This has been my project for the last month or so. It's a quad-opamp A47 Headphone Amplifier, based on this schematic that Auchter pointed out to me. Coupled with my new Chaintech sound card and Grado SR-80 headphones, it sounds completely amazing. It also represents the first circuit that I've built from the ground up. It looks sweet too. Here are some pictures from development:
- First design
- Final design
- Breadboarded prototype success! (one channel)
- First Successful test! (both channels)
- In case, before getting the smaller capacitors
- News updates chronicling its development


So I drew up these plans for a sweet freaking spudgun using a coaxial piston valve design I adapted from spudtech's forums. It runs completely pneumatically, so there's no springs or bolts or anything to worry about. You can check out this sweet animation that I found on SpudTech.com.
I've been working on building this thing for a while, but revisions 'A' through 'H' have failed miserably, and I'm almost out of patience. Its official project name is "The Benjamin Franklin Gun," chosen for the amount of money I've currently spent on development.


So after the fiasco with my graphics card shorting out, I decided that it might not exactly be wise to have its fan turned off most of the time, since it was designed to be constantly on. So I modified the design of my fan switch to make ... "The Poor Man's Fan Speed Control."
With the switch on, the fan goes full blast, which is loud, irritating, and necessary for 3d gameplay. With the switch off, the fan power passes through 94 ohms of resistors, making it nearly silent, yet still providing a little bit of cooling. The gpu runs about 53 degrees normally, or 56 with the fan turned down(not while gaming, of course).
You might notice the giant bundle of resistors in the picture. This is because all I had at my disposal were RadioShaft 1/4w resistors, and a single 100ohm was getting really hot, so I used five 470ohm in parallel. Pretty clever implementation too, if I do say so myself.



I dusted off my half-built SnowDuck 2.0 and finished it up. All that was left was to mount the steering servo and radio. I'm calling it the Michigan RC Car. It's not 100% yet though; I plan on putting some plastic over certain parts so I don't get snow-related electrical shorts.


The hub that connects my computer to my new file server is an old 10mbps piece of crap, which was a problem when trying to transfer a whole bunch of uncompressed DVDs. So I took 2 female CAT5e jacks that I got at a garage sale and wired them up into this crossover hub replacement. This way, I didn't have to move any wires.


I actually made a work log this time, with all kinds of pictures and text and it's just great. Read it.


I made this USB device charger out of 4 9-volt clips and a voltage regulator. Since the picture i've glued a little heatsink on the side to help with the overstressed regulator. With no batteries on it, this thing's really compact. Perfect for insuring that my shitty cellphone battery doesn't die in the middle of nowhere (if i happen to have a 9-volt with me)


This pretty much speaks for itself. I only had to modify the gum wrapper a little bit by unfolding it and gluing it back together in proportion to the Shuffle. It is truly an amazing device that plays 8 hours of music and can be disguised as a pack of gum.




"What's wrong with a regular mousepad," you ask?
Well, a regular mousepad is useless while sitting on a couch attempting to play Counterstrike. And thus was born the Mouseboard. I would patent it, but I probably wouldn't be able to sell any.


A picture of my current armory of PVC: here you can see my new pneumatic spudgun with about 8x the power of its predecessors, which I have dubbed, " The Governator."


Concealable weapons laws don't apply to the MiniSpud.
It shoots those little red potatoes with about the same distance as its daddy, and can be concealed in a backpack, trenchcoat, suitcase, etc...
I made two versions, one with a stupid button on the side, and this ridiculously sweet one with a trigger grip.



The first spudgun I built ran off of hairspray. It was pretty barbaric, and bad for the environment. Also, it's nowhere near as fun as the crazy shit I'm building nowadays. It's ridiculously easy to build though.


I ripped the electronics out of my R/C boat, and built this frame with the snow landing gear from my R/C plane, and voila! I'm currently working on a better version, but I kinda stopped working on it due to the lack of snow.



I have created a device that takes the frustration out of sticking pencils in the ceiling tiles. It also takes the sanity out, but that's half the fun. Or, double the fun, however you choose to look at it.