parts and assembling the guitar or as complicated as starting with just a piece of wood. Even advanced guitar builders normally do not get involved enough to wind their own pickups as it can be a tedious and labor intensive task. A low-end professional pickup winder can be purchased for about $450 which is certainly not economical for the hobbyist. [Doug] is one of those folks that wanted a pickup winder but didn’t want to shell out the big bucks. So what did he do? Build his own, of course.

If [Doug] was going to build a winder he was going to do it right, with all the features to make pickup winding as quick and painless as possible. The winder needed to be fast, count the windings and stop after a pre-programmed amount of revolutions. To keep this machine safe and reliable while maintaining the ability to spin quickly, [Doug] chose to base the machine on an off-the-shelf wood lathe since they are sturdy and made to spin at high speeds. The lathe is equipped with a face plate where the pickup is mounted.

Once the pickup is mounted to the face plate, the desired amount of turns is programmed into a digital counter that receives a signal from an opto switch and encoder disk attached to the lathe spindle. The motor speed is manually controlled by a user-adjustable potentiometer. There is also a stand alone tachometer that gives speed feedback to the user. Once the counter reaches the pre-programmed limit, it trips a relay that cuts power to the motor. This way the amount of windings can be precisely controlled. There is even a switch that changes the motor direction for reverse winding humbuckers without the need to remove and flip over the pickup.

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Re-Using The LCD & Button Assembly From A Broken Inkjet Printer

September 11, 2014 by Rich Bremer 22 Comments

Inkjet printers are a dime a dozen. You probably have taken old printers apart to scavenge parts like motors, pulleys, belts, switches, linear rods, power supply, etc. These parts are easy to reuse in other projects, unlike the controller portion of the printer which not as easy to make use of. [Blaupause] has done something very interesting, and it probably ranks in the ‘extreme difficulty’ category for most tinkerers. He has taken the front panel off an otherwise non-working Canon Pixma inkjet printer and has figured out a way to interface with it.

The front panel of this printer has the standard buttons that you would find on any ole printer, but the Pixmas also has a small LCD screen. [Blaupause] has written a library for the Olimexino microcontroller that can communicate with and make use of the repurposed front panel. And the neat part of this project is that the front panel’s on-board processor does the heavy lifting when it comes to displaying images on the LCD screen or checking button states which frees up your microcontroller to do whatever else. Right now, the LCD screen can display bitmaps and supports image transparency. The library can not display video as of yet, but that option is being worked on.

[Blaupause] makes all his hard work available to the public on the project’s Sourceforge page. In addition to the library, he also includes printer panel pinouts and detailed information on how to communicate with the buttons and LCD screen. Video after the break…

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HackerSpace Monitor Monitors Hackerspace Environment

September 9, 2014 by Rich Bremer 1 Comment

What’s going on at the Hackerspace? If you can’t answer that, maybe your ‘space needs a HackerSpace Monitor. [Tayken] over at the Tokyo Hackerspace has come up with a way to remotely monitor all the stuff you’d want to know about the ‘space.

His project is based on a Raspberry Pi with a webcam connected to the Pi’s USB port by way of a hub. The webcam is set up to stream 2 frames per second, which is plenty to be able to judge the activity at the ‘space. A WiFi dongle is also plugged into the USB hub in order to gain internet access, send out the video and allow the ability to SSH into the Pi.

What if you’re on the fence about heading over to work on your favorite project but the current weather leaves you wondering what the temperature is going to be like at the hackerspace? Well, this project has that covered too. An off the shelf temperature and humidity sensor plugs directly into the Pi’s GPIO pins. [Tayken] used the Python-based package, RPi.GPIO, to manage the temperature and humidity sensor readings as well as a toggle switch that monitors if the main door is open or closed.

To get everything all the above information to be displayed on a webpage, [Tayken] had to do some fancy programming. Luckily for us, he has made all his code available for download. Not only is this a great convenience for members, but it can also show non-members when it is or isn’t a good time to show up to check the ‘space out.

PiMagic RaspPi to Arduino Shield Interface

Adding I/O To The Rasberry Pi Models A & B

September 9, 2014 by Rich Bremer 19 Comments

The Raspberry Pi has been the basis for many cool projects. Even so, Models A and B have been criticized for having only a handful of GPIO pins available. Sure, the new Model B+ has a 40-pin GPIO header but what if you want to use your old RaspPi with a bunch of in and outputs? [Steve] is one of those guys and has done something about it by creating a pretty neat solution he calls the PiMagic. It’s a Pi Plate that has an on board ATMEGA328 running an Arduino bootloader. The RaspPi and the Arduino communicate via UART as [Steve] felt it was a bit simpler than going the SPI or I2C route.

The RaspPi GPIO’s run on 3.3v and the ATMEGA328’s like 5v. To solve this, the PiMagic has a Level Shifter that keeps the I/O of the two boards happy. Older Pi’s had a problem burning out PCB traces when supplying too much current on the 5v supply line. [Steve] threw in a fuse that will burn out before the Pi does to ensure that no Pi’s were harmed in the making of this project.

Now that a bunch of I/O are available, how do you physically access them? Well, the PiMagic has female headers in the typical Arduino layout. This way any Arduino Shield will plug right in. [Steve] made all his source files available for those who want to make one themselves. Find an assembly video after the break.

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CNC3020 Linear Rail and Lead Screw Lubrication

A Little Lubricant Goes A Long Way…. With Your CNC Machine

September 7, 2014 by Rich Bremer 59 Comments

[Peter] has been having some positional repeatability problems with his CNC3020 Router recently. The problem was mostly in the Z axis and was measured to be up to 0.3mm off position after 10cm of travel. This may not seem like a lot but it was enough to break a few 1mm diameter end mills. The X and Y axes generally seemed OK. Surfing the ‘net reveled that the control board’s power rails did not have any filtering capacitors and that may have been the cause of the problems. Unfortunately, the positioning problem still persisted even after the cap’s were added. Frustrated, [Peter] then started a full-blown investigation to figure out why his Z axis wasn’t cutting the mustard.

In a CNC system there are 2 major components, the electronics and the physical machine. Since it was unknown which portion of the system contained the problem, [Peter] decided to quickly swap the X and Z channels, running the Z axis with the X axis electronics. The problem was still evident on the Z axis which means that there is something wrong in the mechanics of the machine. The Z electronics were put back on the Z axis and the testing continued by lowering the acceleration and the maximum speed. The positioning error was still there. Since it is possible that the Z motor could be the problem, it was decided to swap the X and Z motors but midway through the process the problem became evident. When trying to rotate the Z axis lead screw by hand there was a noticeable lack of smoothness and the axis seemed to jump around a bunch!

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Many Gave Their Lives For This Cargo Bike To Be Re-Born

September 4, 2014 by Rich Bremer 27 Comments

Cargo bikes are very specialized and you don’t see too many of them out on the streets because of that fact. Being uncommon also means they’re rather expensive if you wanted to buy a new one. Like any hardcore bike DIYer, [Mike] got around this issue by building his own out of a couple old bikes. His goal is to show car-dependent people that you can get away with biking most of the time, even if you need to move some stuff from place to place. The build process for this monster was so involved that it required two pages of documentation; Part 1 and Part 2!

There are a few types of cargo bikes. There is the trike (seen often in regular or reverse trike varieties) with a bin between the 2 adjacent wheels. Two-wheeled options are usually either front loaders (the storage area between the rider and the front wheel) or those with rear racks. Mike’s bike is the latter.

He started with a 26″ wheeled bike that was already a Frankenbike of sorts, even the frame alone was a conglomeration of two separate bikes! To start, the rear wheel and chain was discarded. A kid’s mountain bike with 20″ wheels was disassembled and the head tube was cut off. The top and down tubes of the smaller bike were notched so that they fit nicely with the seat tube of the larger bicycle. The two frames were then welded together along with several pieces of support to make sure the bike stayed together through the rigors of riding. The rear rack is made up of some old bike frame tubes and some metal from the frame of a sofa that was being thrown out. Nothing goes to waste at Mike’s place! The 20″ kids bike rear wheel already had a 5 speed cassette so that was a no brainner to re-install. In the end, Mike has a bike that cost him zero dollars and shows the world it is possible to build a utilitarian bike and reduce your dependence on automobiles.

If cargo bikes are your thing, you may be interested in this up-cycled cargo bike, this one with a huge front bucket or maybe even this nifty bike trailer.