Monthly Archives: August 2014

Pandora Radio – Part 3

Posted on August 27, 2014 by joel
Next up are the knobs. I am planning to reuse one of them as a volume control - I'm not sure if the other will just be for show. The knob shafts don't fit tightly in the holes in the case, so I am going to 3D print some bushings for them. Below is a video of the 3D printer in action!


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Pandora Radio – Part 2

Posted on August 27, 2014 by joel
One of my first steps was to cut an opening behind the button area for a 2-line LCD from Adafruit that I'll use to display the artist and song title. I started by scoring the veneer with an exacto knife, then drilled some holes carefully and used a jig saw to cut out the rectangle. I filed the wood back to the scored line until the opening was exactly the right size for the LCD. The control board for the LCD will be mounted as a daughterboard on the Raspberry Pi I will used to run the whole thing.


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Pandora Radio – Part 1

Posted on August 27, 2014 by joel
Years ago I bought an old Philco 39-17T tabletop radio with the intent of converting it to a slave set of speakers for attaching an external mp3 player. That project lingered a long time, and I never quite got around to it. Here are some pics of the original radio when I bought it. The outside was a little beat up, but repairable - but the inside was trashed.


And here are some photos or the restored shell of the radio. I refinished the case, replaced the grill cloth, and spray-painted the metal escutcheon plate. I've gutted the inside in preparation for the new innards.


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Sean’s Road Trip – Part 4

Posted on August 25, 2014 by joel
Another of our stops was Hershey's Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Sean got to design his own chocolate bar (including a custom wrapper), and got to watch it move down the factory line. It was a bigger place than I expected from the website, but that was actually good. Sean thought the "Chocolate Tasting Adventure" we did was pretty fun too. He liked that we had to eat the chocolate so "fancy".


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Sean’s Road Trip – Part 3

Posted on August 25, 2014 by joel

We also visited the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ. It was pretty amazing, but we somehow neglected to take any pictures other than this one. Sean really dug this thing though - there were bubbles on the underside of the tank that he could pop up inside of and look around. It was pretty cool - I only wish I could have fit under there myself! All in all, it was great aquarium - I think I liked it even better than the one in Baltimore.

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Sean’s Road Trip – Part 2

Posted on August 25, 2014 by joel

Another stop on our trip was at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. It was pretty cool in there - they had way more skeletons than I would have expected. Among the larger skeletons they had a brontosaurus, a triceratops, and a stegosaurus - but they also had a whole bunch of raptor-sized skeletons too (think Jurassic Park). Among the mammal skeletons they had a prehistoric elk with antlers nine feet across! The plaque said the antlers weighed more than the rest of the skeleton combined! They didn't allow any photos inside the museum, but we got this one from the outside.

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Sean’s Road Trip – Part 1

Posted on August 25, 2014 by joel

The first stop on Sean's road trip was the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island. We didn't take many pictures, but that's only because we were having such a good time. But we did get one cute pic of this red panda lounging about. Looks like a pretty good thing he's got going on there.

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42 Words of Wisdom: #18

Posted on August 25, 2014 by joel
Got this in a fortune cookie the other night - and immediately thought of Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."

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Emulation Station

Posted on August 10, 2014 by joel

I've been working on another Raspberry Pi project while I try to decide how I want to proceed with the Gameboy. This little box is just about done. The box is made of a single, solid piece of bubinga, and houses a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie/EmulationStation. It runs all of the old console emulators - NES, SNES, Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Color, Sega Genesis - you name it. If it was out during the 80s or 90s, it probably supports it. I've got it setup with two USB-based SNES reproduction controllers, with extension cables long enough to reach the couch. As soon as I finish putting the rest of the ROMs on it, it is ready to move upstairs to the living room. I'll try to grab some "action shots" once I've moved it to its final home. too.

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Caught In the Act!

Posted on August 10, 2014 by joel
The other night I opened the downstairs medicine cabinet to look for something, and saw this odd arrangement of the kids' toothbrushes. Does it look like they caught it the act of ... ahem ... making sweet toothbrushy love?


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