| Car Stereo to Home Conversion | ||||
I decided that I wanted something more pleasant to wake up to in the morning than a single 4" full range driver in an AM/FM clock radio, and I had a nice Panasonic car stereo collecting dust -- so instead of buying some bookshelf system, I built my own. I had all but the DVD enclosure and Banana Plugs in my parts bins already. If I wanted to do it totally right, I'd have hooked up the rear 12v standby power and antenna wires to 1/8" jacks. I'm otherwise very happy with the result, as it looks similar to something that'd be sold by electronics retailers.
In the simple wiring diagram above, pin 87a (12v from the AC adapter) is connected to pin 30 when the relay is "off" or untriggered. When 12v is applied to pin 86, that triggers pin 87 (12v from the PSU) to connect to pin 30. So basically the 12v AC adapter supplies "battery" power when the stereo is off, and the ATX PSU supplies power when it's on, since the 12v 500ma adapter wouldn't be able to push enough current to drive the speakers. The ATX PSU is plugged into a x10 module, which is controlled via a remote, and my x10 alarm clock. Since the "Power Good" wire in the PSU is soldered to ground, this causes the ATX PSU to turn on whenever AC power is applied. So whenever the x10 module is turned on, the ATX PSU then turns on, and starts supplying 12v power to the Acc wire on the stereo and the relay, which causes it to trigger. By the time the stereo starts outputting audio, it's being supplied with ample power (18A) from the ATX PSU. When the x10 module turns off, the PSU turns off, which resets the relay to its resting state, which allows the 12v wall wart to supply 500ma of 'trickle' power to the stereo, which retains the station/eq/volume settings.         |
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| New Gaming Rig Build | ||
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Machine upgrade time. I added a GPU waterblock and heatercore, and completely internalized the watercooling system in a much classier case. This box contains an Intel Q9300, 4GB of DDR3, an 8800GTX, an ASUS Maximus Extreme, and two 150GB Raptors in RAID0. It screams.
The design goal of my machines is to include high performance parts while maintaining sub-ambient noise output -- it needs to run silent, and blistering fast. This is why you see more exotic cooling methods, including the water pump that's suspended with elastic straps (to negate vibration), and the large 140mm main cooling fans, which have a much lower frequency noise signature that is not as audible to the human ear. I used to hang out at Silent PC Review quite a bit. It's the resource for silent computing.
Parts: -
Lian Li PC-A70B aluminum case (w/additional external layers of
mousepad for sound dampening) - Second Skin Audio 'Overkill' Acoustic Mat on the inner surface of the side and top panels
Installing the 8800GTX Waterblock ...
Later Stage Construction & Assembly ...
Fit & Finish ... Coming Soon ...
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| CKKIII Headphone Amp | ||
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No project log yet -- still in progress. Update coming sooner or later. This amp is being built using the information available at the AMB Labs CKKIII page, and will power my Sennheiser HD650 cans once it is finished.
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| Home Stereo MTM Speakers | ||
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These speakers were built for my home entertainment center, using Dr.K's MTM design from the Parts Express Project Showcase. They use two Dayton RS180S 7" woofers, one Dayton RS28AS-4 tweeter per cabinet. Definitely one of my favorite, and more impressive projects.
Full Project Log, Multiple Galleries: http://www.mikebarr.net/projects/mtm.htm
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| Gaming Rig Video Upgrade | ||
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Upgrading to a new motherboard to support my new 8800GTX. This is a pretty uninteresting motherboard swap, but someone wanted to see the process.
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| Car Audio Amp Rack | ||
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This rack contains an Alpine H701, three JL Audio slash series amps (300/2, 250/1, 300/4), and a Streetwires fused power distro block. The rack is fed with an Alpine DVA-9860 head unit via TOSLink optical cable. The gallery has the logical component layout, which shows the front midbass and tweeters, which I'll eventually get installed one of these days, now that I have a car worthy of them.   
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| Fan RPM Doubler Board | ||
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The PSU fan in my Tektronix Phaser 560 Extended color laser printer had died. I couldn't find a suitable 24v replacement fan, so I bought a nice 12v fan and installed it with a 7812 12v regulator inline. The printer still complained about a fan error. The problem was that the new fan was designed to spin at a lower RPM, and the printer was designed to watch for the higher RPM from the original fan.
I tried connecting the replacement fan without
connecting the yellow RPM reporting wire. No good, the printer
still flips out because it thinks the fan isn't spinning, and
therefore refuses to print. Printer BIOS engineers
Luckily the replacement fan spun at almost exactly half the RPM of the original. This meant I just needed a simple pulse doubler circuit to trick the printer into thinking it had a new, shiny OEM fan in place. Below is the circuit I built, and it works like a charm. The printer is still plugging away today.
Based on the RPM doubler schematic at lullaby.dk.
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| Watercooled Hard Drive Silencer | ||
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Soon after purchasing my WD Raptor HDDs, I couldn't stand the high pitched whine they emitted, so I crafted a silencing/cooling enclosure for them. This project is what initially got me into watercooling. The drives are connected to the computer via non-standard SATA over firewire cables -- while physical 4-pin firewire cables are used, the signals passing across them are 1.5Gbps SATA, not 400Mbps firewire.
Parts: - MDI SEX6CDX2 600CDX2 SCSI dual bay CD-ROM enclosure - Found in the RE-PC As-Is section for $2 - DigiDoc4 Temp Probe & Voltage LCD Display - Highpoint eSATA 4-pin Firewire brackets - Thermal Interface Material from the Koolance 2nd HDD Kit - Hose barbs, 1/2" copper tubing, 5gal army gas can reservoir, Danner Mag3 water pump
Archived [H]ardForum Thread: http://www.mikebarr.net/.../hardforum_thread.htm
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