In my quest to figure everything out myself, instead of just blindly following pre-designed circuits, I’ve come up with a pretty good clean sounding 1/2 watt power amplifier as well as an effect loop and more recently a switching setup for dual channels using a DPDT switch and some nice tone shaping. For the most part, it’s been about 60% research and theory and 40% just trying things out and learning from the resultant epic...

Here is a simple project I recently completed.  I needed a footswitch controller for my Peavey Studio Pro 110 amplifier.  It’s a very nice amplifier for small apartment use and I bought it used for a very decent price – the price was low partly because it was missing the footswitch controller. The actual controller is quite simple inside, being composed of two switches and two LEDs connected to a 1/4″ stereo audio cable...

I have migrated my previous reprap.briancantin.com posts over to my new novakane.ca domain (you’re already there). This new blog will have all sorts of hacks, articles and general technology projects that I work on, most being open source. Coming up soon will be posts of some of my 3D object designs and some guitar related electronics projects.

I decided to try out the new spiral vase mode in Slic3r. What this does is print an object in a continuous extrusion, rather than the normal stop, raise to next layer, then continue like usual. The idea is to create a seamless print that is in theory water-tight. Something glitched on my printer part way through… I’m not sure what happened. The end result is that the glitch slowly worked its way around the vase as it printed....

It is well established that all micro electronics work by containing an active loop of magic smoke. As long as the magic smoke is contained within the circuit everything works well. However, many things can conspire to break this wonderful system. You will know when this happens, because you will observe the magic smoke leaking out of your device. In all seriousness, a bad crimp on a heavy gauge wire going to the heated bed platform...

I posted the other day the lastet build description of my Prusa Mendel i2. I used that build to print a new set of parts that were printed with a focus on part strength and solidness as opposed to economy of printing. After I had a full set of parts ready, it was time to tear it all down and rebuild it. Here is a picture of the basic framework assembled: Note there are some changes from previous build and a stock i2 build: I removed the...