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What're you up to this weekend?

cstanton

I'm going to tinker with different soundcards I have, USB and PCI to see which is better at storing and playing audio from old vinyl records that I have.

What do/don't you have planned?

  • in reply to anniel747

    newer TTs have the RIAA built in. It's also possible to filter in Audacity.

  • I will be building timelapse videos from my timelapse still images.

    This week generated some great sunset images with lots of color.

  • Went to Ham-Fest and bought some historic electronicimage devices....

  • in reply to anniel747

    I use an old auto-changer with a BSR Monarch deck and a crystal cartridge, it's good enought for most of the ex-juke-box gramophone records I get these days. The equalisation for the cartridge is a 470K resistor in series. I've also used it for 78RPM shellac records, one of which was labelled '80 RPM' but it sounded ok to my old ears. Another of the 78's tried to take the cartridge right to the centre due to an over-enthusiastic run-out groove so I had to edit a slow fade to zero at the end.

    For 33.333 LP's I use the 'line output' on the hi-fi set-up in the living-room with the original magnetic cartridge, so I don't need to bother with external equalisation units.

    I have a Word table with the details of each track (about 6,500 now). This was started several years ago, it didn't add much more time because the records had to be played in real-time anyway so I had about 3 minutes per track to do it. This data, via a Raspberry Pi, enabled me to add the meta-data to each digitised track in seconds. I still like watching the data on the display scrolling forwards and backwards while an old  78 complete with pops, clicks, oodles of stereo surface hiss plays through, high-pitched wobbly voices sounding as if the singers each have a plum in their mouths...  Little things, etc.

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    Probably not, he was a nice chap.  Been making swords for 45 years now; it was absolutely fascinating.  He collects his own rocks to grind out the iron sand, then turns that into clumps of rough metal which he then chips off bits to heat up to turn into an ever expanding block, which he is able to fold over itself.  Really skilled stuff. Legally, he can only make 2 a month so he supplements with knives and other edged implements like branch cutters.  Sharp doesn’t cover it!

    And yes, hand tools works!  He made something akin to the cutlass in the link but more cleaver-like:  made mincemeat out of a wooden block.  He gifted my wife and I a knife each which I think I’ll treasure rather than use.  Amazing bloke.

  • I want to use multicoloured LEDs as indicators on an instrument front panel and It will need 32 of them. I thought I might use the 2mm square neopixels and I bought 1000 from Aliexpress for about 1.6p (£0.016) each.

    I thought I had better see how well they worked.

    I'm driving them from the SPI MOSI pin on an ARM processor (Giga Devices GD32E103 and I had to tweak the clock to get a good ratio of high and low times from 4 bits of a 16 bit SPI data word.

    Right now the code is using interrupts (one for every 16 bit word transmitted) but I'll change it to use DMA.

    Happy to post the code if any one wants to play with it. The GD processor SPI is a pretty much exact clone of earlier ST  ST3210x processors.

    I set up a pseudo random thing to drive it (sorry about the kitchen paper optical filter - the camera couldn't cope with bright LEDs).

    So I'm pleased to say that the sub 2p neopixels work OK.

    Unfortunately the little light pipes (plastic rods a few mm long with a domed end) cost about 5x as much as the pixels - but I need them to get the light through the front panel.

    image

    MK

  • in reply to michaelkellett

    I've never understood why the light pipes cost so much more than the LEDs themselves! Given that they are approximately the same thing, and one is missing the LED die and leads.