Off course everybody can order from the factory trough hole plated pcb and they are off the hook, that is the professional solution and for the end product I do the same. But that costs more, there is a lead time and if there is some error on the board or on the schematic, you need redesign and order another one.

I personally use home-made double layer pcb’s for my prototypes, with photo method and some design constraints like track width, spacing,  clearance, the results are quite good.

Yes, that’s nice but it has a lot of vias, and can be painstaking  to make the connections for each via by running  through a thin wire, soldering one end then soldering the other end, cutting down the excess, because for each via you have to handle the wire, the soldering iron, the cutter resulting a great “overhead”. I admit this was my solution and took hours to make each via separately, until somebody showed be a clever trick, but that’s enough talking, here are the pictures:

You need some thin copper wire:

First anchor one end of the wire by soldering to one side:

Run through the vias(like sewing) the wire:

Solder each end:

Start cutting as close as possible(on each side):

The result:

Nice, round bumps

And after soldering the TQFP package:

As you can see, the vias underneath the TQFP doesn’t cause any problem, although more attentions is needed when soldering. Fast and simple, hope you get the spirit and start tinkering.

This pocket sized mp3 player is based on Microchip PIC16F877 and comes with both C and Assembly source code but the C code version has more features and stability. The mp3 player was designed to work with compact flash cards up to 100 gigabytes. For decoding it uses the VS1001K chip and for conversion it uses the built in DAC. The principle of operation is not very complicated, the PIC reads the CF card and once it finds a file it clocks the card 512 times per sector sending all the information one byte at a time to the decoder chip. The decoder gets a valid stream of data and sound comes out of the built in DAC. The project doesn’t have a display or a fancy menu, it’s just a plain simple mp3 player.

DIY Mp3 Player Based On PIC16F877: [link]

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! Praise the Lord! How many times have you thought you don’t have enough holiness in your life? How many times you wished you’d do more than just saying Grace before dinner? Well, now you can do something about that! Yes, with the help of the Holy Toaster, you can turn every meal into a God-worship ritual. Forget going to church! Holy Toaster is the s***!

This is an open source project that will transform your common toaster into a sacred device – a Jesus toast maker. Using two stainless steel inserts that block the toaster’s radiation in certain areas, your usual toaster will now have the bread come out with the face of  Holy Jesus, The Son of God. It will improve your daily meals and will bring godliness closer to you with every bite.

As mentioned in the title, this is a Do-It-Yourself project and for those who own or may operate a laser cutter it is fairly simple to upgrade their toaster into a divine toaster because the SVG and DXF files are available for download and free for use with any purpose or profit. Godly. Now you can impress your grandma when she comes visit.

For others that wish to have their breakfast enlightened by Lord Jesus and don’t have a laser cutter available, there is still hope! If you live in the US you can purchase the Holy Add-on of Light. Foreigners will also be able to order it the near future. Careful with the sharp edges and with the pliers when you install the holy inserts into the now holy toaster. And you’re good to go!

This project made me think of other things that could be upgraded with holy spirit. Like pasta in the form of a cross with a little Jesus on it or pizza with a big mozzarella cross and a Jesus made of salami. Possibilities are endless, really.

DIY Holy Toaster: [Link] – [via]

Most gamers are certainly familiar with the joystick, used in all sorts of video games from the early days of television video games back in the late ’60s. Being a very intuitive device, the joystick is also used in cranes, trucks or other machinery, especially in an industrial environment. Moreover, the joystick is used extensively in the aeronautics industry, to control an airplane’s ailerons.

Quite simple in design, the joystick usually has 2 axes of movement, similar to a mouse, moving along the X axis with left or right signals and along the Y axis with up or down. Its simplicity as a piece of hardware is the reason why it can be made using parts from all kinds of devices. Here’s an example of such a joystick, built from an idler wheel of an old VCR.

Besides the idler wheel, this joystick has 4 microswitches and a spring and it’s installed on a piece of sheet steel. The idler wheel has a metal shaft which, combined with the spring, serves as the actual “funstick”. The metal is drilled and the shaft is inserted into the hole with the convex side of the washer facing down, so the shaft rolls against the metal when it is moved. Putting the spring between the metal sheet and the flat side of the washer turns the shaft into a joystick, having it return back to the center position after it is released.

The switches take some fine tuning to adjust properly, because the hole should stop the shaft from moving and not the actuator of the switch. But after the switches are set up correctly you have a working joystick ready to be attached to a front panel. More details and pictures of the VCR joystick are available in the link.

DIY 2 Axis Joystick: [Link] – [Via]

This is a real DIY project, hack your old alarm clock, connect it to the Arduino board, write some Phyton script to access your Google calendar and download the data to the Arduino. This will result in a versatile alarm clock, which the author named Larmie.

The alarm clock uses the LM8560 , if your clock has other IC then you must adapt the project, otherwise with the step by step explication it is easy to replicate the Larmie. You can use any calendar software, but I think the Google calendar is the best choice, because you can set your alarm remotely.

The downside of this device is that you need to run your PC all the time, it would be nice to use the Ethernet shield with TCP/IP stack and access directly from Arduino the calendar. Also it would be great if beside the plain 7 segment display some LCD display would show the reason why you should wake up at 6am.

Arduino and Google calendar: [via] [link]

First of all for those who don’t know, the monome is a music controller which is used to generate sound effects, is has a lot of push buttons which have different color back lights to generate a visual effect to. DJ’s VJ’s use the commercial version, but there are also available DIY kits, open source open hardware designs, the most simple is to use the Arduino with the monome shield, but you can build your custom shield or entire system.

The basic functions are, use a large keyboard matrix, with back lit buttons and based on the sequence which the user pushes the keyboard generate a MIDI output which is interpreted by a mixer or synthethizer.

The sound and visual effects can be customized if you build your own monome, most of the parts can be bought from Sparkfun, including the pcb’s, although there are open source projects, the programming part is not for beginners and you need some external MIDI interpreter which can be expensive.

Monome with Arduino: [Link]

As we all know headphone amps are not cheap to buy. I think this is the main reason that drives the hobbyist to make their own amps. Most people are familiar with the popular C’Moy headphone amp which is cheap to make and it sounds nice.

But there also other designs available, for example this class A MOSFET headphone amp. The author designed and build it because he’s 32 ohm Grado SR80 headphones didnt’t sound good on it’s computer soundcard.

An IRF610 MOSFET was used by the author but there is a wide variety of FET devices that can be used instead. Unlike the C’moy amp this amp was primarily designed to sit on a desk, it’s bigger the MOSFET needs heatsink cooling so this wouldn’t fit the portable category of amps.

A LM317 regulator is used for the constant current source, and the current is limited to about 250mA. In the end the sound is better than on the sound card and it was a small investment as most parts were salvaged.

It’s not too difficult to build something similar but it will sure help to have some experience with similar circuits.

MOSFET Headphone Amplifier: [Link]

DIY game console ? there are not many projects out there on this subject, mainly because of the ammount of work and time you have to put into something like this.

Matt, the author of the DIY Game Boy, got over this issues and manged to get it done. The core of the project is an Arduino that controls all the other modules.

There is very little soldering requiered on this project as it’s mainly constructed using modules and shields. The source code is posted on the project page so you should have no problem on making something similar.

DIY Game Boy: [Link] – [via]

This tutorial will guide you when building your own single transistor tesla coil. We’re all fascinated by the sound produced when high voltage is discharged so sooner or later you’re gonna want to build it. Apparently using a single transistor it’s better and the whole thing works better.

DIY Single Transistor Tesla Coil: [Link] – [via]

This is a simple do-it-yourself (DIY) headphone amplifier project that is fashioned primarily after the Class A MOSFET Headphone Driver project by Greg Szekeres and to some extent Mark’s DIY Class A 2SK1058 MOSFET Amplifier Project. The amplifier concept is simple and follows a typical single-ended class A circuit utilizing an active constant current source (CCS) in place of a passive resistor. A CCS doubles the efficiency of the circuit over that where a passive load resistor is used, bringing it to a maximum of 25%.

Class A Headphone Amplifier Boost Your Sound: [Link] – [via]