First off, I'm starting something new. I've arranged with a friend of mine to pre-build some Stella Amp kits! So for an extra assembly fee, you can get the board pre-soldered. All the wires and potentiometers and such are not soldered. If you want one of these you will still have to solder on the pots and the input jack and the like. If you are unsure of your soldering skills or if you just want to save yourself some time, you can pick one of these up.
I want to be clear, this is just the board with all of the components that will be assembled. It won't come with a speaker or a cigar box, and it certainly won't be ready to play. You'll still have to put some DIY elbow grease into getting it to work. But if your favorite part of making an amp is the woodworking or the exterior decoration, and you find the the actual electronics assembly tedious, then this will be a way that you can outsource some of that tedium.
Oh, and if you want to sell assembled Stella Amp kits on ebay or something, I do offer quantity discounts on kits. Unfortunately, I don't have any way of making that quantity discount happen automatically with my shopping cart software (although that feature is on my massive list of things to do). So if you want to order a bunch of kits, drop me a line at support@crazybutable.com, let me know what kind of volume you are interested in, and we'll talk.
Finally, I wouldn't normally tell you all this, but I just bought a postage scale. That means I can start fighting with my shopping cart to offer shipping based on weight. Once I can ship based on weight (instead of stuffing everything in USPS flat rate boxes), I can offer things for sale in the store that don't fit in the standard flat rate box. Things like speakers and cigar boxes. But that's all coming in the future, and I don't even know how far in the future it's going to be because I don't know how hard it's going to be.
It's mulberry season (at least at my house) and before it's over I want to give you the results of a few experiments we tried recently with mulberries.
The first was fresh mulberry green tea. I took about a teaspoon of fresh mulberries, a teaspoon of green tea, muddled the mulberries in with the tea, and cold brewed it overnight in the fridge.
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it came out bright purple, and it tasted weird. The green tea flavor and the mulberry flavor were definitely competing for attention, and neither of them could win out. It was very odd, and by the end of the cup, unpleasant. This is unfortunate because I dried a whole bunch of mulberries for putting in tea, because I was so sure it would work and taste awesome.
Maybe dried mulberries will work better? The dried mulberries smell amazing. Or maybe black tea is the way to go. Further experimentation is needed.
The second thing I tried was watermelon / mulberry popsicles. These were much more successful. Take about 2 cups of watermelon, de-seeded. Add about 1/4 cup of mulberries, de-stemmed (yes, that is difficult.) Mash them together with a potato masher. Add about 1-2 tablespoons of lemon juice. The popsicles were cool, refreshing, and everyone loved them except me, because I hate watermelon. (Bet you weren't expecting that twist! I made a lemonade/orange juice popsicle for me.)
At any rate, all six of the people who tried the watermelon mulberry popsicles said they were great. I tried just a smidge of one and I could tell that the mulberry and the watermelon flavors blended together very well. Highly recommended.
I got a great deal on a used MacBook Pro a while back, and it's a great computer and I love it, but the problem is it doesn't have any built in hardware acceleration for video. So if you are watching a long movie or doing FaceTime or watching a youtube live stream, or whatever, it *really* heats up.
This is a problem when you don't have air conditioning, because it REALLY starts heating up!
I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I have this flexible cold pack, like for wrapping around ankles and the like. I put that on the table, and put a double folded towel on it, and put the MBP on top of the towel. I was thinking that maybe it would take the edge off, but it worked much better than I expected, it cooled everything way down, super fast.
Since the whole computer is one piece of aluminum, the whole body cooled down to a comfortable 72 degrees or so. If it was any cooler, water would start condensing on it! (It's 88 and super humid at the moment).
So this is great, I'm covered for the summer now. (In the winter, of course, I want all that heat.) Now I just have to come up with a cooling solution for the power supply.
ryugreen put up an awesome post-build (with pictures!) on the Stella Amp forum, go check it out!
Where the amp really shined for me was when I plugged in my korg synth. It's a batter poweredc portable synth, and combining the two gives me a great portability for an electronic instrument. It has plenty of volume and with the 6.5" two way i used, lots of bass and mids to help out with the range of the synth. Very impressed.
Getty Images completely redesigned their watermark, and the new design is amazing. It gives credit to the photographer, in the image itself, and it has a link where you can find out more about the image at any time.
Now, compare this to the old Getty Images watermark:
I have no idea who this person is. I have no idea who took the picture. I know it's a Getty Images picture but I have nowhere to go for more information because if you think I am going to spend even half an hour combing through their archive looking for more info you are out of your mind. I found this image on a Tumblr blog, so I can't even get any clues from the file name. I did a Tin Eye reverse image search and it came up with zero results, I'm guessing this means that Getty Images is blocking its images from image search engines. But it also means that if I want to use this in a design or a campaign I'm completely stuck and it's not worth my time to find out more.
The old watermark is huge, and it is RIGHT on top of the middle of the image; horribly distracting. Also notice the new watermark has NO mention of Getty Images at all. No logo, no text. I don't know about you, but I tense up when I feel like someone is trying to market to me. The old watermark is all about The Brand. When I look over to the new watermark, I actually feel myself physically relax.
The new watermark also has a striking visual design (although I'm sure we're going to see a TON of copycats.) I immediately got it, whenever I see an image like this I'm going to think Getty.
Finally, do I even need to point this out? Putting the link on the photo is a genius move. I cannot believe no-one else has thought of it. The old watermark was ugly and designed to keep you from sharing or using the image. The new watermark looks great, and with social media, each one of these images is like a little advertisement for the image itself. Any time a Getty Images picture goes viral, that link, embedded in the photo, is going to bring people directly to a place where they can license the photo. The photographer is going to get credit too, it's a win for everyone.
A few months ago when I was stuck in traffic, I noticed the car in front of me had a license plate that said LM4250.
"Huh," I said to myself. "That guy really likes his National chips. What's an LM4250?"
I looked it up when I got home, and the LM4250 is a low power precision op-amp. "Maybe he's the guy that designed it, or he did some important work on it. That's pretty cool!"
Then we moved to the new house, and I started seeing a LOT of LM license plates. LM4105, LM4216, etc. What the heck was going on?
Eventually I figured it out. Near our new house is a Limousine company that specializes in "regular" sized limos instead of stretch limos. They have a whole fleet! And as I drove past it one day, I noticed that all of their plates on the cars are LMxxxx -- LM for Limousine, presumably.
Sadly, not all of the plates corresponded to actual part numbers. Still, it's fun when every now and then you see a DC/DC step down controller parked at the curb:
Earlier I mentioned that I would do a more thorough writeup of my solar powered Stella amp. Over the weekend I finished that up and I posted a a new project page for the Solar Stella, with a ton of photos and a video demonstrating how it sounds, so go check it out!
Wow! I'm still amazed, and I'm not sure how to write about it. But it's been two weeks since the Minne Maker Faire and this post is getting long overdue!
I had never been to a Maker Faire before, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I've never had my own booth at an art fair or anything like that, but I've been to a few art fairs so I just decided to wing it. I had no idea if this was going to be more of a show and tell kind of event, or more of a selling products kind of event, so I came prepared for both. Unfortunately, I really only had one product, my Stella Amp kits, so I decided to get a bunch of cigar boxes and speakers and I had those available as well. If someone wanted a kit, they could get a speaker and a cigar box too, if they wanted.
(Well, I'm not going to make you wait in suspense: I sold exactly one kit to a friend of mine who was already waiting to buy one from me. But that's okay, because it turned out to be more of a show and tell kind of event anyway.)
I got in a little late with only 45 minutes to unpack and set up. I apologize for the near complete lack of photos, but I was so busy I completely forgot to take any! (If you have any of me or my booth let me know!)
For my main display, I had a sign behind me. Later, when I have time, I'll put a picture up of the sign because I was pretty happy with it.
On the far side of my booth, I had an Apple G4 iMac (the really old one that looks like a lamp), which was set to display full size images from my assembly instructions for the Stella Amp. I loved this, and I wish I had time to edit and tweak the images a bit more (it was heavy on soldering images, I wanted more pictures of the final assembled amps) but I completely ran out of time.
I had four amps set up. One amp (the one in the picture above) was just hooked up to my iPhone with a stereo 1/8th inch to mono 1/4 inch cable. I put a nice jazz playlist on infinite repeat on the iPhone and had everything set up so that I could just turn up the volume and it would come on, and turn it down, and it would turn off again. I powered this amp with a single 9 volt, and I was really impressed with the battery life. It was on the whole time and never ran out of juice (although, to be fair, it wasn't amplifying music most of the time). Actually, none of the amps ran out of battery power even though they got some heavy use.
Another amp was mounted in a cigar box but it had no speaker in it, I just ran the speaker wire to a 12-15 inch Axman Surplus woofer that was mounted in a guitar amplifier style wooden box (gotta give credit to my friend John for making the guitar amplifier box, it's VERY well made, he just didn't have time to finish it up and rather than throw it out he gave it to me). This amp was connected to my bass most of the time, and was on the far end of the booth, on the opposite side of the iMac. This is the only video I shot during the Faire, so you can see and hear this amp for yourself:
Yes, it's quiet. It's only about a watt or two, powering a bass! The Stella Amp, as a bass amplifier, is always going to be a quiet little practice amp. (Sorry for the sound quality but I was using kind of a crummy camera so it is what it is.)
The third amp was just a basic amp, powered with 4 AA batteries. I usually had this one hooked up to my guitar.
The fourth amp I made just for the Maker Faire, and I was really happy it all came together at the last minute. I'm going to have a more thorough write up later (I need to take a few more pictures and edit the pictures I've already taken), but this amp was solar powered! (EDIT:I finished the write up.) The Solar Stella wound up looking great and sounding even better. I had a lamp hovering over it to demonstrate the powering circuit, but since the solar panel is powering a li-poly battery, it didn't matter whether the lamp was on or off. I don't have any pictures of the final assembled amp, but I did find this one on Flickr:
You can see that the solar panel is mounted on the lid of the box, and the lid is held open by another cigar box underneath it. The lamp is just out of frame above it, turned off. The coolest thing about this amp is that it sounds amazing when you play a harmonica through it. So I had this one pretty much hooked up to a microphone (Shure SM-58, with an impedance matching transformer) full time.
I never did get a photo of my booth, I forgot to even ask someone to take one. So this is the best one I've found (you can see me in the background wearing the hat, click to enlarge) on Flickr:
At any rate, I was still setting everything up and people started coming in. Slowly at first but they just kept coming all day. I had my wife go out and get me some food and it was an hour or more before I was done eating it, snatching bites here and there. (Hard to eat, because you can't have any food in your mouth if you are playing the harmonica, which I was, quite a bit.)
My nearest booth mate was Adam Wolf from Wayne and Layne. His big project everyone came over to see was a Van de Graaf generator he made out of a pop can, an old motor, and some PVC pipes. Adam was great, he was managing his booth and the Make magazine booth, and if I had to step out to use the bathroom he'd keep an eye on my stuff. I don't know how he felt about it, but it was fun for me when he would step out for a bit. Being next to his booth(s) I got to overhear everything he was saying, so when he stepped out, I just stepped right in, fielding answers from three groups of people at once.
"It's a Van de Graaf generator made out of a pop can and PVC pipe."
"Yeah, go ahead and grab a button, the buttons are free"
"It's a guitar amplifier, I designed it because I wanted more flexibility in how my amplifier sounded compared to existing kits out there."
"This kit is REALLY awesome. See how the LEDs scroll like that? Well, you're not limited to what the kit starts off with, you can make the scrolling message say ANYTHING you want by going to their website. No, no, you don't have to plug it in to the computer. See this? It uses these optical sensors to read the program right off the website, the website blinks the program into the micro controller one bit at a time. I know, isn't that cool!"
"Make magazine is running a special, if you subscribe during the Maker Faire, you can't get a better price anywhere else!"
"Here, let me show you how the amplifier sounds."
etc.
It was a lot of fun.
On my other side was Michael of Nootropic Design. His big attraction was this RGB panel from Adafruit that he had programmed up to display a number of retro 8 bit game sprites. This panel is BRIGHT, and even though it's not very big, it's one of the first things you'd see when you came in the room.
He also had a Hackvision up and running with Asteroids and that was very popular, especially with the kids.
Ever since the faire ended, I've been completely swamped with being a dad and general family concerns. I am sorry this took so long to write. But I do want to say THANK YOU to everyone who came out! I had a lot of fun meeting everyone! And next time I'm going to spend a bit more time going around and checking out the rest of the Faire instead of staying chained to my booth.
