As we’re trying to set out to custom-cast resin figures i’ve built a one-evening-hacked vibration table as a first step for (hopefully!) successful room-pressure casting.
wood
Raid system – 8TB home storage, on budget!
With the advent of higher definition Television, growing demand for high quality lossless audio as well as general madness the need for a reliable as well as flexible and large home storage solution grew rapidly for me. Just hammering more disks into your home router / server just won’t nail it over the long term. So i’ve set out to build a cheap (per TB), (hopefully) longlasting as well as reasonably reliable home storage system for the enthusiast (read: “tinkering geek”). This was achieved using a custom made case for the parts as well as a lucky find for the adapter card. Read on for more…
PicPost: Headphones Amplifier
Since a long time i wanted to check out DIY Amplifier design and building (see http://ideas.kanojo.de/ for a rough timeline oO). As a first-tryer i opted for a Headphones amp as a friend is a real HighEnd-Headphones fanatic and well … it’s simpler and cheaper – you don’t need large capacitors, big heatsinks, uber-powersupplies … all nice n tiny.
The Amplifier itself is a TexasInstruments TPA1517NE Class-AB Amplifier that is driven at a voltage of 18V (to be able to supply a reasonable signal for high-impedance (600ohms) headphones. The Schematic is almost the application note except for enlarged output capacitors to lower the cutoff frequency of the output-filter. Both powersupply and amp reside on on PCB.
The casing is made from 15mm Multiplex, routered at the edges. The volume-control knob is also routered from the same 15mm MPX material. The edges are routered along with 45*
Buuut, as this is a picpost, here they come:
Wooden Drinholder for cult drinks
As another birthday of a friend came up and we stood there with not even the slightest idea of what might make a good gift we had to get a little creative – first came the idea of collecting some nerdy and culty drinks (non-alcoholic, i think in this respect non-alcoholic has way more style) and well, give him a set of cool drinks. Next were some thoughts about how to package it and well, while thinking about some cardboard setups to pack it up the idea for this wooden drink holder which can be dual-used as a drinkholder shelf.
See the pictures below for the whole drink collection as well as the drinkholder and both put together :P.
(some building details inside!)
Say hi to the KanojoFrame!
Hi and welcome to a new full fledged (i at least hope so) tutorial to hack together a fast-switch picture frame, our so-called “KanojoFrame”. As i must admit the idea is not fully genuinely ours, we designed and built it with the moo-frame from the excellent business-card supplier moo.com: Moo Mosaic-Frame.
The idea is to have a frame thats front glass plate is dismount- and mountable in the glimpse of a eye thus allowing to change the contents without too much of a hassle. The other aspect is that the whole content of the frame is made up of a mosaic of mini-pictures framed by small but thick cardboard frames. You can then use cardboard spacer to lay the small framed image-“cards” (moo.com are half business cards, ours are roughly creditcard-size) out in every way you want to create a nice compilation of the works displayed!
The frame itself is quite flat, 6mm without glass, rougly 8.5mm with the glass front attached. The glass it held by a couple of strong rare-earth magnets and sits very tight, so no worries about falling glass. The inner frame can hold around 7*3(=21) of our cardboard-mini-frames, but … see for yourself! And if you feel like it, make one yourself….
New HiFirama, Black Beauty
Yay for another cool HiFi Project – a mini-monitor using the MarkAudio “cheapo Series”, CHR-70 which benifits from the design- and production experience MarkAudio has from it’s larger brothers but is made with budget considerations in mind – so in short it’s a modern, well-designed and manufactured “mid-budget” speaker which performs just great! The cases are Teak-veneered MDF, the design is a GHP (“Geschlossen mit HochPass” -> Closed with HighPass Cap) design from a HiFi-Forum (german board) member which was influenced by the “GHP” concept of a german HiFi-magazine…
Backlit Couch/Coffee-Table
Have you ever wanted a cool couch- or coffee-table? Something you’re friends will be like “wow”, that blends nicely into your existing room and that makes a nice comfy atmosphere? Too bad something like that isn’t available readily made at IKEA or the like … but hey, we can tinker it together ourselves!
That’s what we thought when we started to plan that table. Another nice thing about it: It’s extensible, you can always mod in a LED matrix and a matrix-cabinet and start displaying pixel art, a ticker or whatever you feel like … but first you need the basic hardware, and thats what this post is about!
Geek-ish Tissueboxes
IMPORTANT: For those of you are looking to buy cubes, we have a sales page here!
We happen to be fans of Big Bang Theory and in one episode, we spotted a Rubik’s Cube tissue box somewhere in their geek apartment (back in October?). Of course they’re not the first one to have this idea but we got curious and were convinced they would make awesome Christmas gifts for our friends. In the end we overdid it a little and made every cubic (and geek-ish) item we could think of. The result? A certain annoyed person who had to cut all those small pieces of wood for us (he paid us back with cutting them half-heartedly and not so precise as usual but no hard feelings..). Every cube made in a different way (some painted, stenciled, glued,..). Many gifts and actually none left for ourselves to keep and no drive to make more, … as always.
Now this wouldn’t be a real Kanojo.de blog entry if we didn’t tell you how it works, so here goes:
DIY HiFi Surround, picturama
Once again i’ve been tinkering on small a broadband system to be used as my surround front/rear speakers. I’ve chosen a simple (and cheap!) design very similar to the CT 242, the only thing i’ve changed is the bass-reflex tuning. Once again, as i’m quite new to all this i’d rather refrain from giving instructions on how to do this and that here.
Custom Figure Display, Part 2
Heyyas there,
here comes part two of the “custom modelkit/figure display” series (or whatever you’d call it). A custom display for figures, modelkits, whatever – you name it! It’s a crossover between a glass-case/cabinet and a shelf. It combines the idea of hanging it on the wall with a glass-case so the figures/GKs don’t collect too much dust. This time – unfortuneatly – i don’t have pictures of the quality and detail of the other tutorials, but i will try to describe the working parts as good as possible.