bonnie & jason

Beta 22 amplifier build

I got a fair amount of work done on my next project the last couple days. This one is a high power, three-channel, active ground amplifier and matching power supply. These also come from AMB labs.

Here’s the power supply board in progress:

And here it is complete:

Here are the three amplifier boards in progress:

More to come… there’s still a lot to do!

Edit: The boards are done… now comes the difficult task of connecting them all up together and running tests to make sure everything works as it should.

In the meantime, here’s the obligatory Ashley and Amanda pic:

Edit 3/8/2009:
Just about done with the amp. I still have to wire in the headphone jacks when I get them, but it works with the speaker jacks already.
Here’s the full amp in all it’s cookie tin goodness:

The front panel:

The back right:

The guts:

Edit 3/17/2009:
I was getting some transformer hum problems despite my best efforts to keep the signal wires on the opposite end of the enclosure, so I ended up moving the toroid into it’s own enclosure while keeping all the wiring, IEC, and on/off switch in the original tin.

As luck would have it, I had a round cookie tin lying around so I put it to good use! As such, I present to you the cookie tin/beta 22 hybrid:

I just need to trim and mount everything to that board (scrap piece of shelf from IKEA) and then it should be completely finished.

More DIY electronics

I built a headphone amp and DAC today. Both are designs from AMB Labs.

Here’s the amp:

Here’s the DAC:

So now, I can get the digital optical signal out of my Mac Pro, convert it to an analog signal, and amplify it with a nice portable but powerful amp. Woohoo! I’m liking this DIY electronics stuff quite a bit at the moment. It’s not quite as brute force a project as the bike building, but it’s not nearly as messy either. One more project to go… details to come.

A few “studio” pics

Although I don’t have my studio lighting setup any more, I do have a white backdrop. That and some natural light from a window is all it took for these basic shots:

Dumplings, two ways

It seems that chefs are always doing some sort of food multiple ways. We were watching top chef the other day and one of them did eggs, three ways or something like that. The Iron Chefs seem to use that idea as well presenting the same main ingredient in bite size pieces in two or three different ways.

So, as life imitates art, here are our dumplings plus actual dumplings that I pan fried up for dinner the other night. Mmm… dumplings two ways.

Ashley and Amanda’s first bath

Since both of their belly buttons have fallen off, we decided to give Ashley and Amanda their first bath since being born. Probably a good idea given the potential for milk stuck in neck folds and poop stuck in leg folds.

Here they are pre-bath doing what they do most… sleep:

Here they are post bath:
Taxi!!!

Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout Willis?:

Alissa’s bike

We got this bike at Ross for Alissa a number of months ago. It’s the smallest one I’ve seen but Alissa is still too short for it. Now, at least, she can sort of stand over the seat on her tippy toes. It’ll probably be another few months before she can reach both pedals.

Also, here’s the obligatory twin pic of the day:

Amanda and Ashley’s first video

We’re home from the hospital so I took a few minutes to throw together a quick video of the last few days (movie clips are from the Canon 5D mark 2 with a canon 24-105mm 4.0 IS lens). Director of music credits go to Dennis again. (First one is from blip.tv, second is from Vimeo… same video, I’m just experimenting with competing services. I think I like the blip.tv one better. It lets me embed as a quicktime video and I think the playback is higher quality. Let me know if you see things differently.) EDIT: removed quicktime version… it was making the blog load slowly.

One more night in the hospital

We had our complimentary steak dinner tonight so that means tomorrow, it’s time to go home. Both Amanda and Ashley will likely go home with us as both of them seem to be doing well as far as maintaining weight, body temperature, and warding off jaundice. The staff here has been exemplary for the most part and have made our stay as pleasant as possible. It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow when we bring the twins home and they “invade” Alissa’s universe.

photographic side note: All the pictures and videos this week were taken on a Canon 5D Mark II. Most of the images were shot at ISO 3200 (very happy with the low noise) and are .jpg files straight out of the camera (no RAW processing ability on my laptop.)

Twinspiration

Awww…

Hiccups:

Blue Steel:

I’m not the only one with new headphones

The twins passed their hearing tests: