A few months ago when I was stuck in traffic, I noticed the car in front of me had a license plate that said LM4250.
"Huh," I said to myself. "That guy really likes his National chips. What's an LM4250?"
I looked it up when I got home, and the LM4250 is a low power precision op-amp. "Maybe he's the guy that designed it, or he did some important work on it. That's pretty cool!"
Then we moved to the new house, and I started seeing a LOT of LM license plates. LM4105, LM4216, etc. What the heck was going on?
Eventually I figured it out. Near our new house is a Limousine company that specializes in "regular" sized limos instead of stretch limos. They have a whole fleet! And as I drove past it one day, I noticed that all of their plates on the cars are LMxxxx -- LM for Limousine, presumably.
Sadly, not all of the plates corresponded to actual part numbers. Still, it's fun when every now and then you see a DC/DC step down controller parked at the curb:
Earlier I mentioned that I would do a more thorough writeup of my solar powered Stella amp. Over the weekend I finished that up and I posted a a new project page for the Solar Stella, with a ton of photos and a video demonstrating how it sounds, so go check it out!
One thing I like about hand drills is that I can pause the action whenever I need to in order to take a picture:
This is one of the amps that I took with me to the Maker Faire.
Wow! I'm still amazed, and I'm not sure how to write about it. But it's been two weeks since the Minne Maker Faire and this post is getting long overdue!
I had never been to a Maker Faire before, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I've never had my own booth at an art fair or anything like that, but I've been to a few art fairs so I just decided to wing it. I had no idea if this was going to be more of a show and tell kind of event, or more of a selling products kind of event, so I came prepared for both. Unfortunately, I really only had one product, my Stella Amp kits, so I decided to get a bunch of cigar boxes and speakers and I had those available as well. If someone wanted a kit, they could get a speaker and a cigar box too, if they wanted.
(Well, I'm not going to make you wait in suspense: I sold exactly one kit to a friend of mine who was already waiting to buy one from me. But that's okay, because it turned out to be more of a show and tell kind of event anyway.)
I got in a little late with only 45 minutes to unpack and set up. I apologize for the near complete lack of photos, but I was so busy I completely forgot to take any! (If you have any of me or my booth let me know!)
For my main display, I had a sign behind me. Later, when I have time, I'll put a picture up of the sign because I was pretty happy with it.
On the far side of my booth, I had an Apple G4 iMac (the really old one that looks like a lamp), which was set to display full size images from my assembly instructions for the Stella Amp. I loved this, and I wish I had time to edit and tweak the images a bit more (it was heavy on soldering images, I wanted more pictures of the final assembled amps) but I completely ran out of time.
I had four amps set up. One amp (the one in the picture above) was just hooked up to my iPhone with a stereo 1/8th inch to mono 1/4 inch cable. I put a nice jazz playlist on infinite repeat on the iPhone and had everything set up so that I could just turn up the volume and it would come on, and turn it down, and it would turn off again. I powered this amp with a single 9 volt, and I was really impressed with the battery life. It was on the whole time and never ran out of juice (although, to be fair, it wasn't amplifying music most of the time). Actually, none of the amps ran out of battery power even though they got some heavy use.
Another amp was mounted in a cigar box but it had no speaker in it, I just ran the speaker wire to a 12-15 inch Axman Surplus woofer that was mounted in a guitar amplifier style wooden box (gotta give credit to my friend John for making the guitar amplifier box, it's VERY well made, he just didn't have time to finish it up and rather than throw it out he gave it to me). This amp was connected to my bass most of the time, and was on the far end of the booth, on the opposite side of the iMac. This is the only video I shot during the Faire, so you can see and hear this amp for yourself:
Yes, it's quiet. It's only about a watt or two, powering a bass! The Stella Amp, as a bass amplifier, is always going to be a quiet little practice amp. (Sorry for the sound quality but I was using kind of a crummy camera so it is what it is.)
The third amp was just a basic amp, powered with 4 AA batteries. I usually had this one hooked up to my guitar.
The fourth amp I made just for the Maker Faire, and I was really happy it all came together at the last minute. I'm going to have a more thorough write up later (I need to take a few more pictures and edit the pictures I've already taken), but this amp was solar powered! (EDIT: I finished the write up.) The Solar Stella wound up looking great and sounding even better. I had a lamp hovering over it to demonstrate the powering circuit, but since the solar panel is powering a li-poly battery, it didn't matter whether the lamp was on or off. I don't have any pictures of the final assembled amp, but I did find this one on Flickr:
You can see that the solar panel is mounted on the lid of the box, and the lid is held open by another cigar box underneath it. The lamp is just out of frame above it, turned off. The coolest thing about this amp is that it sounds amazing when you play a harmonica through it. So I had this one pretty much hooked up to a microphone (Shure SM-58, with an impedance matching transformer) full time.
I never did get a photo of my booth, I forgot to even ask someone to take one. So this is the best one I've found (you can see me in the background wearing the hat, click to enlarge) on Flickr:
At any rate, I was still setting everything up and people started coming in. Slowly at first but they just kept coming all day. I had my wife go out and get me some food and it was an hour or more before I was done eating it, snatching bites here and there. (Hard to eat, because you can't have any food in your mouth if you are playing the harmonica, which I was, quite a bit.)
My nearest booth mate was Adam Wolf from Wayne and Layne. His big project everyone came over to see was a Van de Graaf generator he made out of a pop can, an old motor, and some PVC pipes. Adam was great, he was managing his booth and the Make magazine booth, and if I had to step out to use the bathroom he'd keep an eye on my stuff. I don't know how he felt about it, but it was fun for me when he would step out for a bit. Being next to his booth(s) I got to overhear everything he was saying, so when he stepped out, I just stepped right in, fielding answers from three groups of people at once.
"It's a Van de Graaf generator made out of a pop can and PVC pipe."
"Yeah, go ahead and grab a button, the buttons are free"
"It's a guitar amplifier, I designed it because I wanted more flexibility in how my amplifier sounded compared to existing kits out there."
"This kit is REALLY awesome. See how the LEDs scroll like that? Well, you're not limited to what the kit starts off with, you can make the scrolling message say ANYTHING you want by going to their website. No, no, you don't have to plug it in to the computer. See this? It uses these optical sensors to read the program right off the website, the website blinks the program into the micro controller one bit at a time. I know, isn't that cool!"
"Make magazine is running a special, if you subscribe during the Maker Faire, you can't get a better price anywhere else!"
"Here, let me show you how the amplifier sounds."
etc.
It was a lot of fun.
On my other side was Michael of Nootropic Design. His big attraction was this RGB panel from Adafruit that he had programmed up to display a number of retro 8 bit game sprites. This panel is BRIGHT, and even though it's not very big, it's one of the first things you'd see when you came in the room.
He also had a Hackvision up and running with Asteroids and that was very popular, especially with the kids.
Ever since the faire ended, I've been completely swamped with being a dad and general family concerns. I am sorry this took so long to write. But I do want to say THANK YOU to everyone who came out! I had a lot of fun meeting everyone! And next time I'm going to spend a bit more time going around and checking out the rest of the Faire instead of staying chained to my booth.
Instagram for Android is out, and I've got it.
I didn't think I would, but I like the square cropping. I've always found square cropping to be hard, its not easy to strike a balance between compositional solidity and fluidity. There is no horizontal space to traverse so its hard to set up tension. Mindlessly putting everything in the rule of thirds spot creates an effect that is simultaneously cramped and boring.
But, for whatever reason, I find cropping in instagram fun. I think what I am learning to do is discard all of the 35mm intellectualizing that has set itself up in my brain and concentrate on the photograph. My compositional brain is getting lazy with 35mm and this square cropping is a good workout for it.
The camera in the Motorola Atrix is a pile of poop. I mean, it's a pretty good camera for a cell phone, it could be a lot worse. But whatever Instagram is doing to the image really brings out the noise and blurriness.
Also, the filters. It is tedious wading through all of the very similar filters to find one that works well with an image. It's actually a bit infuriating, because most of the filters make the photos look worse, at least with my phone. At the very least I wish I had the ability to change the color cast which these Instagram filters apply to the image. Just a little slider to go from cyan to yellow, or green to magenta.
I've been working so hard getting ready for the Minne Maker Faire that I forgot to post an update! Everything is back to normal and I'm taking international orders again. In fact, i just shipped a package to Switzerland last week.
The Faire is going to be great! I'm going to have a booth, if you are in Minneapolis stop by and say Hello. I will have a number of different Stella amps that I have built as examples if you want to play around with one or see what they sound like in person. And I'll have kits and accessories for sale. No finished amps for sale, sorry! I was hoping to get some done but The Move sapped all my time.
I'll have a guitar, a bass, and a microphone to try things out with (the microphone that I have sounds great with a harmonica, you'll have to bring your own harmonica though). I also got an old iMac set up that will display pictures from the build process, I'm pretty excited about that too.
This is one of the fine amplifiers I'll have for you to take a look at.
Alright, we're moved in the new house. It went reasonably well, now we just need to finish unpacking.
Of course we still don't have internet because of some phone company shenanigans. And until we have internet, I cannot ship internationally because I cannot print out the customs forms on my printer without a connection to the internet.
I should be all connected and set up by March 16th. Feel free to order before then but don't expect anything to ship until then.
Thanks!
Beatles Hard Day's Night mystery chord solved with Fourier analysis (via dangerous meta)
David Gilmour guitar secret (reverse the wah!):
What is the probability that every day I'm shufflin'? (via Reddit)
Great Katamari Damacy hack! Turn any page into Katamari Damacy using CSS.
My family and I are moving to a new place in a couple of weeks! It's exciting and stressful and too much work all at once but what can be done. The new place is awesome, we'll have a backyard for the kids, with a tree house and a slide, and the folks we are renting from seem great.
Keeping orders going out the door, however, is going to be a bit of a logistics challenge, for obvious reasons. I mean, I don't even know when we're going to get internet at the new house yet. I've got a good plan for moving everything over to the new house, but even so, depending on when you make your order it may take a couple extra days to ship it. Also, I'm usually pretty good about packing up new kits when supplies run low, but I already boxed up and packed all of my spare kit parts, so what is in the store is in the store and I won't have a chance to bundle up new kits for a few weeks. If you want a Stella Amp kit, you'd better get one before I run out! (Or I might not run out, but don't say I didn't warn you.) I'll also be a little slower on the uptake when it comes to answering forum posts and support emails.
Alright, I gotta get packing.
I gotta hand it to Fender, these new amplifier designs are amazing:
I wouldn't mind building one of those for myself.
Just posted a tutorial on how to mount the pots and the LED for a cigar box Stella amp build. Let me know what you think!
Today Newt Gingrich was on the front page of the newspaper, and the front page of the business section had a picture of a man walking through airport security while still wearing his coat and shoes.
HELP SOMEONE HAS KIDNAPPED ME AND SENT ME BACK IN TIME TO THE 90s!
On the other hand, wait a minute! It's time to buy Apple stock at 7 bucks a share!
(Here's the Semisonic lyric I was thinking of when I wrote the title: "Closing time - time for you to go back to the places you will be from.")
I just put up a quick page on how to mount a speaker to a cigar box if you are making a cigar box amplifier. All you need is a drill, a couple of bits, a screwdriver, and pliers.
As you can see, you drill the holes in the box to make the speaker grille you want to have. Then mount the speaker to the box with machine screws and nuts.
(If you don't have any machine screws and nuts around the house, believe it or not Home Depot has half a wall of machine screws and nuts in little baggies, you just get the size you need. I got 1 inch screws so I knew there wouldn't be any problem with the length. These screws are 6-36 screws, if you are using a different diameter of screw then you would use a different diameter of drill bit for the screw holes.)
My web host recently moved my website over to a new server, and there were some issues with The Move. Sadly I didn't notice these issues until a week after it happened, which basically ruined any chance of turning this into a smooth recovery. In fact, I didn't even know A Move was taking place because I didn't check the e-mail account my host sent the notification to. My bad.
So Hello! This website is coming to you from exactly one week in the past!*
In all seriousness, I have all of the content that I added over the past week available to me, and I will be adding that back in as time allows. And if you have placed an order in the past week I have either already sent it or I will send it tomorrow.
I have, as far as I know, fixed all of the issues related to The Move. But if you come across anything weird or something you think should be fixed, or a missing page, or what have you, PLEASE let me know, right here in the comments. (If you do not see a link for posting comments, click on the title of this post and it should show up.)
Thanks!
[*] I can't wait to see who wins the big game on Saturday, the Bruins or the Canucks! (My money is on the Bruins.)
For Christmas I had a number of people on my list, and I had no idea what to get them. After a bit of thinking I decided to get Sugru for everyone!
Mainly, I wanted a couple packs of sugru for myself but wasn't sure I could go through the entire 12 pack in 6 months. Sugru does have an expiration date and I didn't want to waste it.
But wait, what is sugru? Sugru is an adhesive, moldable, permanent silicone putty. What does that mean?
Think of things that would be better in your life with a little silicone putty. Your paring knife is wicked sharp but the handle is just a little too small? Build a new custom handle! You like your eyeglasses but they don't have the little pads that keep them from slipping down your nose? Add new pads! Got a crack in your lens cap? Fix it!
I got one 12 pack of sugru from Adafruit, and on Christmas at the party I opened it up and let everyone take the colors they wanted. I had never used any before but I jumped right in and cracked open an orange pack. I used that to repair a frayed iphone cable and used the other half of the pack to insulate my mom's house key (she keeps freezing her fingers on it when she goes to unlock the door.)
Everyone loved the sugru and instantly thought of a ton of things to do with it.
For my next pack, I'm going to repair a broken doll and fix the broken clip on my pedometer. I haven't done it yet though. Turns out the instructions point out that if you are susceptible to allergies, or if you have sensitive skin, you probably want to wear gloves while handling sugru before it cures. I am neither susceptible to allergies, nor do I have sensitive skin. But a year or so ago I developed a sensitivity to traditional photographic chemicals and I had to switch to non-traditional photo chemicals. And about a half hour after handling the sugru I noticed that familiar prickling skin feeling that I got when using film developer.
So I'm relegated to using gloves. That's okay I guess but I don't have any gloves on hand, so it'll have to wait until I can get to the store.
If you are interested, check out all of the cool things that people are using sugru for!
I have a plan for a full sized telecaster (actually several telecasters, but let's start with this one first). Alas, the wood that I bought for it badly warped before I had a chance to even cut out a body outline, so I scrapped it. I had that wood sitting around for a couple of months and then it went from perfectly straight to super cupped and twisted in less than a week.
As far as the plankocaster goes, I'm still chipping away at it. I made the first mistake! I was levering wood out of the neck pickup cavity only to discover that I was really denting the surface of the guitar with the lever action. So instead of a nice straight 90 degree cut into the wood, it's much more rounded.
I've started planning and gathering materials for a concert sized cigar box ukulele. I know I have the right cigar box around here but I have to dig it out of my pile. Not sure exactly where it is. And I can see the neck wood, it's in the far corner of the room. I'm going to have to move quite a few things to even lay a hand on it, let alone move it.
Great classic motown groove:
Great lyrics, great voice, great build up:
This is smooth, you wouldn't expect smooth from a ukulele and acoustic bass:
But when I'm up visiting my mom for Thanksgiving, I can turn it up to 11:
I decided I wanted to make a telecaster. My first plan was to build a body blank by gluing up a bunch of pine planks we have around the house. I had it all figured out, but when I explained my plan to my wife, she quickly proved it would never work because I'd have to plane the boards down too much, so if I wanted the right depth I'd have to glue them three deep and three across and if you figure out the math and divide the cosine by the tangent of the hypotenuse we totally don't have enough wood.
Then she said "Why don't you use those big thick boards we got from your mom?"
Big thick boards? Holy moley! There are three of them, all of them too small for a tele body, drat. I tried to fit them together in a way that I could glue them up to make one body but there was no way to do it that made sense.
I'm still not sure what I want to do with the other two boards, but this one I decided I'd turn into a plankocaster. Simplest possible thing.
And, I'm going to do it without the use of any power tools. As my wife says, if you're working with hand tools, you make mistakes way slower. (She built a book case and put the dados in with a wood chisel!)
Here's the board. I figured it was pine. It's super light, and when you tap it, it rings like a bell.
It's totally amazing and I can't wait until I completely screw it up. First step is to tape up a plan:
Make sure it's lined up square on the plank:
Start chiseling out wood:
And when that smell hits the nose. it is the most amazing thing, this isn't pine, it's CEDAR! And it's very fractury, it wants to split along the grain like nobody's business. I better make a stop cut all along the neck pocket just in case:
It comes out so fast and so easy I'm taking it really slow:
I can't tap it the other direction because it splits like nobody's business and I'm afraid the chisel will get away from me!
Here's a night's work:
Look at how tight that grain is! And how massive this tree must have been!
Like I said, I can't wait until I completely screw it up.
These are yummy. Ingredients:
2 cups whole spelt flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons butter straight from the fridge
2/3 cup milk
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
Combine the dry ingredients and mix well. Add the butter. You want to break it up with a fork (and knife if it is really cold) until the butter is in little pieces, no bigger than a pea. You want it like little crumbs almost. Those little butter pieces will melt while the biscuit is cooking, giving it a wonderful flavor. If you melt the butter and add it then it doesn't turn out as good.
After the butter is added, add the milk until it just becomes doughy. You may need a little more or less milk. When you have a good dough, just grab a hunk and pat it until it's 1/2 to 1 inch thick. Stick on an ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake for 12 to 15 minutes. Eat with butter and honey or jam. Or honey and jam. They will be a little crumbly, I usually eat mine with a fork.
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