Recently Ben, Cliff and Claudio have built Diametric’s Mini Quadcopter. We met a fellow RepRap user- Diametric- at this years Midwest RepRap Festival in Elkhart Indiana. He brought along a 3D printed quadcopter that he designed and built.

The quadcopters are remarkably inexpensive, the design, models and bill of materials can be found on Thingiverse. They are easy to build and easy to get off the ground. We’re still learning how to fly them however. While all three have taken flight, we have had some accidents and damaged the frames on 2 of them, twice. We’re not too worried when that happens, for we can always reprint the frame within about an hour and a half on one of our 3D printers.

Recently Roy and I set out to build set out to build a better headphone amplifier for our higher end Sennheiser headphones. A headphone amp simply boosts the power to the headphones a bit, this results in better sound on the bigger headphones. The design is built around a know design over at Diy Audio Projects. It is a Class A amplifier with a 12AU7 tube. We ended up puting a spin on the project and added a PCM2704 USB DAC (sound card). Sweet glowing tube action pictures are below.

Great Scott! What’s the date? Oh thank goodness, we’ve still got time.  Listen, I know this may sound “heavy” to you, but we’ve got to get you to the Midsouth Makers soldering class on October 8^th at noon or the consequences could be dire! I can’t tell you why it’s important without creating a temporal paradox, but I can promise you that learning how to build a RBBB (“Really Bare Bones Board”) Clone will be pivotal in your future in some way.  An RBBB is one of the smallest, most affordable arduino-compatible boards available right now.  You don’t even need any plutonium to power this baby, just plug it straight into the breadboard that the Makers will be providing to all the class participants. How many gigawatts is it?  Where we’re going, we don’t need gigawatts, just bring a soldering iron and the rest will be provided. Once you’ve completed this class, you’ll have you’re very own arduino compatible microcontroller, power cable, data cable, and breadboard to build it all on, the combination of which should help you save you from – oh no, I’ve already said too much! Hurry and sign-up on the events page at the following link: http://www.midsouthmakers.org/events/.  Then you too can say, “I finally made something that works!”

 

Details

Class: Soldering Part II: RBBB Clone

Cost: $35

Date, Time, & Location: October 8th  at the Space at Noon.

What to bring: Soldering Iron

What you get: An arduino compatible microcontroller, power cable, data cable, and a breadboard to build it on, plus a greater knowledge of soldering and circuitry.

You must sign-up before the day of the class so that we know how many parts to order!

You can do so at the following link: http://www.midsouthmakers.org/events/

Want to learn how to solder? The Midsouth Makers group will be hosting a beginners’ soldering workshop on Friday, May 14th at 7pm in Room 241 in Nolan Hall at Christian Brothers University campus, 650 East Parkway South, Memphis, TN 38104. If you wish to buy a soldering iron it will be $10, but only $5 if you bring your own soldering iron or just want to borrow one. We are a newly founded non-profit group looking to meet, teach, and work with others on DIY projects.

We will have a kit that includes a 555 timing chip and everything you need to build a small circuit that lights an LED when you press the button. All parts including batteries are included. Each kit contains the timing chip, 3 resistors, a button, 2 batteries, a LED, a capacitor, and perf board to solder everything to.

So last Friday we had our very first workshop. We tried our hand at soldering. Despite a couple of burns, or two, or several, we hope everyone at least enjoyed themselves and the opportunity to introduce themselves to the world of discrete electronic components. So whether you were able to get your circuit to work or not, hopefully you at least learned how to solder. And hey, don’t get too terribly discouraged as you’ll have another shot on May 14th.

The circuit that we worked on was a 555 Timer based One-Shot (see monostable multivibrator.) The purpose of this circuit is to provide a steady, constant, digital signal that goes high for a predetermined amount of time no matter what the input trigger does and then shuts off until triggered again. In other words, no matter how many times you press the button on the circuit, the output generated will remain high for the set period and go off. Once it is off you can then press the button and it will repeat the same thing again. In the electronics world this is a very important, yet simple circuit. The 555 Timer is used in almost anything that requires a simple clock. Even more important for the purposes of our workshop, the circuit has several soldering points, and involves some creativity with component placement.

If you have any other questions about the circuit, feel free to shoot me an e-mail at [dhess at midsouthmakers dot org] and I can attempt to explain (or confuse you) even more. The links for the circuit diagram and Fritzing file should be below. If you have any issues getting to the files, just leave a comment.

Circuit Diagram: here.
Fritzing File: here.