Posted by Justin on January 27, 2012 – 6:39 pm
I really needed a quick amplifier to power a few book shelf speakers. Looking around my ic bin, I found a few lm386s.
Next I pulled the rest of the parts (1x perf board, 2x ic sockets, 2x 100uf caps, 2x 5k pots, some wires, and a few odds and ends)
Put all this in a blender, bake for few hours and this is what you get.
The results are, its not a bad sound. some noticeable distortion at higher levels. More improvements can be made, like changing the output caps to bigger ones, adding a gain selector….etc.
But what I have now works. Next a class A amp and other projects.
Posted by Justin on January 13, 2012 – 2:48 pm
Hopefully this will help me stay motivated to keep posting. my current side project
My motor driver should be done this weekend.
Posted by Justin on March 7, 2011 – 5:13 am
Recently I have been slacking with my posts and updates and its about time I made one really long update, add some goals and things I would like to accomplish. So let me explain why I haven’t been updating recently. Recently I have been working really hard on creating the abstract and documentation for the MBED NXP challenge, then I was sick for 2 out of the 4 weeks of FEB and just in a slump due to winter blues(happens every year). But now I am starting to get back into things and I am ready to start/finish some projects.
- Mbed NXP challenge,
Finished the abstract and Documentation, submitted what i had just because of deadlines. I am glad i turned in something but i am very disappointed in myself about the writing and editing. By far this is probably the worst piece i have written since I got out of school(the only piece i have written since i got out of school), but this was a good learning experience. The things that I have learned from the whole contest is…………………..Start your papers and documentation early!!! Other then that, take your time double check and even if you don’t win you will have learned something. Pics and what has been accomplished, coming soon!!
Keep an eye out for this project, it will still be worked on but I have to take a small break and let my mind rest on it for a bit(sort of at a standstill).
other projects..….MSP430 projects coming on down the line. Stepper drivers and Servo drivers are in the works. The concept i would like is an ESC or other driver controlling the motor/servo or stepper and will either accept I2C or SPI commands…… Something simple and elegant.
Also a few noise makers would be nice to create since i have 3 piezoelectric discs not being used yet.
Other things that need to be done
some other things that i would like to accomplish in the near future, would be to re- code my google maps project, finish up my DEV web server(harden and clean out). Create a mirror on my server for my site(just in case). Start working on my T20 project and get the BootTP working, recreate the new firmware, so i can load up Linux. Another thing I cant forget it start planning my CNC machine, i have an old scanner and a bunch of steppers that would look good moving a cheap rotary tool(dremmel)…. oh and i cant forget the home made cat toy that i really want to make ….oh and i really cant forget the cloudy day solar light charger(lol it will be explained later)…. too many ideas lol…
If i have missed something you would like to see me finish, or that my attempts at what I am trying to accomplish will not work, then by all means tell me or leave a comment , Trolls Welcome 
Also if you have any great ideas or improvements to the site let me know( even if they are small or you have a different way of doing something) All comments, criticism and trolling will be answered.
Thank you, every one for the support, comments and criticism and typo/grammar corrections!!!
Posted by Justin on January 3, 2011 – 9:56 am
As i was testing my battery with my helicopter, this is not going to be the battery i use, It is a 7.2v 2A Nimh battery pack that i had acquired, as i was putting stuff together and testing my servos, I also wanted to do a quick battery test, so i rigged everything up like it supposed to, i also created a quick motor test on mbed.org to program the uC and get the servos at 90o and get the blades leveled so i can do the motor test.
servos work great with this setup, that test is done, went with out a problem. next was the motor test, so i removed the blades to protect me and the wires. Then i hooked everything up. checked the motor, and the battery connection, perfect no problems. next i hook up the uC control lines and ground (I learned ). or so what i thought was ground. so i power every thing up. nothing goes, check the battery and all the power, looks good. next i remove the control lines.(or so i thought) checked the voltage from the pwm line, about 3v, looks good. so i use the control line that was being used for the main rotor and hooked it up to 5v nothing happened, so i thought ok maybe my gate voltage wants high enough, (last time it was 5v source and 5v gate and it worked) so i get the brilliant idea of trying to hook it up to one of the power line, a full 7.2v (8.5v fully charged) thinking that should be enough power to get it going ………………guess what ……………
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Posted by Justin on January 3, 2011 – 1:51 am
Have you ever worked on a project or tried to trouble shoot some sort of complex technical thingy and cant figure out why its not working like it should? If your reading this most of us have some sort of problem like this. Recently I have been working on trying to get my NXP Mbed Challenge up and running and working on the last few hardware requirements. This last week i have been trying to get my servos and motors working together and have started to make some good progress. until i hooked up power. Servos would not move nor did they seem like they were even powered……double checked them with an arduino and they worked. So i put it all back together and tried again, still no movement from the servos, now i start all over again with the trouble shooting, I did this about 3 times tracing out all the wires, doing electrical conductivity tests, the whole 9 yards. After a few hours and a day of rest i went back to it………
re-connected everything back up and tried again…………And this is what I concluded ……
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