Category Archives: Electronics

I recently got the radio's original buttons working with the Pandora radio. I built a little board to go below the switch assembly, with some microswitches located under each of the steel legs of the button assemblies, and then wired everything up to a 26 header so that I could connect it up to the Pi. I forgot to take a picture of the top side of the board before I permanently mounted it inside the radio, so you'll have to live with only a bottom-side photo. :)

I got the LCD working over the long weekend. It fit the hole perfectly. There wasn't going to be enough room at the top of the case to mount the whole LCD / LCD driver board / Raspberry Pi stack up there without interfering with the operation of the radio's original buttons. So I mounted the driver board and the Pi to the bottom of the case, but ran leads up to the LCD at the top. From a software perspective, I've got the LCD displaying the track name and artist when the song changes, and I will probably setup one of the buttons to allow you to cycle through the backlight colors for the LCD.

The photo didn't come out so great, but here's an update. The bushings I 3D printed worked out pretty well. It took a few tries to get the tolerances correct, but once I dialed them in they were a perfect fit. I still need to drill some holes in the knob shafts so I can add some sort of retaining pin to keep the knobs captured.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I've been working on a project with the Raspberry Pi to make a Nintendo Gameboy style handheld that can play all of the original NES games. It's based on this project over at adafruit. So far it has been going really well, but I've hit a snag with getting the controls to line up correctly with the cutouts in the top cover, and getting everything to fit correctly inside - it seems like I've always got at least one button that doesn't line up right and I've got to open it up all over again. I need to do a little more fussing with it before it will be finished. Stay tuned! too.

My electronics workbench has been getting a lot of use lately, and I've been steadily adding to it since I first posted about it in May. This first photo is of the original setup, as a point of comparison.

Since then, I've added a lot. More tools, more shelves, more monitors, a bookcase - and I've started taking over the nearby basement shelves as well, to make space for an inkjet printer and my latest acquisition - a 3d printer. That thing has been a blast! I'll be posting a lot more photos of stuff I've been printing in the near future.

I've been a subscriber to Make Magazine since the first issue, and I've watched the developing world of DIY with excitement. I've wanted a 3D printer for a good long time, and Sean has also been saying that we should get one for at least the last year or so. Well, the entry-level price point has finally dropped into the realm of possibility - last week we pulled the trigger on a Printrbot Simple. I've always wanted to use one for printing small sculptures or designing action figures, not to mention building some robots and printing custom parts. We played with it a ton this weekend, and printed a bunch of small things from Thingiverse. Next up is designing some of our own stuff to print, and coming up with a bigger project. Now we just need to order some more filament! We've already used up the sample filament the printer came with.