I’ve been having alot of fun lately starting up my Electronic Repair business, and I’ve had the opertunity to work on some really cool stuff. a few weeks ago I was working on a Moog motor controller card from a Piston Bully snow cat, and this week I fixed an underwater camera. Yesturday, I took apart my old bass amp from high school.. It was a squire 18 Watt Amp and it had great sound for a solid state amp. It died. Well it didn’t really die as much as it just didn’t work. Upon inspection of the insides I found the problem very quickly …  So I got 3 of these little bad boys from DigiKey just in case I blow another one. $1.67 each! Does anyone know if you can stack these?

Well I’ve been quite busy as of late, between the makerspace we’re staring (Minot Makers) and the different jobs I try to keep up with I haven’t had much spare time.. but I have started an android App that I’ll be working hard on for the next few weeks/months/years/decades/hours. Grid Designer is an idea I had to create a drawing program based on a snap to grid style of drawing with shapes and different pen tools as to make it easier to draw something legible. I’ve got a functioning prototype on the android market and am working hard to get more features working in the near term

In my slurry of posts, I’ve covered a couple projects but none made me as happy as the annoyatron I made for my brother. Well I made this for him for his birthday, but I didnt ‘hand’ it over persay, I hid it in his bedroom . My device made a high pitched chirp every 10 minutes. Similar to a cricket, high pitched noises are hard to locate… So for two nights he tried to find it, but couldn’t. I had to tell him where it was at. I made a post about it in the MSP430 forums, but heres a quick picture. Im really quite proud of my use of rare earth magnets as a battery holder.

Happy Hacking.

We (as in anyome that’ll join) are starting a hackerspace here in town. The temporary website is at minotmakers.tophathacker.com but I did buy minotmakers.com… My webhost is just taking too long to respond to my DNS request. It will be there soon. Check it out! Register! Participate in the forums!

Boom! Check it out, radio shack has Arduinos now! Im not an arduino fan really but I do commend their efforts. I used to work at my local radio shack so they dug these shields from the back and let me take a picture.

I realized today that I work on websites for a living, and for the most part enjoy it, but when it comes to my own site i just throw up a random wordpress template. When im done with minotmakers.com, Im going to come back and rework tophathacker.com.

I recently realized I should pick up my blog again and document some more of my projects. Im just going to make some quick posts, and I’ll add schematics, pictures and code when I can.

Zombie in a can is a project i did around haloween. Android app and bluetooth to a microcontroller…

Heres a video.
Zombie in a can

I found this little guy when I was working in an Office Supply store here in town (won’t name names.. I’m pairanoid.) I was pulling a new cat5e cable so they could have a separate internet connection for the computers they’re repairing. I ALWAYS ask for junk, ’cause after working for Retail once in your life, you know they throw out alot of useful junk.. sometimes some fully functional junk. When the lady said I could have it I was ecstatic! this freebie even came with a 2GB SD card that had a small avi file on it.

Hokay. I’ve finally finished my Birthday Countdown Clock for my uncle.* It uses the ez430 launchpad with a Nokia 3310 LCD from sparkfun. The pin assignments are documented better in the source code, but I basically soldered a male pin header on the LCD and plugged it into the Launchpad. The Clock counts down until my uncle’s 50th birthday then plays “seasons don’t fear the reaper” from a greeting card circuit.

Read more…

So, I’ve neglected this site for a while but SOON there will be more projects of mine posted including a WRT54g V3 router interfaced with an MSP430 to shut off projectors with a web gui, A 3310 Nokia LCD interfaced with the MSP430G2231 and a greeting card circuit, a ps2/bluetooth keyboard interface for the Droid, More 3310 LCD Goodness with a fireworks display timer.. and I’m sure other things

-TopHat