Media - diy - Page 1 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the mostly-disassembled innards of a Pirate MIDI "BRIDGE4" controller sitting on and around a magnetic iFixit mat. There's a selection of screws, and next to the circuit board is the TRS jack that's been ripped off it.

Well, fuck. I managed to break the MIDI-out jack on my MIDI controller. I guess this will be a good test of my soldering skills. 😬 I've been watching a bunch of That Pedal Show on YouTube and was rejiggering my pedal board (I ended up removing everything from the effects loop except for the looper pedal, put the flanger before the boost/overdrive pedals, and it all sounds amazing), and I leant the amp forwards a bit so I could get behind it to plug the effects loop cables back in. The jack sticks out far enough from the MIDI controller that a significant portion of the 13kg weight of the amp ended up on jack and just ripped it straight off. 😢

Posted on 6 May 2023, 21:46

A photo of a narrow raised garden bed alongside a fence. The garden bed is covered in fresh red mulch and there's a metre-long black grate in it that the drainpipe that comes down from the pergola drains into.

Got a bit more of the garden bed done this afternoon, including a drain grate thing (it's not wonky, it's just angled slightly downwards). Previously the rain that fell on the pergola came down the drainpipe and dispersed through the dirt, which ended up just dribbling out from between the wood and causing a big puddle over the back-right of the bricks. I expect the water will still come through the wood but hopefully it's far enough to the left that the water will just flow down onto the grass now. 🤞🏻

our house gardening diy darkroom

Posted on 9 January 2023, 16:37

A photo of a horizontal speaker with a grey mesh grille on it, sitting on top of two vertical pieces of wood that have a 90-degree section cut out of them such that the speaker is angled up at 45 degrees. The whole setup is at the base of my electronic drum kit and so the speaker is angled to aim right at me when I'm sitting on the stool.

I bought an Audio Engine speaker around this time last year to use with my drums (https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/1906) but it was always just sitting on the floor pointing at my feet so today I decided to build a little stand for it so it'd be angled up at me! I can definitely notice the difference, everything sounds a lot crisper.

our house diy music darkroom drums speaker

Posted on 29 December 2022, 16:16

A photo of two electric guitars hanging from wall mounts.

That was a productive morning, and a good use of spare wall space.

our house diy music darkroom guitar

Posted on 3 December 2022, 12:18

I haven't done anything with the actual ESP32/physical button thing yet, but I got the software side of my "remotely turn the Raspberry Pi displays on and off" project done! The core is a very simple Node.js service that runs on the Pis directly (https://github.com/VirtualWolf/hyperpixel-brightness-control) and subscribes to an MQTT topic that contains messages indicating whether the display should be on or off, then writes directly to the GPIO pin to control the display brightness. I updated my Pi Home Dashboard (https://github.com/VirtualWolf/pi-home-dashboard) to add an HTTP endpoint that'll send messages to that same topic the display-attached Pis are subscribed to, and the shortcuts in the video are simply calling that endpoint. I'm using the "retain" MQTT flag for the messages sent to the display status topic so even if the Pis reboot for whatever reason, the last known state is what they'll start up with again when they come up. And finally, instead of a cronjob set on each individual Pi to automatically turn the displays off at midnight and back on at 8am, I've got one running on the main Raspberry Pi 4B that runs the MQTT broker that just sends the required message to the MQTT topic and the Pis with the display attached dutifully turn on or off as necessary.

raspberry pi diy video

Posted on 11 September 2022, 11:36

A photo of three ESP32 microcontrollers. They're teensy little circuit boards, roughly 5cm in length and 2cm in width, festooned with electronic components, and with two rows of pins coming out of them on one side for plugging things thing.

I'd wanted to order a handful more ESP32 microcontrollers from Adafruit a few months ago, but they were entirely out of stock so I put my email address in to be notified when they were available again. A couple of weeks ago I got an email saying "The Feather HUZZAH32 is back in stock! There are 2997 available." I... think that might be enough, haha. I ordered three and they arrived today. One of the things I want to do is to rig up a physical button that will turn off the LCD displays that are attached to the Raspberry Pis in the lounge room which display the current temperature inside and out, as well as the time. Even though we run them at a significantly-lower-than-maximum brightness, they're still very bright when we turn all the lights off when we're going to sleep. They automatically turn off at midnight and come on at 8am, but sometimes I want to turn them off earlier, and also occasionally I'm up before 8 in the morning and instead of the temperature and time I'm greeted with black displays. Should be a fun little project!

our house diy darkroom new toys esp32

Posted on 6 September 2022, 21:50

A photo of a DIY guitar pedalboard. It consists of two horizontal planks of wood screwed into two shallowly-angled pieces on either end. The two horizontal pieces have strips of velcro on them, and there's three pedals attached to it. The cables are extremely neat and tidy and mostly tucked away underneath the body of the board.

A photo of the pedalboard sitting in front of an Orange (and coloured orange) guitar amplifier.

That was a HELLA productive day off, look at my pedalboard! Everything is so neat and tidy, I'm fucking STOKED at how well it came together.

our house diy music darkroom guitar guitar amp pedalboard

Posted on 5 September 2022, 17:09

A photo of a bright orange guitar amp with a wheat-coloured front grill sitting on the floor next to a shiny black electric guitar.

The same orange guitar amp but this time sitting on a little elevated wooden platform in the corner of a room under a standing desk.

It's here! 🤘🏻 And it fits PERFECTLY on the little stand I made!

our house diy music darkroom new toys guitar guitar amp

Posted on 2 August 2022, 14:43

A photo of a tan three-seater lounge with a small ramp going up to the left-most seat. The ramp has two additional vertical pieces of wood attached to either side of it top prevent Beanie jumping down part-way down the ramp, and there's an L-shaped bit of wood sitting in the gap between the left and middle seats to stop him being able to both jump down beside the ramp and also wander over to the other seats and jump down from them too.

Beanie loves sitting up on the arm of the lounge (for example https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/1809) but he also happily just jumps straight down from it to the ground even though we got him a dog ramp (https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/1944). So this weekend Kristina made a little barricade on the lounge and sides for the ramp so he's only got one way to get up and down. 😁

beanie our house diy darkroom dog ramp

Posted on 31 July 2022, 15:50

A photo of the corner of a room underneath a standing desk, with a little pine wooden platform on four legs that sits over the top of a power board. The platform itself is about 40cm wide and 23cm deep, and is raised up 13cm off the floor.

I don't really have a decent place to keep the new guitar amp I'm getting because it's about 2cm too deep to fit sideways beside my desk so I did some DIY today and built a little platform for it to sit above the power board in the corner!

our house diy music darkroom guitar

Posted on 30 July 2022, 14:54