Category: Electronics

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My electronics projects have been non-existent for almost two years now. I’m going to kick things off again by building a headphone tube amplifier. This comes after months of prodding from Carl followed by a conversation where he basically said my creative output has dwindled to zero. I agreed, so here we are, building a little tube amp. Rather than waiting until the end to do a write up, I’m going to post as I go. Now, on to the build.

12au7 tube irf510 mosfet headphone amplifier

DIY headphone amps are far from untrodden territory. There are many designs out there, and several places to get help. After a little bit of research I considered these hybrid amp designs:

I decided on the NP-100v12 due to its low part count and availability of the 12AU7 tube. The photo above shows a finished build from Rogers Gomez. I think this will give me a good introduction to tubes and amps. If I had a bit more experience, I’d probably lean towards one of the Millett Max amps.

Stay tuned for more…

Photo from diyaudioprojects.com

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This Raspberry Pi touchscreen case from Thomas Murray on Kickstarter looks great. So great that I just had to back it.

The other night, I tore down an old Dell Inspiron laptop to salvage the LCD. The idea was to marry it with a Raspberry Pi and turn it into a display not unlike this one–without the touchscreen bit. But, this is very nice and the touchscreen will serve my purposes quite well. I’ll hold on the old Dell LCD for another project.

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Amazon EchoWe received an Amazon Echo as a gift. It’s pretty cool. For the most part, it tells us the weather, and plays music–so far anyway.

I was happy to learn that there is a way to add additional functionality with Skills. I spent some time hacking around with the Alexa Skills Kit but have nothing worth sharing yet.

For those looking to use the Echo as an interface, Lindo St. Angel has a comprehensive writeup on their reference project, which is a voice controlled alarm panel. There’s a lot of good information and sample code in that repository.

via hackaday