If you’re only making a single cup of tea at a time, why don’t you consider a Hot Shot (or similar unit)?
My family has used one for years, and my grandmother used her’s for several decades.
The heater/thermostat lasts practicaly forever, and if the seal fails, you just replace the o-ring and it’s good for a few more years.
EDIT: Oops! I meant to reply to 0xDE57, but all you guys have the same pfp. 
lol, no worries. it’s not my fault im too strong for this weak ass kettles
It doesn’t affect sound much really. I mean it must have some physical effect on reverberation, but its subtle enough you likely wouldn’t detect it with the human ear. Or at least I couldn’t, and neither could the drummer.
Another consideration is to get the wires for the lights and sensors into the drum without altering the drum itself (ei: cutting holes). Luckily drums come with holes premade just for us!
so we need small enough connector to get 4 pins through. i couldn’t find a 4-pin connector head small enough to fit so I found some small 2-pins and using 2 at a time that can fit should work:
I just had a brain-fart and remembered that a piezo sensor that can handle an enormous impact is an engine knock sensor.
You may loose some lower-end sensitivity, but you could bolt them to the sides of the drums and they won’t mind at all.
Only problem I can think of is that some knock sensors are tuned to a particular frequency.
Other than that, I’m excited to see how it works with the whole drumset lit up.
Well I am moving at a snails pace. Perhaps even a snail could be faster…
Not made much progress on the drumlights due to busy.
There is a similar drum light project on Adafruit that uses microphones instead of peizo. This could be a better approach:
This could actually be beneficial as drums themselves are tuned to particular frequencies.
Alternatively, we could use a commercial version of a drum trigger. The drummer acquired a Roland RT-30 ‘head’ and ‘rim’ (dual trigger) to play around with, and it’s able to differentiate between rim shots and head hits. This would allow the ability to trigger different colors based on if the rim or the head was hit!
Other than the hardware, I’d say tricky part would be a drummer friendly UI front end to pick out patterns and colors for the drums, and perhaps communicate over serial USB. Otherwise it’ll be limited to what ever colors/patterns were defined in code.
It’s very likely that I underestimated the scope of the project as I seem to often do…
I usually play with small circuits or micro-controllers that require only 5v - 12v. Very carefully I tread into the higher voltages.
I had started building a plasma speaker using a flyback transformer and a 555 timer. It’s similar to a “singing tesla coil”.
It worked! I could hear music through the arc! I couldn’t believe it actually friggin worked!..for about 30 seconds!
I then watched the coating melt off one of the wires as it started drawing ~10 Amps, and one of the mosfets let out the magic smoke.
Lessons learned:
I thought maybe the resistor shorted because it was charred brown, but apparently that’s not so common, so I am not sure what failed first.
But the damn thing worked…briefly… Great success!
That is the fun part of learning electronics.
Especially when you realize a transmitted signal from a radio is in essance an em impulse of a short circuit at microvolt ranges.
Until that realization you look at an antenna circuit and think WTF, how in the hell does this even work?
An electronics bench is never really clean because if it is too clean you arent accomplishing very much🤣
Seriously though there are so many schematics to be had on the net.
Sadly though getting the parts may be a trial.
Just be careful not to burn up too many led’s
It take a long time for the stink to dissipate
( and really annoys the wife)
Just blow up a single Tantalum caps. Less effort, more smell!
I have no idea. Magic!
I find electricity incredibly difficult to understand and intuit. It’s feels like black magic. I understand only just barely enough to follow simple formulas and circuit diagrams. I have some patients to learn through trial and error. Beyond that I feel rather lost.
This has been one of the best videos I have ever seen in regards to visualizing how the reflections travel down the wire and understanding how electricity “chooses a path”:
This video has seriously helped illustrate some major holes in my knowledge, and how to measure this stuff practically.
But it’s all so terribly abstract…I wish I could actually visibly see these alleged electrons and ethereal fields. Why does any of this work? What even is an electron or a photon? I know it’s there in theory interacting with things, but I don’t know how or why. These particle things are frustratingly tiny and somewhat nonsensical…
A while ago I picked up a copy of ‘The Art Of Electronics Third Edition - Horowitz, Hill’ as its widely regarded as one of the best. I am struggling wrap my head around these spells and incantations as a hobbyist.
Also picked up ‘Learning The Art of Electronics A Hands-On Lab Course - Hayes’ to go along with it. One of the projects is a simple AM radio receiver (3L.4).
This is on my endless list of shiny todo projects.
Don’t think. Too much thinking’s bad for you, and should generally be avoided.
To understand electricity is not difficult
The key is not dc or battery power, its magnetism.
Is the driving force of everything electric.
Moving a wire through a magnetic field will induce a current flow in it.
An inductor coil stores energy as a magnetic field.
A ac induction motor uses magnetism of a rotating field.
Solenoids and magnetic relays magnetic attraction of an iron or steel core.
Transformer theory explains a lot on magnetic flux, how turns ratio affects primary and secondary voltages.
Static electricity can charge a leyden jar capacitor up to lethal levels hence all the safety rules.
Semiconductor properties is electricity at atomic size.
Transfering electrons from one atom to another.
Transistors operate as switches and amplifiers
Their chemical makeup and structure manipulate electricity to suit the needs of the circuit design.
But the key to it all is magnetism.
Conversion and manipulation of both magnetism and electricity is the entire principle of technology.
For quite a while i couldnt understand how a gamma match on a yagi or loop antenna worked for tuning an antenna
Then i realised the matching section that the gamma was part of is just a simple resonant lc circuit.
You learn many things on your own by experimenting but its great to have like minded people to discuss things with.
If you ask me thats a great shortcut to learning.
While the video goes into detail about his circuitry
Its simply explained as this.
Electricity does not decide to follow anything but like water will flow the least resistant path.
The open end of the circuit while not connected acts ac a capacitor and will build up a charge until it starts feeding it back into the circuit.
His water model demonstrated that beautifly
If you noticed when the water flows into it the level goes higher than the current flowing into it.
That demonstrated the capacitor charging and storing direct current.
Thinking and especially solving math problems staves of memory issues later in life.
Turns out there is a limit to the acceptable level of mess and chaos on the work bench. Magnet bars++
Performed a successful battery replacement surgery recently so that’s a win. I’ve replaced a few screens in the past but it still makes me nervous trying not to crack the glass or tear a ribbon cable when opening devices held with glue and heat.
Sometimes I fix stuff till its broke 
I kinda want an analog silly scope to want to play with lissajous figures:
They seem to work/render better on analog rather than digital scope.
But no one seems to make CRT scopes any more? looks like they can only really be found on ebay.
My requirements are simple:
How difficult would it be to repair an old analog scope?
At risk of starting yet another project, I’ve seen its possible to turn an old CRT TV into a crude oscilloscope.
I have a small CRT TV unit I could sacrifice for this porpoise. Not sure if it would produce the desired quality tho. Most of these TV conversions don’t seem to produce clean figures.
This is one of the better CRT TV to oscilloscope conversions out there:
Neat!
German retailer “Conrad” has one made by their in-house brand:
Depends. If the high-voltage section has issues, very. If it is just a bad connection and dried up caps, easy.
Linked scope appears to be only single channel. I need 2 channel; one for X axis, the other for Y axis.
oh… 
Listing said “1-Kanal” so I assumed that other input was for something else. Thank.
It is technically a 1-Channel scope with a Trigger input, just that that trigger can also be the Y-input.
I have been looking at that scope for a while now, because it is cheap, has a warranty and does analog-X-Y
Ah yeah I thought it was the trigger.
I like the simplicity of it. Screen looks a little small, but fits the requirements.
I have 2 scopes
1 is an analog 15 mhz dual trace. Tektroniks
I use it mostly for analyzing power supplies and polarity testing axial lead capacitors.
It Is also far more sensitive than the digital.
The digital portable is handy and has a variety of menu based measurement scales and options.
Including both scale and digital readout of voltages and frequencies.
Backlog post / ongoing project.
Few years ago I was given an old macbook. It was terribly slow and overheating. So I:
But it was still slow and overheating. why doesn’t apple believe in properly cooling their devices?
Then strange vertical lines appeared on the screen. And after a few hours the screen went black. The boot sequence would not get past the apple logo and hang indefinitely on a grey screen. The discrete GPU died…
Turns out its one of the infamous 2011 dead GPU models! In this case a 17" MacBook Pro 8,3: i7-2820QM + AMD 6750M GPU
There are a couple hardware approaches to fixing this:
hard-wire the LVDS output lines of the integrated graphics (Intel HD Graphics 3000) to the lines going to the LVDS connector.
However:
I am not confident in my micro-soldering skills to attempt fix #1.
I don’t have a jTag programmer for fix #2.
Luckily the i7-2820QM has integrated graphics: HD 3000
I was able to manually override the gpu-power-prefs via efivars, thanks to these guides:
Boot into Single User (CMD+S) and launch USB bootable arch with nomodeset to not load video drivers and stay on integrated graphics.
Once we reach the terminal in arch:
cd /
umount /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/
mount -t efivarfs rw /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/
cd /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/
printf "\x07\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00" > /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/gpu-power-prefs-fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9
chattr +i "/sys/firmware/efi/efivars/gpu-power-prefs-fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9"
cd /
umount /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/
These steps may need to be repeated if the PRAM gets reset. PRAM can be manually reset using: (Command, Option, P, and R)
It seems now you don’t need arch and you can simply boot Single User (Command + S). I’ll be sure to try this if my PRAM resets:
nvram fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9:gpu-power-prefs=%01%00%00%00
nvram boot-args="-v"
reboot
If met with Operation is not permitted one can temporarily disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) in recovery mode (Command + R):
csrutil disable
Reboot, then try to set power prefs.
Be sure to re-enable SIP when finished.
csrutil enable
reboot.
It now boots and is no longer e-waste! But its still runs hot and kernel panics at about 65C…
I replaced the thermal paste with liquid metal. This seemed to only take a couple degrees off. I was hoping for a bit more.
Found this great utility: smcFanControl which allows you to monitor temps and manually set the fan speed:
The utility helps a lot. I now set the fans faster than their default speeds and keep an eye on the temps. At the cost of some increased fan noise to keep it below 65C. It idles around 35C-40C @ 3000 rpm. If the fans to go below 3000 RPM it just can’t keep cool. Anything faster than 3500 and the noise is a bit much. It’s certainly not a quiet machine…
I wanted to undervolt to reduce heat, but it doesn’t seem possible on this old Sandy Bridge?
I did find another utility: Turbo Boost Switcher (free version works) which allowed me to disable turbo completely: http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com/
This reduces performance a bit as the CPU will no longer hit max frequency, but this helps keep the system cool and stable. It’s definitely not a snappy machine but its perfectly usable.
One last mod. This macbook has a optical drive tray! I swapped out the CD tray and put in a SATA drive caddy adapter doodad:
I did have a second SSD in there but I ended up needing that drive for another machine. So it currently lies unpopulated, awaiting…
todo: add another small SSD and dual boot → 
Been using it for a couple years in this wacky state. I probably wouldn’t ever purchase a mac, but I will admit the magsafe is pretty nice. The 17" 1920*1200 display is better than I expected. 16:10 > 16:9
Despite having no turbo and no discrete GPU, the i7-2820QM proves itself still useful in 2024. It’s perfectly capable of web browsing, playing videos, and even playing with live recording + effects + VST’s in Ableton. This machine’s main function is a simple DAW workstation. The fan noise is a bit distracting which is somewhat counter to being a DAW station, but not much can be done about that.
It may be an older machine, but this macbook has user serviceable storage and up-gradable RAM (not soldered…), plus the optional secondary physical drive. Can your m1 do that? Didn’t think so. 
This is a sort of ongoing project with a goal to see how much life I can squeeze out of this machine. If it gives me problems in the future I might attempt flashing the gMux with an arduino.
I have a similar story with a 2011 macbook that I got for free a couple of years ago, except in my case it was the 15" 8,2 macbook pro.
Same situation with a failed graphics chip, except rather than modding the muxing chip and firmware to keep the laptop running on integrated with the faulty discrete chip powered down, I tried fixing it.
A sheet of aluminum foil with a gpu-sized square cut into it and careful application of a heat gun (manually ramping up the temperature to ~300°c over the course of ~5 minutes and gradually lowing the temperature) and the laptop was fixed!
Given that this worked, without removing the underfill from around the gpu or the use of any flux makes me think that the failure lay in the interconnect between the silicon and its substrate, rather than the BGA that connects the package to the board.
As the laptop didn’t come with a drive and I had no interest in installing an outdated version of macos, or performing workarounds to get a later version working, or really using macos in general, I installed ubuntu and have been using it that way ever since. It also needed a new battery since the original had swollen to the point that the trackpad would not click, and probably would have broken, had it not been for the fact that the lid on the underside of the laptop was only held on with 3 screws.
Similar to your case I used a fan control utility to set the peak of the fan curve at around 65°c, which even more important for me since I’m still using the dedicated graphics that have already proven unreliable.
That said its been over 2 years of using the laptop regularly and it has not yet failed. This makes me think that while there may have been a flaw in the manufacturing of the graphics chips, be it assembly or simply choice of materials for the substrate or solder alloy, it was ultimately apple’s poor thermal design and overwhelming unwillingness to let their devices make any noise, even if they’re baking inside, that killed this device.
In using the device I came to pretty much the same conclusions. Its perfectly serviceable for tasks like web-browsing and image editing. That said it is a bit noisy, as doing anything, even so much as loading a web page with lots of pictures will peg the fans at 100%.
The gpu temperature is kept in check, generally not passing the 60’s, but the cpu under any sustained load, even something like watching a video will have it bouncing off of 99°c. It also seems like the bad cooling is not to blame the laptop just uses a lot of power and generates a lot of heat. Despite having gotten a new battery, the laptop never got more than a couple of hours of battery life.
I assume this is at least partly my own doing, since linux likely isn’t doing any favors in reducing power consumption and being stuck on dedicated graphics constantly will have a hit to battery life. In the research and testing I’ve done, you also can’t dynamically switch between integrated and dedicated graphics on linux, you’re stuck on whatever you set via the bootloader/kernel parameters and trying to switch will result in a black screen until you switch back.
Despite all this, the macbook works fine for what I use it for, and I’ll likely keep using it until either dies again or lack of software support keeps me from using it (this already happened with the most recent versions of blender, which no longer supports both the dedicated and discrete graphics).
Hope you don’t mind the rambling =)
