With my MX-5 tucked up for winter I needed another activity to distract me from doing the really important chores round the house. So I dug out my old raspberry pi and have started the slow painful process of relearning how it works, what each gpio pin does and how to make an LED flash!
Anyone else here enjoy messing round with electronics?
More of an enthusiastic bungler than a nerd really but I have a couple of hifi related RPi projects. Mainly trying to achieve hi end streaming on the cheap. Pretty good success rate but some of my programmes are not the most stable for day to day use.
My other love is modifying vintage amps. I have some splendid results with the old British made Quad amps & dabble a bit with some of my old valve guitar amps.
I’ve been playing around with Ras Pis for a few years now
I use 2 (Pi3b and Pi Zero 2W) for PiHole, which blocks advertising on websites, games and some streaming platforms e.g. ITVX.
A Pi5 16Gb as a PiOS and Win11 workstation
A Pi5 8Gb as my main music player (moOde).
As well as Pi Zero W as a Proxy Server
I’ve a couple spare (Pi4 and Pi5) for other ‘fun ‘ projects.
They’re great machines and all of them together use less than 1/8 the power of my main PC Workstation.
I used to do bit of a tinkering, did electronics city and guilds in the 1980’s with the intention of becoming a TV /video service engineer.but never did that. Repaired Photocopiers for a living then I T for a copier company. Moved into X ray equipment for whilst. Had a couple of raspberry pi’s mostly for reto gaming and TV streaming. Recently got into watching other people repair stuff on YouTube mostly to reminisce about when my eyes and fingers worked well enough to repair PCBs.
Can’t even read a book these days. Fingers work well enough to play guitar still and that’s enough for me.
That’s the sole reason I have a Pi Zero.
I’ve always had shaky hands, tends to make a mess of trying to take photos and soldering is a bit iffy. Also I can get too engrossed in trying to do the soldering, as in not destroy what I’m working on so that one time, I was concentrating too much on the PCB that I picked up (grabbed with a closed hand) the soldering iron by the wrong end… (I had put it down on my heat proof mat as opposed to putting it back in the stand).
From an early age!
My mother had a box of 1930’s junk including parts for a few crystal sets (look up “cat’s whisker radio” and “coherer”) and some very high impedance headphones.
So the first radio programmes I ever listened to was long wave home service on a setup I cobbled together from the junk.
A complete radio was; a long aerial, ground connection, a tuned circuit of coil and variable capacitor, the cat’s whisker (predecessor of the germanium diode) and the headphones.
Two elements of skill are required; 1) find the sweet spot for the whisker of wire on the galena crystal where it could detect (rectify) the signal, 2) tune in.
It was a Catch 22 situation how to do one without the other? But this ten year old had not read the yet to be published novel, so it was merely a challenge, and amazingly satisfying once the trick to it was found, and then when the sound came though the heavy old Bakelite headphones.
Happy days.