I recently bought a new phone, because my old one’s battery capacity had degraded to the point where it couldn’t last me through the day – an experience that’s fairly common. The pain of financial expenditure fresh in my head, I decided to investigate what I could do to look after the battery of my […]
Read More A smart charger that preserves your phone batteryMy electronics workbench was missing one crucial component: a power supply. For years I’d got by as a broke student testing my projects with an assortment of DC adaptors, LiPos, AAs, small buck/boost converters and linear regulators. But enough was enough. I had been bitten by no current limit enough times: it was time to […]
Read More Making a DIY power supply from an old stereo ampI decided to build a tube headphone amp because I’ve been aware of them for a while, but I wanted to see how much of a difference they actually make to a listening experience. I decided to go with an amp that uses a twin triode 12AU7 tube, which has two advantages: Runs on 12V, […]
Read More Tube headphone amplifierDue to a friend moving away (Finnian Anderson, check out his blog) I came into ownership of a Skywriter. I decided to hook it up to an Arduino Leonardo to create a gesture/shortcut pad for my computer. The skywriter can detect a number of gestures including flicks, circles and taps. I assigned each gesture to […]
Read More Computer gesture control with Arduino and skywriterRecently I was given an old iPod dock for parts. Since I had some spare 3″ speaker drivers lying about, I decided to salvage the circuitry from the dock and make a portable speaker. First, I had to make an enclosure. I used some scrap oak floorboards that I found in our shed, along with some pine […]
Read More Bluetooth Speaker
Ben James 