During the summer, we spend most of our time in our Michigan cottage in our screened in porch. It’s peaceful, with a great view of the creek in our backyard and surrounded by trees and nature. For the past two winters we have wanted to be out there and experimented with heat shrink plastic with…
Bell Labs Speech Synth Kit
2018 has been the year of my obsession with speech synthesizers. I’ve been experimenting with the Ginsing/SoundGin IC for awhile and recently created my own eurorack-based synth module. In researching speech synth chips, I came across a very cool Bell Laboratories Speech Synthesis Kit, from 1963, on Ebay. A little beat up, but never put…
Prairie Lodge Sign
I needed an excuse to use my X-Carve CNC, so I made a sign for our Michigan cottage. We call it Prairie Lodge, as we live on Prairie Ave. Awhile back, my good buddy Brandon Nelson gave me some really unique pieces of wood that were perfect for signs. Using X-Carve Easel software, I quickly…
Arp Odyssey Repair – Part One
Many years ago, I had repaired a few synthesizers for Bon Harris of Nitzer Ebb. Being a huge fan of theirs I took the opportunity to do the best I could and managed to fully repair a few of them. I managed to repair a very broken EDP Wasp (still my favorite synthesizer), Sequential Circuits…
Wireless Power Transfer
I don’t remember how I got it, but I’ve had this old project my Dad built back in his college days. He built it as an experiment in wireless power transfer, or WPT. From Wikipedia “WPT is the transmission of electrical energy without wires as a physical link. In a wireless power transmission system, a transmitter device,…
Prius Battery Repair
When my daughter was in Chicago for a visit, she and her husband left for the five hour ride home, but within a few minutes she called saying the car would not go faster than 15 miles an hour. Instead of using the electric motor, the car would only run on the gas powered engine,…
UL Fire Extinguisher Simulator
This was the very first project which helped me start my company, M1 Interactive Inc. It was designed to teach kids and adults (but mostly kids) how to properly use a fire extinguisher using the acronym PASS. The client, Underwriters Laboratories, in Northbrook, IL wanted us to create a simulated environment, which would catch on…
Workbenches
Workbenches I have known over the years. This is a random compilation of photos I’ve taken in the midst of projects I’ve done. I am not always good at documenting the whole process, more of the mess each one creates before turning into something worthy. Or not.
Autodesk Eagle
I have been wanting to create my own PCBs for years. I tried many times to do this by etching my own, but with anything more complex than simple circuits, it requires a minimum of a two sided board. This requires a lot of work and planning to etch, which for me was not in…
Crypto Currency Meter
I jumped on the crypto bandwagon awhile back and for fun, wanted to build a cryptocurrency analog meter to gauge how much money I was losing every day. Using my past experience with the 8266 chips in my LED Cloud project, I thought this would be EASY. Not the case, it seems. As usual, working…