The DIY-ers corner

  • Thread starter Jet Badger
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Jet Badger

Jet Badger

3,475
Lithuania
Vilnius
So show and discuss what you've made yourselves :)


My last little project was finding a solution to get a bit more sound from my headset that is connected to the PS3's RCA jacks. Firstly I found a TDA2822 chip on an old PC motherboard laying around. Didn't get very good results as I only used stuff that I found laying around. It produced a noise level way too high to be acceptable, ofcourse it can be solved but I just couldn't be bothered.

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So today I tried to do it in a different way. I used a piece of an old CD drive PCB. I found the datasheet of the chip and after some tracing soldered the wires in correct places. This setup performed extremely well. Zero noise, though as it isn't a "real" amplifier it isn't very powerful, but I found it to be more than enough.

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Some other stuff - basement-spec Hi-Fi. A Computer PSU driven old car radio with some old car speakers enclosed in boxes made of discarded drawers.

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A boombox I started last summer. I used a 7 dollar mp3 module, a couple of old car speakers and the box was made of old plywood soviet equipment boxes. The reason why it isn't finished is that I couldn't scavenge all the required components to run the random TDA2005 amp I got from a scrap radio.

The VHS case with a knob and wires hanging out of it is a TDA1552 amplifier I made when I was 14 or so. A very simple and useful project BTW if you're just starting out with electronics. Only 5 components or so, 2x22W, runs off 12V :)

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When I had a G27, I had made a simple analog handbrake. Used some scrap plywood and OSB and a crappy steering wheel for the guts. Worked well, gave it away with the G27 when I sold it though :indiff:

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Another simracing-related thing was a budget set of pedals with a loadcell for the brake. They're sitting in the corner unfinished now.

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I've also made a couple of sequential shifters.


The first one was the simplest and I really loved it, had a nice tactile click.
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Also an office chair. Rover 400 edition :sly:

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That's all I have so far :D. Show us your creations :)
 
Dean
I haven't got any creations yet, but I'd like to see more of that chair. 👍
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There isn't much to it really. It used to be an ordinary cheap office chair, I just removed the chair part, put an MDF board on top of the bracket of the base and bolted the seat onto it 👍
 
I am not so much of a builder as you are, but I do almost all of the repairs I have myself.

Last night I took my old ps3 apart that my brother killed by stuffing two discs in at once.
The plastic housing of the drive was stretched beyond working properly and I had to remove this to make it work properly again:

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It is the small lever that protects the drive from having a second disc inserted... Doesn't work very well...
 
XS
Not sure if this counts but here's my motorcycle before and after a semi-restoration. Did everything myself, including head, engine, clutch and final drive work.
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Hell yeah! That's sooooo rewarding when you are finished!
 
This thread is awesome. I haven't really "made" anything from scratch in a long while, but back in the daaaaaay me and my dad did two portable mini soccer goals out of strong PVC tubing for our patio so me and my cousins could play around and to take them to family picnics and stuff. Sadly, I don't even remember what happened to them, but man they delivered.
 
For anyone into DIY, if you don't already know, check out Instructables.com.

I'd have posted some of my old projects but unfortunately they are half way around the world.
 
Much respect for people creating their own stuff.
I have 2 projects that I've been wanting to complete for about 2 years, but one needs a lot of soldering and I haven't even ordered parts for the other project.
 
DYI is so general. I suppose it's all about sim racing hardware. Respect for all the DYI-ers in the world. :cheers:


I made soup, but that probably doesn't count. But I did it myself. :D
 
I really want to make an office/desk chair out of an old car seat. doesn't matter which kind either, that would just be awesome! and i wanna make a cheesy desk out of a piece of wood and old rims. lol

My wife would probably be ok with the chair, but not the desk. :lol:
 
W3HS
For anyone into DIY, if you don't already know, check out Instructables.com.

I'd have posted some of my old projects but unfortunately they are half way around the world.
Click to expand...

Another good one is hackaday.com, though they're not so much tutorials as they are inspiration for tech hacking.

I've got a few things I could share here but I can't get photos right now. Off the top of my head, I've got:

- 20/20 au profile/18mm chipboard/MDF sim racing rig including a keyboard tray, arm rests and a flight stick (sort of)
- 4-way Headphone switcher (PC/PS3/360/??? (unimplemented))
- Home-made X360 VGA cable
- Two 'broken out' Dualshock 3s, both intended for controller mods I haven't completed yet; one one-handed G27 controller for a chap in Australia who contacted me to make one for him, another for a button box, but I need funds and time for both.
- USB switch to share my G27 between my PC and PS3
- Half-finished Raspberry Pi laptop mod. Actually, no, it's more like 1/5th finished; I've got the case (unprepared) and I've also gotten a keyboard matrix interfaced with USB via an Arduino Leonardo. It's pretty smart but I need a display, suitable power source, trackpad and I also need to strip most of the connectors off the Pi and replace them with the laptop case connectors... Big job.
- PowerMac G5 case. So far it has been stripped, that's about it. I need PC parts to put in it before I make any progress on that one.
- A prototype G27 mod to customise the clutch function for GT6. The idea is to make the clutch 100% point customisable, since it works pretty much digitally anyway when the clutch is fully depressed, so I'd like to make it so I can shift with 50% clutch which should reduce if not eliminate mis-shifts.
- Custom Mega Drive II arcade stick. I made this many years ago before I knew what a logic family was so the voltages are wrong, I can't really be bothered to revisit it.
- Home-made TDA2030 stereo amplifier. This was actually pretty good, but I don't have a suitable power supply (it needs +/-12V 4A) and the low frequency response is crap (by design, of course (honest!), because the speaker frequency response is about 200Hz to 20kHz) so I'd need a subwoofer as well... Two more TDA2030s in push/pull would do the job nicely, but that's more money.
- PS3 compatible Namco NeGcon. Another one I started ages ago, before I understood what latency was and how it was caused... I had a 4021 PISO shift register interfaced with a 595 SIPO shift register via an Arduino, which had to shift in a byte then shift it back out, so it was often too slow to even detect a digital button press. The analogue axes all worked fine, though! When I revisit it I need a 'headless' shift register arrangement and some sort of cable that's thin enough to fit in the controller's cable port but still contain the right number of conductors; I need about 9 or 10 I think; 5V, ground, four for the pots, 'CS, SDO and CLK for the shift register in the controller.

Pretty much nothing I make is ever finished before I move on, mainly because I don't want to spend what it would cost to package stuff nicely or whatever.
 
neema_t
Another good one is hackaday.com, though they're not so much tutorials as they are inspiration for tech hacking.

I've got a few things I could share here but I can't get photos right now. Off the top of my head, I've got:

- 20/20 au profile/18mm chipboard/MDF sim racing rig including a keyboard tray, arm rests and a flight stick (sort of)
- 4-way Headphone switcher (PC/PS3/360/??? (unimplemented))
- Home-made X360 VGA cable
- Two 'broken out' Dualshock 3s, both intended for controller mods I haven't completed yet; one one-handed G27 controller for a chap in Australia who contacted me to make one for him, another for a button box, but I need funds and time for both.
- USB switch to share my G27 between my PC and PS3
- Half-finished Raspberry Pi laptop mod. Actually, no, it's more like 1/5th finished; I've got the case (unprepared) and I've also gotten a keyboard matrix interfaced with USB via an Arduino Leonardo. It's pretty smart but I need a display, suitable power source, trackpad and I also need to strip most of the connectors off the Pi and replace them with the laptop case connectors... Big job.
- PowerMac G5 case. So far it has been stripped, that's about it. I need PC parts to put in it before I make any progress on that one.
- A prototype G27 mod to customise the clutch function for GT6. The idea is to make the clutch 100% point customisable, since it works pretty much digitally anyway when the clutch is fully depressed, so I'd like to make it so I can shift with 50% clutch which should reduce if not eliminate mis-shifts.
- Custom Mega Drive II arcade stick. I made this many years ago before I knew what a logic family was so the voltages are wrong, I can't really be bothered to revisit it.
- Home-made TDA2030 stereo amplifier. This was actually pretty good, but I don't have a suitable power supply (it needs +/-12V 4A) and the low frequency response is crap (by design, of course (honest!), because the speaker frequency response is about 200Hz to 20kHz) so I'd need a subwoofer as well... Two more TDA2030s in push/pull would do the job nicely, but that's more money.
- PS3 compatible Namco NeGcon. Another one I started ages ago, before I understood what latency was and how it was caused... I had a 4021 PISO shift register interfaced with a 595 SIPO shift register via an Arduino, which had to shift in a byte then shift it back out, so it was often too slow to even detect a digital button press. The analogue axes all worked fine, though! When I revisit it I need a 'headless' shift register arrangement and some sort of cable that's thin enough to fit in the controller's cable port but still contain the right number of conductors; I need about 9 or 10 I think; 5V, ground, four for the pots, 'CS, SDO and CLK for the shift register in the controller.

Pretty much nothing I make is ever finished before I move on, mainly because I don't want to spend what it would cost to package stuff nicely or whatever.
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That's quite a list you got there :) Very few of my projects are completed aswell, I usually try to build stuff from scrap I already have so usually when there's a specific component on demand suddenly everything stops because of money :)
 
I made a small stick for better portability when I go out. It's fitted with an MC-Cthulhu and Sanwa parts. Things didn't go my way so the end result is rather shabby.

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I am proud of the colour scheme though! Orange Creamsicle was the idea. Wasn't able to get a brighter orange, parts nor paint. It's only 8x10!


It works on a PS3 and PC/Mac.
 
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Took on another project this weekend. Made a sort of a drill press from scrap, only bought the $5 drawer sliders.

Sorry about the disastrous photo :lol:

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AOS-
Does it move on the slider?
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Yup, the metal lever you see is a piece of a broken spare slider, it acts as a handle to push the drill down. The sliders on which the drill moves are between the plywood piece behind the drill and the frame. The sliders, for the record, required a moderate amount of modding to suit the purpose :D
 
So you've pretty much made your own vertical mill! sweet! A mill is one of the best power tools to have for a fabricator.
 
satchurator17
can you make a tutorial how to build that sequential shifter?thanks for your help
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The first shifter is just a rod pivoting on a large DPDT switch. I eyeballed the size of the box for it and cut out a plywood patern that would stop the rod and prevent breaking the switch (you can see in the photo).

The second shifter is a bit more basic. It's a rod pivoting on a bolt, there's a couple of microswitches that the rod presses when you either upshift or downshift. In both shifters I used rubber bands for centering. Hope this helps.


Today I received my USB soundcard and started making my poorman's mixamp :D. The purpose is to make a device that would allow me to use my ordinary analog headset with PS3 and at the same time with my phone. There will be a switch that will alternate the mic output to either the USB soundcard (=>PS3) or the secondary device (a smartphone in my case, on which I could run Teamspeak or Skype for voice chat). I will use the USB soundcard for mic input and power only, because the PS3 doesn't output game sound over USB and also because it's a cheap soundcard that has no sound quality.


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The components (left to right):

  1. The $3 soundcard
  2. Female-to-female USB coupler to make the USB cable detachable
  3. 2x 3.5mm stereo jacks for the headset's audio and mic
  4. 4-pin 3.5mm jack for the secondary channel and mic output (5 times the price of a regular 3.5mm jack :lol:)
  5. 2x RCA jacks to get the sound from the PS3
  6. 3-pin rocker switch that will switch the mic between the PS3 and the other device (smartphone)
  7. 10K volume control potentiometer
  8. An RCA coupler to extend the cable from the PS3
  9. Some 4.7 kOhm resistors to be our mixer
  10. And the needed cables

This is the mockup of how it'll look like (the box is a cut-off VHS case :sly:):

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I got back late today so will probably finish it tomorrow. Also, aside from the stuff above there will be a small headphone amp circuit in the box as the volume drops massively after a mixer. I will use the CD drive circuit you see in the OP for that.
 
I said screw it and bought a proper project box today. Looks so much better! A lot of solderin' but works just as intended. I may think about putting in a balance between the channels knob, 'cause when using Teamspeak it's drowned out by the game.

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