Category: DIY

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LED Word Clock Complete

It’s taken quite a while, but the LED Word Clock looks to be finished. This was a project started a few years ago by some students, and then was completely redone by a current Junior from our shop. This student has spent most of the semester putting the project together in a manner that looks professional, like a product off the shelf.

The design uses about 10 layers of lasercut wood to conceal the wiring and house the lettering and spacing pieces. The circuit board is custom made on our Bantam Tools PCB mill, and all the wood and acrylic were cut on our Epilog Fusion Pro. Just a few photos below of the finished product, hoping to have a more detailed writeup of the process from the student.

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Pi Radio Hardware

Today I spent some time setting up the hardware for the Pi Radio. Unfortunately, I was unable to do a complete test because I did not have a speaker. Usually, I’ll have a few small speakers in my office for testing purposes, but I must have taken them to school for some reason. I will take the components to school tomorrow and try testing them there. Will hopefully have an update tomorrow. Below are some images of the hardware setup, the Arduino is not being used, just using the breadboard. Also, a photo of my safety officer.

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Pi Radio Continued

Today I began setting up the Raspberry Pi for the internet radio project. I do not know too much about coding, and the instructions from the Instructables website did not always make sense to me. Additionally, the tutorial is from 2017, so some of the information is outdated. For one, the settings options on the pi are slightly different than in the tutorial, but I was able to figure out how to get what I needed.

Additionally, the tutorial asks to upload a specific media player to the pi, yet the when I attempted to do that via SSH, it said it could not find the media player. I was able to upload a different media player, but not sure if it will work. I was also able to upload the python file, which downloaded as html, and I needed to download a python editor in order to save the file. Perhaps there is another way to do this, I just could not figure it out.

I believe that is all that I need on the software side, now I will be adding all the hardware and test it out. Once the hardware is working I will go into the software again and change the radio stations to one I want. Here you can see me using Terminal to talk to my Raspberry Pi.

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Internet Radio

A while ago my wife surprised me with an old fashioned radio. It’s an Emerson 805 Series B model which was available in the 1950s. The radio does not work anymore, although all its guts were still intact, tubes and all. I decided to turn the radio into a working internet radio, and hoping to keep functionality of the tuning dial and power switch. 

So far, all I’ve managed to do is take the radio apart. A lot of interesting components inside, but for my purposes I will only keep the plastic enclosure and tuning and power knobs. The back needs to be recreated, which I will do with the laser cutter, as well as inner speaker lining. Not sure what I will use for that, but it can be attached to a lasercut support structure. 

For the electronics, I will initially be following a guide from Instructables – this one I found from _Marcel_ which looks very close to what I’d like to accomplish. In addition to new electronics, I’m also going to clean and repaint the enclosure and knobs, unsure of the color scheme right now, but I will want to keep a retro look to the radio. All for now, a few photos of the radio below.

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Toothbrush Update

A few days ago I wrote about how my wife’s Philips Sonicare electric toothbrush failed. The brush still turned on, so the battery was not an issue. After taking it apart I was able to discover it was a mechanical fault, a metal piece had sheared off making it so the head would no longer vibrate. 

I was able to locate a new piece on Ebay to replace the broken hardware and it was an easy install to replace the part. The toothbrush is now functioning properly again, and a $10 part has saved us $100+ dollars on replacing the electric toothbrush. 

A few pics of the replacement part and the broken part below. In the first picture on the right you can see the old part with the sheared off piece. The middle image shows the sheared off part with a metal attachment. A screw (not shown) goes through the attachment piece and through a part connected to the brush mechanism, and then screws into the captive nut on the sheared off part (you can see the bottom of the captive nut sticking out of this piece. The photo on the left shows the not tip assembly purchased from Ebay. You simply need to unscrew and then attach to the vibrating mechanism on the toothbrush. 

We may not be able to fix everything, but we should endeavor to fix what we can rather than throwing something away.