Post pics of your builds.... - Page 367

Interesting. It looks like the knob has the same finish, so is that acrylic too?

Yes, it's also acrylic that I cut into circles, glued them together, sanded and polished them into the appearance of being one piece (with a set screw to hold it firmly to the volume shaft).

the pimeta-v2.

- uncased?
- anti-cased??
- de-cased???
- sub-cased????

something like that

here's my pimeta-v2 boxed up (boxed under?) sitting next to the gamma-1:



the pimeta-v2 by itself, alternate angle:



mostly a surface mount build. buffers are under the board and op-amps are on top. most R's and C's are surface mount, below with only a few on top.

yes, its funny looking but it works quite well, the wiring is kept away 'from things' in the right ways and there's even a sub-floor (not yet shown) inside the box.



(dark lines near wire grommets are shadows, not pencil marks, lol)

the way the pimeta is laid out, the output wires don't come together neatly in a central area. in my config, they go straight down into the box and across to the output jack.

kind of a 'mad scientist' install, but then, again, I don't disagree (bwahahaha).

Jesus! Your pictures look better than real life LOL

thanks mr duck

just finished another stage in a continuing project of mine (spdif switch). here's the finished perf-board switch 'fabric' that supports up to 8 inputs and 1 output. I have 4 ports populated with headers (all I care about is 4. drilling 4 holes in chassis is PLENTY for me, lol).

top and bottom board views:





its really simple. TTL level switch with 3 address lines (3 bits = 8 inputs possible). I only care about 4 inputs so I only need to supply 2 wires to give 00, 01, 10, 11 to select from which of the 4 inputs is chosen.

what's kind of neat is that the input ports have +, - and signal on those 3 pins. but if you route those same 3 pins to another board, similar to this one:



then you can choose to use opto parts OR coax parts for any/all of the input ports. I use the same pinout and so if I have 3 toslinks and 1 rca or 2 and 2 or whatever, its all the same to the main 'fabric board'.

that small photo is an older one, before I settled on the '3 pin standard' (lol). that is a 2 port coax-in board. I also plan to build a 2-port coax-out board and a mixed 1in, 1out coax combo board. opto ports are always floaters, like this:



since those 'mount themselves' I didn't see the need for boards, for them.

just 1 or 2 more steps before the build is complete

such beautiful soldering work and pictures of it. Gives me the chills

Linuxworks,

The macro mode on your camera is outstanding. What are you using in terms of equipment (if you do not mind me asking). I realize lighting plays a big part, but the lens you are using is superb at close range.

jk

thanks

I shoot olympus slr bodies (e3, mostly) and oly lenses. the last set were from the zuiko (oly branded) macro 50mm f2.0 lens. its one of the sharpest lenses you can get for an slr.

basic idea is to use a tripod and self-timer for the shot and use available light, never flash! use live-view on your camera (a must-have for this kind of work)a and move the lighting around while watching for 'bad reflections' in the subject.

set the f-stop to the highest numbered one then back off 1 or 2 clicks. that gets you a good depth-of-field (but in these shots I *wanted* the background blurry, so I picked a middle f-stop).

don't over expose! if anything, under expose by .3 or even more.

fixup a lot of the lighting in a 'shadow/highlight' tool (cs2 has a good one). that will tone down or compress the highlights so they 'fit' inside a normal lcd screen's limits. if you didn't get enough light on dark areas, use the s/h tool and open up the shadow areas slightly. if more work is needed, use dodge/burn tool.

most images can benefit from de-noising. I use neatimage as a visual noise killer.

finally, after you resize to 'print' or web display, THEN you want to do your final sharpening pass. I sometimes use unsharp mask or 'smart sharpen'.

an advanced tech (somewhat tricky) is to set an intentionally slower shutter speed and then do 'light painting' with a handheld flashlight or some light soruce and while the shutter is open, move the light around to 'hit' the hard to see areas. you can also use this to soften shadows by keeping the 'flying lights' (as I call it) moving. note, make sure you don't have a bouncy floor or all the 'activity' would cut down on the sharpness of the image (shaking of the tripod).

alright, my spdif switch is now fully prototyped and boxed up. really inside a box, this time

I had some fun with clear plexiglass (polycarb, actually). I had the plastic shop (TAP) make me a top clear panel and a bottom slide panel, also clear (2 diff sizes, though). the front and rear caps were ABS crinkle finish plastic. with cut charges, it came to be about $12 total (plastic+labor). hard to complain about that, and I walked out that day with the cut plastic
















there are 3 input ports on the rear but the main switch board allows for 4. I didn't need 4 and didn't want to cramp the rear panel, so I went with 3. in fact, the chip supports 8

1 of the opto blocks is different (sharp brand instead of toshiba). I wanted to see if it mattered and it didn't; the size is about the same and its an 8mhz 5volt part and so its fine for spdif. not sure about 192k but I think it will do 96k.

I also opted to have a single toslink output instead of a dual tos/rca out. I only needed one and again, didn't want to clutter up the rear panel more than needed.

once the schematic is drawn up, I'll post that. you can see its meant to be modular, with the user picking what kind of ports they want and then 'patch paneling' them in via those ribbon cable jumpers. in fact, if you goof up (nah, never happens) you can 'renumber' the ports this way (lol).

my spdif switch. I call it SPDIFmaster

Nice work linuxworks, I'm going to try something siliar, I'm also looing at the Arduino for aquarium control.

P.S. where do you get your cable from (the ribbon cable 3 wire one)

Cheers

wow very neat & tidy, wish I had your skills

Thanks for tips! Some good stuff here.

Now I need a new camera.... ;-)

jk

Unless they take some major steps to improve their quality control I would strongly suggest avoiding Cam-Expert.

This is the best panel of the batch I received today---->


The other panels were somewhat less then......





Nice huh?

Edit: In case you are wondering this is the third (and last) time I have received panels that look like this from them.

wow..that looks quite ghetto for something that comes off a cnc machine.

That is really unfortunate. I was seriously considering them for my Buffalo panels