somebody stop me
Posted: Sun Jun 09, 2019 12:03 pm
The curse of being a design engineer is that almost every product we encounter is an opportunity to do it better. In most cases after spending too much time and money on a DIY project I found better commercial solutions.
My peltier based slow cooker project, gave way to power resistors for heat when the peltier heat source was impractical. After foregoing the peltier technology a commercial solution was easily superior.
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#1 even my lowly driveway lamp was one such example. The opportunity presented itself when I had spare parts from tired broken, too cheap to fix soldiers. Long story short, I cobbled together a second solar panel from a broken lamp. Put in a larger capacity storage battery. I also cascaded two of the charge pump inductors in series to reduce the on current draw and extend over night light hours. This franken-lamp successfully negotiated the short days, long nights late last winter.
I did not expect this to survive this long (several months)... The two solar panels in series should well exceed the design voltage for the control chip, battery, etc....
Since it is still working my only question is should I retest this experiment to light both sides of my driveway. (I have enough spare parts). During the summer months my stock lamp seems to work fine.
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#2 digital TS-1... So far i resisted redesigning my iconic TS-1. The feature creep from discussions here put the nail in the coffin, for me... KISS.
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#3 Control front end for my surround sound system. I am so pleased with my upgraded Hypex amps, I wouldn't mind playing back stereo sources (might even dust off some old vinyl), but not only do I need volume controls I need some way to get 2 channel to feed 6 speakers seamlessly. I still have one of my old kit surround decoders from back in the early 80s, that covers all but the sub out, but don't feel like sending audio through a BBD delay in 2019.... The technology has moved so much I could probably just about make a digital delay using a single micro... I have a DSPic with 2x16b DAC built in... I could just about get by with built in 12b A/D but a cheap 16b stereo A/D is all of $1 BOM hit .
I could likewise craft a simple filter to steer a sub output while scrubbing low bass from primary L/R channels.
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Somebody stop me....
JR
PS: The cheap digital decoder has been working perfectly since I replaced the optical cable with a new one several days ago, but I have low expectations that this is the ultimate fix...
My peltier based slow cooker project, gave way to power resistors for heat when the peltier heat source was impractical. After foregoing the peltier technology a commercial solution was easily superior.
======
#1 even my lowly driveway lamp was one such example. The opportunity presented itself when I had spare parts from tired broken, too cheap to fix soldiers. Long story short, I cobbled together a second solar panel from a broken lamp. Put in a larger capacity storage battery. I also cascaded two of the charge pump inductors in series to reduce the on current draw and extend over night light hours. This franken-lamp successfully negotiated the short days, long nights late last winter.
I did not expect this to survive this long (several months)... The two solar panels in series should well exceed the design voltage for the control chip, battery, etc....
Since it is still working my only question is should I retest this experiment to light both sides of my driveway. (I have enough spare parts). During the summer months my stock lamp seems to work fine.
=======
#2 digital TS-1... So far i resisted redesigning my iconic TS-1. The feature creep from discussions here put the nail in the coffin, for me... KISS.
=======
#3 Control front end for my surround sound system. I am so pleased with my upgraded Hypex amps, I wouldn't mind playing back stereo sources (might even dust off some old vinyl), but not only do I need volume controls I need some way to get 2 channel to feed 6 speakers seamlessly. I still have one of my old kit surround decoders from back in the early 80s, that covers all but the sub out, but don't feel like sending audio through a BBD delay in 2019.... The technology has moved so much I could probably just about make a digital delay using a single micro... I have a DSPic with 2x16b DAC built in... I could just about get by with built in 12b A/D but a cheap 16b stereo A/D is all of $1 BOM hit .
I could likewise craft a simple filter to steer a sub output while scrubbing low bass from primary L/R channels.
=======
Somebody stop me....
JR
PS: The cheap digital decoder has been working perfectly since I replaced the optical cable with a new one several days ago, but I have low expectations that this is the ultimate fix...