A couple of months ago now, I finally ditched prepaid phones again, and got myself a plan, and along with the plan came a new phone.
The phone is Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.
I discovered that with the phone, it is possible to film, perform basic editing, add titles, and background music, and then upload it to YouTube, all from the phone itself
The above video, staring my lovely fiancée Diana, was created from start to finish in camera
Lego, and robots combined. How can it get more awesome?
For christmas, my wonderful fiancée gave me a LEGO Mindstorm NXT 2 kit, and its awesome. I’ve always wanted a M kit, for about as long as they have been making Lego Mindstorm.
This post has been spawned from my interest in pocket-sized tools, and trying to build the ultimate handy set of keys for my work keys. I have a few tools in my collection already, and I’ll write a short review of those, as well as showing some tools off my wish list. This list ignores multitools I have reviewed previously. Most of them are far too big to be included in this post anyway.
my Gerber Artifact
I recently got my hands on a Gerber Artifact, which looked awesome. It has a small pry bar, Bottle opener, “x-acto” style replaceable blade, and a Philips head screwdriver on the tip. I had nothing like it in my collection, so i put in an order
So, i have a couple of guitars, a crappy acoustic, and a fender squire electric.
I have a couple of guitar amps, My Squire came with a little 10 Watt amp, and I also have a massive 40 watt cabinet, which is WAAAAAY overkill for my “playing”.
I usually find, even with the little 10 Watt amp, I’m never even close to cranking it. I only go the 40 watt amp because it didn’t cost me anything (well, it cost me a couple of bucks for a new IEC socket).
I have noticed lately a few places selling mini guitar amplifiers including local store JB Hifi, however, they seemed fairly expensive, for what looked to me to be a fairly basic chinese made plastic cabinet, and what i’m assuming to be, a fairly cheap speaker and internal amplifier.
So, as one does, I got thinking, and I thought I probably have enough stuff around the shed to make something equally as good.
Above, you can see the vice stand. I haven’t done much documentation of the process, so you get the finished product, and thats it unfortunatly. The black blob on one leg is a bunch of electrical tape, which i have used to take out the wobble from the stand, as the feet aren’t perfectly even.
This one came about from various projects where I needed to work outside, but needed something to hold and support my work, as well as having a couple of new tools to try out, including an auto tinting welding helmet, and an angle grinder cutoff stand near identical to the one pictured below:
In the end, the stand was a bit higher then i had planed. The stand was supposed to be about 90cm high, but somewhere along the line, I made it 100cm
construction was pretty basic, with the feet in 3 pieces – one full length of about 50cm, the other two are half that and are joind to the large one in the center, a couple of bits of strap welded ontop of the crossed feet to give me somewhere to weld the main pipe, and then there was the main pipe itself wich was welded ontop of the cross. The end plate the vice bolts to was acually already on the pipe I used, so that made my life a little easier.
My welds were far from awesome, but they are holding for the time being. if they break, i can always re-weld the stand, and depending on how things go, I may end up cutting it off and making it shorter, and hopefully improving on my welds. My new welding helmet helped me aim my welds better, and made it much easier to weld. I’m very impressed.
Thats it for another one of my projects. so until next time, have fun, stay safe.
Matt
This is my latest project. It is a converter box that converts the 3.5mm stereo microphone input on my camcorder, into some common interfaces, Such as XLR, RCA, and dual 3.5 mono plugs.
Specifically, the driving idea was driven by the XLR inputs, and I was contemplating making a simple cable with 2 XLRs, but I decided to go with the jiffy box and extra inputs for flexiblilty
So, I’ve recieved the tgimboeja little while ago, and I’ve been slowly getting around to going thru it properly, and documenting everything, and adding my bits and pieces.
OK to start off with, here is the box as it came, just opened up:
and then removing some of the bubble wrap to take a peak:
Todays blog is about something I’ve been looking at for a while. It is EvilMadScientist’s “The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronics Junk” or TGIMBOEJ for short.
Actually, it is not one box, but many boxes, circulating thru the postal system, full of electronic -treasure. If you want to get a good idea of what you can find in a box, I’ve included a link to the Flickr group right here
Reciently, I finally put my name down on the list as a potential recipient. Hopefully I will be contacted soon, as I look forward to receiving one
I was thinking of making another box myself, however, there is not a huge list of Australian participants, so I wonder if its worth it, or if the few people will just get overloaded with the same few boxes, so for now, I’m going to wait for a box to come my way, and find a good collection of bits and pieces to put back in it (which shouldn’t be a huge problem, I have lots of junk….)
Well, until next time, when hopefully I have some of my own work to post, Have fun making stuff.
Matt out.
So, I Haven’t really done anything worth posting reciently, however, I do have a few things on the brew, and I thought I would make a post hinting at what they might be
First off, I’ve been surfing around the Music from Outer Space website, and I’m feeling like tackling an ambtious project, that has lots of knobs, and shiny things.
To be a little more specific, I’m planning on starting with the Mini-Synth, So I can get a feel for things. I like things that make sound, and music, however, I lack the training and talent to make proper music myself, but I don’t let that stop me drooling over gear
To make this uber ambitious, I’m even going to attempt to create my own PCB, using the laser printer toner transfer method, which will be interesting, as it will be one of my first attempts at etching a PCB. I will probably attempt some smaller boards before I try the big one.
I’ve noticed one of my more popular blog posts is my 2 channel mixer. I have since outgrown it, and now I’m back to using my behringer mixer to mix everything together. In order to free up the mixer again, and to give myself another project to play with, I plan on attempting to make myself an active multi channel stereo mixer – probably about 4 stereo channels in size. Stay tuned for that one.
I may also attempt to make an uber small pocket mixer for mixing various sound sources together, on the run
I am fairly interested in the pongsats of JP aerospace. For a while, I wondered if they still did runs with pongsats attached, as their blog and homepage doesn’t seem to be too up to date, however, I did find a few references to recient launches from my shuffling round the website.
I’m getting excited about making my own attempt at a “smart” pongsat. Similar in concept to the picaxe based one here. However, I’m not going to copy their design at all, I plan on using my own ideas, and hopefully, jamming as much as possible into the small space and weight constraints present. This means Surface mount components, and custom PCBs. both which will be learning experiences for myself.
For all these projects, I’m going to need parts that I don’t have. Originally, I figured I could pick most of it up from Jaycar, which is possible, and fine in most parts, however, at their prices, the little projects, like the audio mixer soon delve into the range it would cost to buy a cheap, professionally designed solution.
This is where places such as Futurlec come in handy, with prices for most components coming in at a dramatically cheaper price.
and just out of interest, for those australians out there, interested in Picaxe Microcontrollers. The place with the best range I have seen locally is MicroZed. they seem to be the main distributor of picaxe related gear in the country
So Stay tuned for more info on these, and other projects, along with Photos, step by step descriptions, Video, and anything else I can manage to include.
I hope you’re exited.
Matt Out.
So, this is a picture of my current work in progress. It doesn’t look like much , but it should be a cool little tool when done.
This post is mostly a test of the ability to post to wordpress from Flickr.
I’m hoping its useful, maybe making it easier to manage blogs with photos, but we’ll find out i guess
Anyway, thats all for now, I’ll keep everyone updated. Cheeers
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