Jury Designs

Hi, Just a quick post mainly showing my preliminary case design for an unbalanced to balanced audio project I'm working on. This is just a simple product that allows me to drive my studio monitors, which have a balanced input, from my PC output which is unbalanced. A good description and circuit diagram can be seen at this website  http://sound.whsites.net/project51.htm . I'll go into the circuitry and testing in another post but today I just wanted to show my initial design for a case. The schematic and board were done in Altium and a step file of the board was exported so I could model the case in Solidworks around the board. As can be seen below, the PCB has 4 green SMD LED's which I added to provide some nicety to the project. The idea I had was for the light to shine through the case to provide a nice effect. Initially I looked at light pipes but nothing really suited the look I was going for. The idea was then to have cutout's in the case and have

Hi, For the last month or so I've been involved in arcade machines which all came about from inheriting an old 1979 Williams pinball machine that was long overdue for restoration. This is a big project as the whole machine needs to be sanded, filled, painted etc. but electrically it is in terrible condition as well. I'm currently in the process of re-doing the driver board in Altium because, as you can see below, the one in the machine is well and truly past it! I've nearly finished the board in Altium (shown below) and will be getting it manufactured soon. On top of this project I have also been designing and building a cocktail arcade machine for my partners 30th birthday party. I'll go into more detail regarding these projects in future posts but today's topic is on virtual pinball machines. My partner wanted to visit a local arcade shop so she could price an arcade machine similar to the one above and whilst there I noticed the full s

Hi, Here's an excerpt from a report I completed on rapid prototyping. This section was on differential cooling and an easy way to overcome it. I thought some might find this useful when 3D printing at home as warping is a common problem. Differential Cooling Problems A common and often ignored (or accepted) problem with most 3D printers on the market is print warping. The cause of this problem is differential cooling. As can be seen in the following image the PLA plastic, when its extruded, is at a temperature of 116⁰C. The extruder itself hovers around the 200 - 200⁰C mark. The PLA sets quick when it’s on the print bed hence dropping from 116⁰C to ambient almost immediately. As the extruder performs its multiple passes, building up the levels, it continually adds hot layers of PLA on the set layers. In other words the PLA is continually heated and cooled. To overcome this many manufacturers have a heated print bed to try and keep this PLA at a constant temperature. In p