Christmas Crafting

Merry Christmas everybody! One of my favourite things about the festive period, apart from seeing my friends and family, and all the food and booze, is the extra time I get away from work to concentrate on some projects. I never manage to get as many things done as I hope, but I have managed to find a couple of days in the festive schedule to geek out. So far I’ve managed to do a remix, which will hopefully be released soon, started work on a Teensy based Comb Filter (will post results on that soon), programmed a PIC chip (will be used to read the interface elements on my redesigned glitch delay module), and built a super cheap oscilloscope kit.

The oscilloscope is a DSO138. For less than £20 I got a fully working oscilloscope. The build was fairly straightforward. None of the components are labelled so you do need to sort through all the resistors and capacitors and either read their values (very hard on the tiny resistors) or measure them with a multimeter. It took about 5 hours to build, but the instructions were very clear and it worked first time. Well, I had a few issues powering it, but that was because I was using a supply with the wrong polarity. It uses a centre POSITIVE 9v power supply, not centre negative, like most guitar pedals. Luckily there’s a protection diode, so that didn’t do any damage.

I have a laser cut case for it (cost an extra £1!). Had a few problems assembling it, but I should be able to resolve them with a bit of filing. Will post images when that’s finished. One of my favourite things about the build was that it coincided with my lovely wife doing some dress making, so we got to spend the day hobbying together!