I made a(n)....

http://youtu.be/bo5ySSbdFo4 I made an Atari Punk Console sound generator/synthesizer! It's just a simple 556 timer with a couple caps, 3 pots, one resistor, and a 9 volt battery in a box.

I found the schematic when looking up intermittent wipers schematic. I built it last night but had to do a little trouble shooting today because the stupid Radio Shack pots for the manipulation pots are dumb....

I can't be the only one that has made something pointless and am strangely proud of it. Please share your random creations, whether its pointless like mine or ingenious! Comments are welcome too!

-Ross

I added pause to my Atari 2600 with a kit, works great. Works by cutting the ready line between the CPU and graphics circuit at the right time.

Period Correct Label

The black rectangle is the pause PCB in a shrink tube, now stuck to the RF shield, which I replaced when I was done unlike most people.

As you can see, I solder much better than I take pictures.

I've also got a circuit bent B&W TV project I need to finish.

A few years ago I made a musicfromouterspace.com Weird Sound Generator for a buddy. I went all out on it. The case is a 3/4 scale 1950's themed lunchbox. The front panel is white acrylic I had laser etched by an online service.

Very cool, guys. Keep'em coming. The Weird Sound Generator might go on the to do list...

My 7 year old son and I built this recently. No real point other than it is a working transistor FM radio. And it was a fun thing to do with my son.

I've made:

beer, mead, furniture, a small building, picture frame (for an 80" x 24" panorama photo), bacon (cold smoked via Alton Brown method),

and per the Project forum thread, plan to start making a long bow soon.

My wife is getting me one of the Arduino kits for our anniversary because I mentioned wanting an Arduino. I guess a kit isn't a bad way to start.

Usually, I'm just hacking random things out of boredom, not building new stuff. I fix a lot of stuff, too. My GS3 front glass broke at Disney World of all places, and I get to replace that.

I play a lot with my home network. I'm always adjusting something to try to get better speeds and more reliable connectivity. I really need to pony up for a router that can put out some real power and run full DD-WRT. My old routers are just an old WRT54g and a WRT54gs running WPS to make a seamless wireless network. Kind of a shame I'm doing it the hard way, but it's fun.

A pneumatic beer can crusher 2 X 8 double-acting industrial cylinder w/ a 4-way push button valve. Crushes 12 or 16 oz. aluminum cans to 1" or less compressed height. Over 300 lbs crushing force @ 100 PSI. 34 cans crushed/ minute manually loaded is my current record, planning on automating the loading magazine style... in my spare time.

I also built a guitar tube amp from just some parts.

I installed a aux in on my stock bose stereo...

In reply to 4cylndrfury:

Does it use the CD changer input at all or does it just play over the top of what ever the radio is doing?

My noteworthy "from scratch" projects include:

Knife w/ kydex sheath
Winch bumper
Trailer hitch
Electricity generating bike
Camping trailer
Ammo can studio light power pack
Strobe controller for my E30
AM radio
Polycarbonate laptop stands

fasted58 wrote: A pneumatic beer can crusher 2 X 8 double-acting industrial cylinder w/ a 4-way push button valve. Crushes 12 or 16 oz. aluminum cans to 1" or less compressed height. Over 300 lbs crushing force @ 100 PSI. 34 cans crushed/ minute manually loaded is my current record, planning on automating the loading magazine style... in my spare time.

Pics?

I built this Velleman kit for my son, then took it to a grade crossing and recorded the sound of a speeding Amtrak train coming through the crossing with horns blaring. My son can play the sound with the touch of a button whenever he's running his model trains.

http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?partnumber=320-203

In reply to jpaturzo:

That is 100% awesome.

entire car (actually, that's not true yet. I'm making one. Locost guys like Dr. Hess have built a car, though.)

wooden shelves (made from a broken bed that I pulled out of the neighbor's trash)
welding cart
display case for an anatomical model (angle iron frame and plexiglass sides)
prop rod for the geo's hood
sheet metal tray to hold my MAPP+O2 torch when using it (hurray for sheet metal breaks)
exhaust for the datsun replica (probably doesn't count since that is part of "entire car")
My walking stick (polyurethane covered umbrella tree wood with braided leather lanyard) carved a wooden whistle (now on the lanyard mentioned above)

exhaust for the geo (After the muffler rotted - and fell off at an autocross [no, I didn't get a rerun] I used two elbows and some straight tube to build a slip on straight pipe that exited at the stock location and hung from the stock muffler mounts)

I also made the beaded hat band that is on my big floppy autocross/outdoorsy-stuff hat. The beads are a mixture of cherry pits and Abrus seeds. I ate the cherries and tumbled the pits in a rock tumbler to clean them up, I collected the Abrus while walking in the woods, and drilled all of them to make beads.

Latest project: plaque displaying wild animal skins from Africa. Currently flattening out some zebra skins to use

....I'll think of more stuff

In reply to RossD:

The input jack toggles between whichever circuit youve selected to solder into when you insert the plug - most people choose to toggle the FM radio input.

I chose FM inputs - when the FM radio is selected, if you have your plug jacked into the aux-in, your mp3 player is played thru the stereo. If nothing is plugged in, you just get regular radio.

In reply to 4cylndrfury:

how did you know which pins were the FM input?

In reply to AngryCorvair:

Well, there was a How to posted up to the G20.net forums, so that helped

but, on my Bose HU, the circuit board was actually very well labeled - the FM side of the board was easy-ish to read and figure out what leads went to what. youre basically plugging into the board between the antenna inputs, and the amplifier/crossover.

I made a header for my EJ22 Beetle.

For bonus points, I lit the workbench on fire in the process.

Take a 1st gen MR2 chair, add in a few feet of square tubing, throw in some ugly welds and SHAZAAAAM!!

Tom Suddard wrote:

fasted58 wrote: A pneumatic beer can crusher 2 X 8 double-acting industrial cylinder w/ a 4-way push button valve. Crushes 12 or 16 oz. aluminum cans to 1" or less compressed height. Over 300 lbs crushing force @ 100 PSI. 34 cans crushed/ minute manually loaded is my current record, planning on automating the loading magazine style... in my spare time.

Pics?

I'll shoot pics and maybe a video of it in operation. Been taking it easy after recent knee surgery and haven't been in the garage for weeks now.

4cylndrfury wrote: I installed a aux in on my stock bose stereo...

is there any way to wire a usb player so a guy could plug a thumb drive full of mp3's into a stock '01 vintage Delco stereo in a Grand Prix?

i was thinking something along the lines of hacking apart one of those rf players that plug into the cigarette lighter and you tune to an unused frequency and making it's guts a part of the stereo system some how.. i mean, yeah, i could just swap the Sony deck with the usb port into yet another car, but then i'd lose my precious steering wheel mounted volume and tuning buttons, as well as the frequency shown in the HUD..

well, I am not sure if something like a USB hack is really possible...the aux-in I did just routes audio signal to the right parts in the stereo to get it to the speakers.

To listen to tracks on a USB stick, you have to have a device capable of decoding the file into audio signal. I think thats the functionality the aftermarket HU's offer over stock stuff from a decade ago - software that reads the MP3 file data and turns it into audio signal.

in fairness, my phone has 32 gigs of data storage, and a headphone jack. It goes everywhere I go, including the car, so a simple 3.5mm audio jack makes the most sense for me. The only bonus a HU with a USB port offers is the ability to also charge my device as I transfer the music.

I built the second story on my house. Pretty proud of that. Probably more proud of the stairs. The original first floor is pretty non standard in its dimensions. The part where the stairs went has something like 7'7" ceilings. There was no way to buy stair risers and have it work. I had to measure a lot, research rules of thumb for rise/run for stairs and remember to take into account things like the thickness of the future decking in the attic that wasn't there yet. All stairs ended up within 1/8 inch of each other and it's rock berkeleying solid. Very proud of myself.