Felix on Trash Arcade: Now annoying even more people

I'm extremely pleased to announce that I've been invited to contribute to Trash Arcade.

My first post is already live. Subscribe and enjoy.

Best Fucking Fucker vid yet!

I don't know why I didn't see this one already, but it's awesome.



This is why Eric is my hero.

Devi Ever Dream Mangler (hypedition)

Video demo of the Devi Ever Dream Mangler...my possibly one of a kind, Hypedition!



Enjoy.

Devi Ever Bit Mangler

As promised, video demo of the Devi Ever Bit Mangler.



Enjoy.

The downtime is killing me

Fuck...it's been forever since I updated here. All I have are the usual excuses...

It's busy at work

I'm tired

The modular case still isn't put together

waahh waahh wahhh

Fuck.

The Devi Ever Bit Mangler and Dream Mangler showed up! :D Expect a video this weekend.

OMG! - Tesla coil guitar amp!

Bad. Ass. !



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSAExHBrfwU

Electrical Engineering is Hard

So after a long sit-down with one of my engineer friends at work, I finally had enough understanding to make my first working circuit (an op amp booster w/low cut)! I've been able to play around with it further, as well as incorporate things from other schematics and still have it work, so I'm stoked. It's pretty simple as far as pedals go, but I'm happy to actually have accomplished something now. The hours spent obtaining no result where starting to become very frustrating and VERY un-motivating.

My experience so far with electrical engineering is much harder than my experience with software engineering. It's quite confusing...most of which probably brought on by many incorrect assumptions. In particular, I keep thinking of the flow of the circuit like the flow of an audio signal. Which, in some ways, is very similar if not the same, but it's also in many ways, not the same at all. For example, I was looking at an example schematic of how the TubeScreamer tone control works (I'm not looking to build a tubescreamer...yeck...just looking for academic purposes). The tone control was basically a pot with it's wiper connected to ground through a capacitor...with it's 1 and 3 lugs going from the negative input of an op amp back to the audio input. What I couldn't understand is how this worked as a bi-polar tone control...why does turning it one way roll off highs, and the other way roll off bass...I could only see that it would roll off highs. That is, until I realized that turning the one way caused the audio input signal to flow to ground through that cap too!

I've made up the following mnemonic to help me remember:
SAWTGTG
"Shit Always Wants To Go To Ground"

:D

I made another trip out to Halted yesterday...god I love that place. They didn't have several of the things I was looking for this time though; particularly nuts to replace those Vector nuts for the rails. Their screw/nut stock ratio is a bit lopsided...many more screws available than nuts. They were a bit short on potentiometers as well... It certainly is *THE* place for resistors, caps, diodes, and transistors though...ICs as well. I'm sure Halted is going to be a weekly visit for a long time to come.

Fun stuff for this weekend is now officially over though...it's time to do the taxes.

Time is going by really really really really slow...

I don't know, we made brownies...and I think we're dead...

"Real" Guitar Hero

Ok, this is fucking rad! It's like Guitar Hero/Rock Band, but with a real guitar, playing *REAL* notes!

:D

I've always been really bad with practicing, this would certainly get me to do it more often.

http://www.guitarrising.com/

Eric Says Fuck You

The infamous Eric Barbour of Metasonix has officially moved his personal blog off of myspace onto Blogger.

Go read his rad shit...now!

Modular Case: Row 1 Complete

Now that I have screws that fit the Vector Nuts I have been able to assemble one row. Why only one? Well because I seriously fucked up the estimate if how many nuts I would need! Next weekend I'm going back to Halted to see if I can find regular Hex nuts that will work with the Vector rails. The Vector Nuts are most definitely not cost
effective...I've learned that the hard way I suppose.

Well since I'm blocked on working anymore on the case, I've got a good
excuse to work on that guitar pedal prototype. It's not the "Chop Shop" one that I mentioned last time, but rather a more immediately useful one. More details once it's working. :)

PS. I've signed up on VIRB. If any of you also have a VIRB page, hit me up.
http://www.virb.com/felixinferious

Halted Electronics

I went to Halted this morning...holy crap this place is awesome!!! I wish I made the trip (all 20min of it) out there a long time ago. There's walls of resistors, 4 isles of caps, power supplies, scopes, function generators, oh, and tubes!!! :D. Metasonix fans: spot the BN6s in that picture.

I also found 4-40 screws for use with the Vector nuts, I picked up 50 of them for...wait for it...50 cents!!!

I got some extra parts for a guitar pedal idea I'm working on, plus a 3rd-hand tool, nicer wire stripper...walked out of there spending less than $40!

Offcially my new favorite place.