Category Archives: Electronics

Arduino, Automation, Design, Electronics, Guitar

Pickup Winder DC Motor Control Prototyping

February 27, 2017 Remy

I Have a Dream

…of one day playing a show with all gear that I made. Guitar, amp, pedals, all of it made my me. I don’t plan to all the way, I’ll be buying the potentiometers and caps and probably most of the hardware. I do, however, plan to make the pickups.

I’m also going to make the machine to wind the pickups. That’s what I’ve been poking at lately. As of now I have a very basic PWM based speed control for a brushed DC motor. I scavenged the motor from an air bed pump I got at Goodwill. It was a couple bucks and has a good basis for everything I’ll need to get up and running.

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Crafts, Design, Electronics

Adventures in Vinyl (aka “Put a Bird On It!”)

February 20, 2017 Remy

DIY Christmas Presents

We decided to do some crafty, homemade presents for my girlfriend’s family for Christmas. Having recently moved to Portland, we wanted to make a present that had a feel of our new digs. What we came up with was very hip mason jar with stuffed candy and treats. We would spice up the jars by getting crafty and etching everyone’s favorite bird into the glass jar.

We created vinyl bird silhouettes stencils to etch the patterns into the side of the mason jars. My girlfriend created the artwork in Illustrator and I cut the stencils on a vinyl cutter I had access to at a workshop I use. We would use a chemical etching solution to create a frosted pattern in the clear glass.

Here Come the Birds

Step one was finding out everyone’s favorite bird. We didn’t even think most people would have an answer, but some of the responses had clearly been thought about for a while. For example one cousin’s choice was the titanis walleri, and his fiance’s was a shoebill stork. After a few days we had a list of birds to work with.

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CAD, Design, Electronics, Guitar

Prototype Boost Built, Testing to Come

February 15, 2017 Remy

Building on my work from a couple weeks ago, I put solder to iron and built up a first prototype of the boost circuit for my buddy’s 8-bit fuzz pedal. Th EagleCAD board layout I made earlier was almost exactly what I needed. However, because I was fumbling my way through the software I didn’t have the correct packages selected for all of the devices.

I tweaked the layout with the actual components I ordered from Digikey a few weeks ago. The biggest curveball was that I ordered some gigantic orange 1000pF caps. I just wasn’t looking that closely at packages when I ordered, but I had plenty of board to work with.

I hooked up some 1/4″ jacks to the I/O terminals and connected a 9V. I tested with my Epiphone Les Paul into a Focusrite Scarlet interface. The signal came through clear and clean, and there was no audible (to me at least) distortion as I rolled through the gain range.

I’ll take the board over to check out the performance characteristics on an oscilloscope soon. Then, I’ll start looking to shrink the footprint of the board as much as possible so I can cram it inside an existing pedal.

CAD, Design, Electronics, Guitar

Planning and Prototyping a Mosfet Boost Circuit

February 3, 2017 Remy

Long ago I promised my friend Nick a mod for a guitar pedal of his. His 8-bit fuzz pedal caused a volume drop that he couldn’t overcome by tweaking the settings, and he didn’t want to put a boost after because he would have to hit two pedals every time he wanted to switch to his fuzz. I had been looking at making a couple of different boost circuits and offered to put one in his pedal.

Now, some years later, I’m actually putting some effort into the project. The circuit I chose is the Mosfet Booster pedal from AMZ . The circuit was simple and would make for a very transparent gain stage. The idea is to make a small add-on board for his current pedal and wire the boost in line before the output jack.

I had seen a Hack-a-Day series about creating PCB’s in a number of different software, in particular a walk-through of using Eagle CAD. I’ve seen so many mentions of Eagle CAD over the years, but never used it. This simple circuit would make a good intro to the program.

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Electronics, Found Materials, Restoration

Fixing a Broken Power Switch

December 22, 2016 Remy

My dad’s old record player had been out of use at my mom’s house for years because of a bad power button. He had good taste in AV equipment and I didn’t like seeing it sit unused. I offered to trade my mom a working but nothing special Technics SL-BD2 for a broken Phase Linear turntable.

I started testing things out and found a problem very quickly. The power button was sticky at best, and never seemed to click and move. The action should have been similar to a click top pen, but there was hardly any movement.

Getting to the switch was a pain. I had to take the turntable completely apart to get into the switch. Outwardly there did not seem to be anything wrong with it, but clicking it directly I felt the same resistance as when it was installed. It wasn’t the button cap causing the problem, there was definitely an issue with the switch itself.

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Electronics, Guitar

Pignose G40V Backlog

November 11, 2016 Remy

A few years ago my best friend Nick asked me to do some mods to his amp. He’d recently acquired this cool little brown 40w 10 inch Pignose g40v. The design was very simple and followed an old Bassman schematic pretty closely. The mods that Nick had been eyeing would bring it even closer to the Bassman. He linked me to a couple of blog posts and schematics and I made my way to HSC, a local electronic component warehouse.

The original amp has been holding up well since and has survived him gigging around Utah. When he found another on on Craigslist he made sure to scoop it up and drop it off with me for an upgrade. The second overhaul followed the first very closely, but this time I left out the standby switch and I didn’t break the presence pot and replace it with something only kind of close in value.

I took pictures with the intention of doing a full write up, and one day maybe I will, but for now this project is stuck in the backlog. Enjoy the pictures in the meantime.

Arduino, Automation, Electronics, Garden

Garden Automation

November 9, 2016 Remy

In my previous apartment I had set up a few self watering planters I made from recycled kitty litter buckets. The planters have a reservoir of water that keeps the soil moist longer. It reduces maintenance, but I still needed to top off the reservoirs every few days. So of course I set about on trying to rig up something to refill them for me.

The idea was to have a larger enclosed tank that can resupply the smaller reservoirs of each planter. To accomplish this, my system would need to:

Monitor the level of the water in the reservoir
Engage a pump to transfer water from the tank to the planter
Disengage the pump

I had some IR transistors that I picked up a few years ago that never got used beyond turning on some LED’s and decided this would be the perfect application for them. I would use them to detect when the water in the planter got too low or too high.

The planter already had some basic floating water gauges. These were just bamboo stakes stuck into wine corks. I would use two thin slices of cork to trigger the IR sensors.

[Show slideshow]

This is a brief write-up of a project that has been postponed. I moved into a new place and my new garden setup doesn’t need this pump… yet.