My Prototyping Workshop
Downstairs past the washer, dryer and elliptical gathering dust is a door that leads to what most tenants use as a storage room. Upon entering the room you will see that I also use it as a storage room but past that is a prototyping/project workshop that I maintain for my personal use. My setup consists of a:
- Neptune 4 Pro 3D Printer
- Soldering station
- Oscilloscope
- Power Supply
- Hand tools
- Drawers of electronic components, screws, wires, etc
My Personal Projects
I am still working on documenting past projects as a younger me did not think to keep documentation on various projects I have completed. Here are some of the few I am proud of and are at various stages of documentation.
Story Phone
To facilitate collecting stories for an event I built what I am calling a "Story Phone". The project uses a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ inside the housing of a 1970s phone to play prompts and record responses. When someone lifts the handset, a prompt plays. When it finishes, whatever they say is recorded until they hang up. It runs unattended, starts automatically on boot, and keeps its story counters across restarts, so it can sit in a booth all day without anyone babysitting it. The write up can be found on GitHub with photos to come!
DIY Pocket Piano
I have been playing music since I was in kindergarten and a few months before COVID lockdown in 2020 I had picked up some synthesizers to find new ways to engage with music. When lockdown started I needed some projects to work on and decided on building a synthesizers. A synthesizer company called Critter & Guitari had a legacy product called the Pocket Piano that before selling as a finished product they had initially offered as an Arduino Uno shield kit. With the kit and piano no longer sold I tracked down Critter & Guitari's Arduino-Piano-PCB GitHub and spent the next 2 months teaching myself how to use KiCad to update the schematics and then updated/rewrote a lot of the code to add additional functionality (multiple synth engines, sound design, arpeggiator, and more!), an external speaker and a screen. Eventually I needed to switch from the Arduino Uno to a Teensy as the codeb ase and functionality grew! As lockdown started to lift and life resumed this is a project I want to return to in the future as I never completed it to my satisfaction. One day I hope to return to make a Rev 2 PCB and clean up my GitHub for the project.