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Amp’d For Profit

I bought a Boss car audio amp (BA-4800) for a staggering $2. There was noticeable physical damage, but it’s worth a gamble for a quick, cheap fix. The damage looked localized to two RCA connectors. The remaining pins from the connector looked undamaged. Without changing anything it was powered with a PC PSU. Volume was good from both the remaining RCA connectors. Desoldered the pins and replaced the RCA connectors with an additional through-hole quad RCA connector. Connected power again: Now all 4 channels were working well. For what started as $2 for 2 working channels is now $6 for 4 working channels. Thats $1.50 per channel. Cheers

Offset Smoker

This was done a few months ago, I just didn’t think to add it till now. I’ve wanted to make an offset smoker since I found out that my hot water system would need replacing. I got a fair way through the project when I couldn’t get accurate information on weather it was safe to leave the enamel lining on the inside. After a quick email to the original manufacturer it was confirmed it needed to be removed. It was too thick to remove with a flappy disk and grinder so it was abandoned. I saw an advert online for someone selling “kits” for $70 (AUD). 2 LPG tanks, 4 legs, and a chimney. The LPG tanks had already been venting for over a year, but I still filled with water for a few weeks… Read More »Offset Smoker

Mini Virtual Pinball Cabinet

While smoking some meat in the drum smoker, I had some time to kill, so I decided to build a smaller desktop virtual pinball cabinet. Hopefully one that would be portable, but still big enough to provide a similar experience to a full size cabinet. The base cabinet was cut and monitors fitted during this time, the rest was done over the following few weekends. Similar to the other one I built, this too would be mainly build from recycled/cheap parts: The laptop inside has a smashed screen and no battery, which would have other wise been thrown out, but fine for this build. The backglass is an old LCD (unknown origin). The playfield monitor was a cheap purchase from a swapmeet (<$10). The arcade buttons are the last left over arcade buttons from several… Read More »Mini Virtual Pinball Cabinet

Ugly Drum Smoker (UDS)

This project started when I was doing a pork leg and it was too big (and tall) to fit in my old charcoal BBQ (18″ Eurochef kindly donated by a good mate). Old bricks  and clamps where to hold the lid down. After some research I found a DIY smoker called a UDS (Ugly Drum Smoker). After much thought and research, I opted for a food safe drum (stupid move) from a chocolate factory, formally it was full of sucrose. So far I’ve invested $5. . Checked the local fire laws – unfortunately our shire does not allow burn off’s,incinerators or fire pits. To be honest our property isn’t big enough and I’m not a huge fan of the toxic fumes. I emailed a few local businesses to get quotes for sandblasting, the best came… Read More »Ugly Drum Smoker (UDS)

Virtual Pinball Machine

Virtual pinball tables consist of the same basic elements as regular pinball machines with a few replacements; The playfield and backglass are replaced with monitors and controlled by a PC. The buttons (and sometimes the plunger) are replaced by buttons and a game controller or keyboard emulator. In more advanced tables the LED dot matrix display replaced with a compatible replacement or a 3rd monitor. This previous project was the perfect test bed to see if the PC I was planning on using was good enough to run the games smoothly. The first test run was running Future Pinball with a Kinect for facial recognition.  At 25-30 FPS is was OK but there was noticeable lag at times. As this was my first and I wanted to use atleast 90% recycled parts I’ve moved away from… Read More »Virtual Pinball Machine

Bartop Arcade

I’ve wanted to build a bartop MAME cabinet for a while, my first attempts last year led to 4 failed CNC jobs, infact the first side panel I did for this project ended up the same way (top left): The Z axis fails; instead of going up, it skips the instructions to raise, and then drills down into the wood, going further and further until either the bit snaps or I turn it off (to prevent fire). This second attempt was successful – I worked out that if I don’t put the front and top panels on the CNC machine it doesn’t happen. I still don’t know why, but it does mean that it’s a lot louder and there is more dust. In this cabinet I wanted to press fit the center panels into the… Read More »Bartop Arcade

Migrating Repetier-Host for Windows

I have changed PC’s used to control my 3D printers a few times – usually due to hardware failure. This time I wrote basic Export and Import scripts to help with the migration. It saves so much time, rather than setting them again. It exports the registry and settings files (among others), and then imports them back when you run it on the destination PC. For this test it was from a Vista laptop to a Windows 10 PC – All good. Migrate_RepetierHost Cheers.

Augmented Reality Sandbox

Found this neat project by Oliver Kreylos, and gave it a go over a weekend using only spare parts. It came together well on a Toshiba i5 laptop. I found there to be issues using the Intel graphics card/drivers, so I swapped to an AMD Athlon 2X4 with a Radeon HD47## card (no longer supported by AMD). It did refresh faster than the Intel graphics card, but had the same ‘unknown’ issue when trying to render water. After swapping out the Radeon with a slower Nvidia card, it all displays correctly, but the frame rates where pretty slow. I reduced the quality of the water and the frame rates have increased. With a working model, I decided to upgrade from the test cardboard box, speaker stand and copious amounts of quick release clamps. The sandbox and stand… Read More »Augmented Reality Sandbox

Mostly Printed CNC (MP-CNC)

Having a CNC machine to cut panels for projects has been a wish for a while. Then I found this awesome project: Mostly Printed CNC (www.vicious1.com). As the name says, most parts are 3D printed and the non-printed parts are easily accessible. The controller is a RAMPs 1.4 board with Arduino Mega, easy to find cheap online. I used the Marlin firmware because it’s the same as both my 3D printers. After destroying my Mendel i2 trying a new printing surface I had spent many hours printing the parts on my Solidoodle2 with a printing volume 6″ x 6″ x 6″. It took longer than usual due to my choice of ABS over PLA. I have had to reprint most of the parts in PLA. The project page gives accurate build times for each part,… Read More »Mostly Printed CNC (MP-CNC)

Samsung Smart Aircon and MRTG

We’ve had 4 Samsung Smart air conditioners for a few years and every once and a while I revisit trying to automate them using scripts and a like. This time I was successfull using perl scripts written/edited by Daniel (CloCkWeRX) and Shannon (freman) to deal with the transmission protocol and token management – I personally would’ve never been able to work it out – so thanks and full credit to them. To start with, you have to discover then register the aircons to get a token for each, to discover them you can use this script get_samsung.pl, which was obtained then slightly modified from here. That script output: perl get_samsung.pl Waiting for responses $VAR1 = { ‘modelcode’ => ‘SAMSUNG_DEVICE’, ‘mac_addr’ => ”, ‘cache_control’ => ‘max-age=60’, ‘decoded_nickname’ => ‘Office’, ‘spec_ver’ => ‘MSpec-1.00’, ‘notify * http/1.1’ =>… Read More »Samsung Smart Aircon and MRTG