So, I got another repair request from a friend of the band and recording engineer, Chout. He bought a yamaha rack mounted delay unit... turns out that the front Input jack has the tip of a cable stuck in it.
There is another Input jack on the back of the unit, but the two jacks are wired up such that the jack with the broken tip in it has priority.
This is a diagram of the front panel input connector. Basically, pin 1 is the tip of the cable (signal) and pin 3 is the sleeve (ground). When no cable is plugged in, pin 2 connects to pin 1, and when the cable is plugged in pin 1 disconnects from pin 2. The back panel input jack is wired to pin 2. This means that when a cable is plugged into the secondary input, the unit will use that signal, but if a cable is plugged into the main input, the secondary is disconnected and only the main signal will be used.
This works great, until a cable tip gets stuck in the main input jack, rendering it useless, and also effectively disabling the secondary input.
Begin the tear down!
Oh, I guess I'm not supposed to remove case...
Or... maybe I will...
Well... there's your problem. But how in the heck to I get it out?
Ahhh... it appears the front panel is just a facade.
Well... some poking around revealed that I'm not going to get that tip out of there without breaking the jack, so I hopped on Digi Key and found myself a suitable replacement. I also decided to jumper over the input switch with an alligator clip, but the thing still didn't work.
Alligator clips for the win
Just when I was going to give up, I noticed these...
Fuses!
The picture doesn't really do it justice, but the two 0.75A fuses were very milky white... and I couldn't see if the fuse wire was still intact. I pulled out the trusty multimeter and it turns out both of them are blown. Something must have shorted in this delay unit, and hopefully it wasn't me. Either way, I'm off to buy some fuses.
I needed to change my drum heads, and since I need to take off the heads to install these boards, I decided to put on the new heads. Now... this marks the second time I've ever replaced drum heads, and I realize they aren't tuned correctly (see video below). You got any tips? Let me know!
Of course, installing all this equipment made me realize all the mistakes I made... I put the sensitivity adjustment on the board that's in the drum, so when I want to adjust the sensitivity I need to take off the drum heads to do it, then without the resonant head, the whole response changes, so I keep taking off and replacing the head... which gets very old, very fast. Ooops.
So, here's the board inside my floor tom. I used corner brace to attach the board to the shell, and just screwed it right into the lug for the drum heads. I got some of those nifty removable 3M cable holders to hold the cable in place and provide some strain relief.
Oh this reminds me of my second mistake... the corner brace is metal, the board doesn't have a solder mask, and if the board happens to not be aligned correctly, the corner brace will short the power and ground. Oooops. Some electrical tape on the leads will be a quick fix.
I used a 3.5mm audio cable to connect to the control box, and I just ran them out the vent holes in the drums. Unfortunately, the cable was to thick to fit through the vent hole, so I had to use a blade to trim some of the plastic off of the connector. Again... ooops.
Anyways... After a few hours getting the bass drum light tested one night, and then another night and another few hours getting the rest of the drums hooked up, I have a working kit! The sensitivity of the LEDs isn't quite right, especially for the snare. The snare lights up whenever I hit the bass drum, and the first rack tom stays on far too long. By the time I'd gone through all of this install, I figured I'd just make a little video and muck around taking off the heads and fine tuning the sensitivity some other day. By the end of this "testing" the snare drum had quit working... I'm hoping it's a loose connection, but we'll see.
Anyway, we rounded up some friends around the practice space and invited them in to check it out, which is all of the laughing you'll hear. Oh, and I'm a professional engineer, not a professional drummer...
So after my first test, I decided that a few high power LEDs in the base drum wouldn't be sufficient, especially since I've been using black resonant heads. The Light that escapes the drum shoots out the tiny port hole, or the batter head, since it's clear. I got a hold of some LED light strips left over from testing (at my place of business) where the controllers had been fried, but the LEDs themselves are still in working order. I stripped off the controllers and cut them down to 3 LEDs per strip, which is the most I can drive with a 9V supply. I soldered the strips together, and adhered them around the inside of the ring...
I've been using my phone to record video, and the quality is pretty terrible until the LEDs turn on... sorry...
Tonight... Installing the Bass drum ring and one of the LED lights (make sure it works) inside a Tom.
Woooooooo! I can't believe how smooth this has been going... Uh oh, I just jinxed myself...
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Wooo!
Finally received all the parts to start building the control box.
First step, find a project box that fits my arduino board and mount it in there.
Fancy that, it's already done! That was quick, eh? I had to cut a few holes in the side of the case for the USB and power connection.
I'm using 3.5mm audio cables to connect the lights, so I got some panel mount jacks to connect them.
And, of course, labeled them.
Adding the power rail...
Anyway... each of those connectors has a sense pin and a control pin, and they all feed back into the arduino board, which has the brains of the whole operation.
It's a little bit of a rat nest, but I've seen worse...
So I ended up with a control box that handle 6 LED boards... The black LED strip was salvaged from broken electronics. I have enough to go entirely around the base drum. I need to figure out how to attach all this stuff to the inside of the drum now...
I'm in need of new drum heads, so I bought a replacements but I've been waiting to put them on so I don't have to muck about taking them on and off again. Hopefully I can figure out how to get these boards installed and then just rinse and repeat for the others.
Next update is going to be a bass drum lighting up... if all goes to plan :-)
Questions? Comments? I'm at soundular-electronics@gmail.com
Success! Since I don't have a drum to make the noise, I have to make mouth noise into the microphone and voila! It lights up! Now to repeat (1 for each drum) and figure out how to attach the light strips for the bass drum...
Here's the story... right before Battle Toys first show, our bassist blew out the speaker in his Peavey combo amp. We would have been left with no bass, luckily our friend and recording engineer, Chout, from the band Small White was able to loan us his Hartke bass head and cabinet. The head has two 1/4'' outputs for speaker cabinets but one of them was busted. I decided to thank Chout by repairing the outputs on his bass head... with his permission of course.
Front view
Holy crap, look at that monster transformer. Also, you can see the two output jacks, just to the left of the fan.
I am a sucker for things that light up...
Speaking of lighting up... check out the glowing 12AX7 pre amp tube. It's a little guy, but he gets the job done. This head has the one tube pre amp, in parallel with a solid state pre amp, and a solid state output stage.
I wanted to get that header out of the board so I didn't have to hard solder the wires. I tried to de-solder it, and pull with a needle nose pliers. The board snapped, and luckily, out popped the header. Woooooo!
Bloody Mary... because I don't need a reason.
Left: Old and busted. Right: New hotness. If there are any eagles eyes out there... you'll notice that I hooked the wiring up wrong on one of the jacks. To quote Rick Perry... Oooops. Luckily I ohmed it out before connecting it and discovered the problem.
Well, here ya go. I connected the output of the Hartke to the 8 ohm speaker in that Crate amplifier. Connected the oscilloscope to take a look... Voila! We have sound! Both output jacks work! All glory to the Hypnotoad!
Oh wow... I just noticed all of the junk on the floor. Is that a 3.5'' floppy disk? What year is this, 1992?
As always... questions? comments? Email me at soundularelectronics@gmail.com
So, one of my friends has an old Squier strat and then bought an Epiphone Les Paul, which he traded in after a few years for a Fender Strat. I guess he misses that warm humbucker tone, so we decided to add a nice humbucker to the Squier to see how it sounds and figure out the process. If everything works well, we're going to put the humbucker on the Fender in the coming months.
I did completed this a month or so ago, so I only took some pics of the wiring (to remember how it was hooked up) and one of the final product.
I stripped all the parts off of the pickguard and used the humbucker to trace an outline to cut out. I would love to use a dremel tool but I don't have one... so... I improvised. I know this is a terrible method, but I used a pair of large wire cutters to snip off bits of the plastic, and then used a file to smooth out the rough edges. Gah! The cuts aren't straight. I used one of the mounting holes from the old pickup, and since it's the slanted bridge pickup on a strat, the pickup doesn't exactly align with the strings... it's unfortunate, but it works.
Oh yeah... in order to at least partially retain some of the original sound, I added a coil tap to that pickup so he can use it as a single coil. It's on a tiny little toggle switch that I put in just out of frame on this picture.
The sound gets a little funky when using both the bridge humbucker and the single coil in the middle, but only when the coil tap is off. I'm not sure how the Squier pickups are wired, but I think one of the humbucker coils is wired opposite the single coil, and they're cancelling each other out. Anyway... end goal of this endeavor is to put this humbucker in the Fender guitar, and this was just a way to do it once and make the mistakes now so I don't screw up the nice guitar.
Lessons learned:
1. If you want it to look pretty, buy a new pre-cut pick guard..
2. Find a wiring diagram for the guitar. Gotta make sure all the parts play nice with each other.
Anything else I should take into consideration? Let me know... soundularelectronics@gmail.com
So... what's the best thing to do with cracked cymbals? I have a little collection now and I am not sure what to do with them. Anyone out there ever cut down a cracked cymbal and turned it into a splash or something?
How did you do it? email me at soundularelectronics@gmail.com
Good news! I designed and ordered boards for the drum kit.
I'm still considering this a prototype board, so I got 3 of these boards, no solder mask or silkscreen from express PCB for 50 bucks. Not bad, eh? I'll get a total of 6 complete boards. I added some hooks in there so I can use either a microphone or a piezo transducer, and I can either use an LED soldered to the board or wire out the leads to external LEDs.
