This naked speaker is the basis for [MaoMakMaa's] newest project called the Wavedrone. He plans on using the autonomous and cable-less device during street performances. You can hear the effect of some stretched jazz cords being played on it in the video clip after the break. The sound is kind of an ethereal background noise that observers might not immediately realize is there.
You can see the 9V battery which serves as the power source clinging to the frame of the speaker. A 7805 linear regulator tames that battery and feeds the two IC’s on the circuit board seen to the right. The ATtiny85 is reading music from an SD card and playing it back in mono (obviously) with the help of an LM386 audio amplifier chip. The trimpots that go into the high pass and low pass filters in between the microcontroller and amplifier allow for a bit of sound manipulation, but we’re more impressed with the quality of the sound this is getting when properly trimmed.
[Nicholas] wanted to add some flair to his RC car. In addition to the headlights that you see above, there’s brake lights, and a horn that plays “Dixie” like the General Lee in the Dukes of Hazard. All of this is triggered by the wireless controller, but he figured out a way to monitor the servo signals in order to add the additional features.
The hack is driven by a Propeller chip. [Nicholas] patches into the servo lines by adding a servo-in and servo-out header to his prototyping shield. With that in place he’s able to tap into the voltage and ground pins to power the microcontroller. By attaching a 4k7 resistor to the control line, he can listen in on the servo signals using the Propeller.
This RC car has a throttle servo. So when the throttle is opened all the way up the Propeller chip flashes some white LEDs in the headlights, and uses an LM386 audio amplifier to play a tune. When the throttle is pulled all the way back the brake lights are activated. Don’t miss the test footage of this which is embedded after the break.
[Michael Chen] felt the sound his PSP was putting out needed more dimension. Some would have grabbed themselves a nice set of headphones, but he grabbed his soldering iron instead and found some space where he could add a bigger speaker.
Mobile devices tend to cram as much into the small form factor as possible so we’re surprised he managed make room. But apparently if you cut away a bit from the inside of the case there is space beneath the memory card. [Michael] cautions that you need to choose a speaker rated for 8 ohms or greater in order to use it as a drop-in replacement for one of the two original speakers. But he also touches on a method to use both stock speakers as well as the new one. He suggests grabbing an LM386 op-amp and a capacitor and hooking them up. Yep, there’s room for that too if you mount it dead-bug-style. We wonder how the battery life will be affected by this hack?
[Kayvon] just finished building this chiptune player based on a PIC microcontroller. The hardware really couldn’t be any simpler. He chose to use a PIC18F2685 just because it’s big enough to store the music files directly and it let him get away with not using an external EEPROM for that purpose. The output pins feed a Digital to Analog Convert (DAC) chip, which in turn outputs analog audio to an LM386 OpAmp. The white trimpot sandwiched between the chips controls the volume.
The real work on this project went into coding a program which translates .MOD files into something the PIC will be able to play. Because of the memory limits of the chip it is unable to directly use all of the instrument samples from these files. [Kayvon] wrote a program with a nice GUI that lets him load in his music and page through each instrument to fine-tune how they are being re-encoded. The audio track from the video after the break doesn’t do the project justice, but you will get a nice look at the hardware and software.
[Dino] is about three-quarters of the way through his talking box project. He’s completed one of the two boxes, and is showing off the technique he uses to marry motion with sound in order to mimic flapping lips with the box top.
You may remember [Dino's] first look at the EMIC2. It’s a single-board text to speech module which is what provides the voice for the box. But what fun is that without some animatronics to go along with it? So [Dino] started playing around with different concepts to move the box top along with the speech. This is easier said than done, but as you can see in the video after the break, he did pull it off rather well. He built a motor control circuit that takes the audio output of an LM386 amplifier chip and translates it into drive signals for the motor. The shaft is not directly connected to the lid of the box. Instead it has a curved wire which is limited by a piece of string so that it doesn’t spin too far. It lifts the lid which is hinged with a piece of cloth.
Headphone amplifiers make for simple, practical electronics projects. The Bass Bump Headphone Amp is no exception, since it’s made out of easy to source parts, and can be built on a proto-board.
We’ve seen many variants of the classic cMoy amplifier, including this pretty one. The Bass Bump differs by providing control over bass frequencies. It does this by putting a filter in front of the amplifier, with a potentiometer to select the mix of frequencies. This goes into a LM386 audio amplifier. At the output is a Zobel network to keep the impedance low at high frequencies. The amplifier can be powered from either a 9V rechargeable battery, or a USB port.
It’s a simple build, but definitely a good one to try on a rainy day. The write up explains how the analog circuitry works, and gives you full instructions on how to build it. After the break, check out a video overview of the project.
The Magnetophone is the latest electro-acoustic instrument from [Aaron Sherwood]. This tower contains 14 strings, and 14 hand-wound electromagnets. By energizing each electromagnet with a square wave, the strings can be vibrated to create music.
The brains of the device consist of an Arduino Mega attached to the top of the tower. The microcontroller has 6 timers, which allows for 6 notes to play at the same time. An open source tone library was used to generate square waves at the correct frequencies. These square waves are amplified by LM386 based circuits, which provide enough power to the coil to oscillate the string. By using square waves at specific frequencies, overtones of strings can be created.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen [Aaron] combine strings and electronics. His Glockentar used solenoids to strike strings. However, this project provides new possibilities by allowing the rate of oscillation to be controlled precisely. You can see the instrument in action after the break.
Sometimes, the best birthday presents are the ones you give yourself. In [Dino]’s case, they’re the ones you make for yourself. In honor of his 55th, he built the Sqonkbox 55, a 13-note cigar box organ based on a 555 and amplified with an LM386.
It’s based on a 555 wired in astable mode, turning it into an oscillator that outputs a frequency. This frequency is determined by the resistors between pins 6 and 7, another between 7 and 8, and the capacitor between pin 2 and ground. [Dino] shows a breadboard version first, with a single tuning pot and momentary acting as a piano key. As he explains, this portion of the circuit is repeated 13 times with pots and momentaries that he arranges like piano keys through the lid of a cigar box.
“Sqonkbox,” you ask? A second 555 in astable mode sends the output through an LED. This LED stands face to face with an LDR, and they are shrouded in this configuration with black heat shrink tubing. The ‘sqonk’ 555 changes the frequency of the first 555, providing a clippy, rhythmic tone at the rate set by a potentiometer. [Dino]’s full video of the build is after the break. A BOM is forthcoming, but it’s easy enough to puzzle it out between the video and the lovely, Forrest Mims-esque schematic.
“You can’t put new wine in old bottles” – so the saying goes. But you would if you’re a hacker stuck with a radio built in 2005, which looked like it was put together using technology from 1975. [Marcus Jenkins] did just that, pulling out the innards from his old radio and converting it to an Arduino FM radio.
His cheap, mains powered radio was pretty bad at tuning. It had trouble locating stations, and tended to drift. One look at the insides, and it was obvious that it was not well engineered at all, so any attempts at fixing it would be pointless. Instead, he drew up a simple schematic that used an Arduino Nano, an FM radio module based on the TEA5767, and an audio amplifier based on the LM386.
A single button on the Arduino helps cycle through a range of preset frequencies stored in memory. The Arduino connects to the FM radio module over I2C. The existing antenna was connected to the TEA5767 module. The radio module outputs stereo audio, but [Marcus] was content with using just a mono channel, as it would be used in his workshop. The audio amplifier is pretty straightforward, based on a typical application found in the data sheet. He put it all together on proto-board, although soldering the FM radio module was a bit tricky. The Arduino code is quite simple, and available for download (zip file).
He retained the original tuning knob, which is no longer functional. The AM-FM selector knob was fitted with a micro-switch connected to the Arduino for selecting the preset stations. Almost everything inside was held together with what [Marcus] calls “hot-snot” glue. The whole exercise cost him a few Euros, and parts scavenged from his parts bin. A good radio could probably be had for a few Euros from a yard sale and much less effort, but that wouldn’t be as cool as this.
Crystal radios may be the simplest kind to make, but regenerative receivers are more practical and only a little more complicated. A recent design by [Selenium] is super simple because it uses a single LM386 audio amplifier IC.
You might be surprised that you can convert an audio amplifier to a receiver using just a handful of components (a variable capacitor, a coil, a handful of capacitors, and a speaker). However, [Selenium] realized he could subvert the gain and bypass pins to cause regeneration and wound up with a very simple receiver.
If you haven’t looked at regenerative receivers before, the principle is simple (and dates back to 1912). An oscillator is an amplifier that gets (theoretically) an infinite amount of gain at one particular frequency. A regenerative receiver is just an amplifier that is almost (but not quite) at the point of oscillation. This gives it very high frequency-specific gain and a measure of selectivity. You can also nudge the receiver just into oscillation to receive CW or SSB signals.
[Selenium] built his prototype on an old receiver chassis because it had the IC and the variable capacitor already in place. However, others have built successful copies on breadboards ([Austin Heller] created several good looking breadboard versions) and on PCB material. [Selenium] also released some other unique LM386-based designs that use more parts (and, probably, have better performance). Looks like a simple way to build a practical receiver.
The folks at [ElectroSmash] recently released 1Wamp – a one watt, open hardware, Guitar amplifier packed with features. It consists of a JFET based pre-amplifier, a Big Muff Pi a.k.a BMP based Tone control and an LM386 power amplifier. The dual JFET pre-amp provides tube-like sound, the BMP provides a nice tonal range while the LM386 can drive various types of output’s ranging from headphones to speaker cabinets.
1Wamp had controls for Tone, Volume and Gain, a Speaker/Cabinet output, a headphone output with an integrated attenuator switch and an aux. input. The aux. input is handy as it adds any line level input signal to the guitar sound, allowing you to practice with metronome or MP3 backing tracks or drum bases. It runs off either a 9V battery or can be powered via an external power source. [ElectroSmash] have released all the native KiCad design files. If you’d like a quick look at the design, check out the Schematic PDF and the Bill of Materials. There’s also a handy assembly manual [PDF] that shows how to build it in five easy steps.
Their blog post provides extremely detailed circuit analysis of every part of the design, starting from the power supply filter to remove mains “hum” all the way through to PCB layout considerations for noise reduction. Oscilloscope screen shots provide signal analysis showing bias points and signal levels throughout the circuit. The choice of value for every component is explained, along with the consequences of changing those values. This makes it easy to customise the 1Wamp to suit individual tastes. We also noticed SPICE models for the recommended and alternative JFET transistors, in case you need to customise the design by changing component values.
There’s also a lot of audio amplifier trivia, references and links shared in their post. This includes a detailed analysis of the LM386 op-amp. Want to add some bling to your 1Wamp build? There are a lot of handy tips on how to add cool LED lighting to the amplifier if it is mounted in a standard metal enclosure. However, the PCB has some really nice graphics, so an acrylic-sandwich-type enclosures look best. Check out the video that walks through the features of the 1Wamp and shows off its performance. And while on the subject of Audio electronics, here’s one of their earlier projects – an open source Arduino guitar pedal.
Documentation to this level proves several things, most notably a love for this design and deep consideration for those who will use and modify this amplifier. It’s a great pattern to follow with your own Open Source designs.
Sometimes it’s worth doing something in an inefficient way. For example, it might be worth it in order to learn something new, or just to use a particular part. [Deater] did just that with the Raspberry Pi AY-3-8910 Chiptune Player (with LED visualizers!)
The venerable General Instrument AY-3-8910 series sound chips were common in older hardware like home computers and game consoles as well as sound cards for the Apple II family. They were capable of generating three channels of square waves with various effects. Developers eventually squeezed every little bit of performance out with clever hacks. The Raspberry Pi has more than enough power to do all this in software, but as [Deater] puts it, it’s far more interesting to use an actual AY-3-8910 from the 80’s. Some LED bar graphs and matrices round out the whole system.
All the code for the Raspberry Pi AY-3-8910 chiptune player can be found on [deater]’s github repository for the project. A video of the player banging out some sounds is embedded after the break.
[deater] got interested in a sound chip from the 80’s used in sound cards for the Apple II family because of the work done on making a port of Kerbal Space Program for the Apple II. The AY-3-8910 had some contemporary equivalents, one of which (the Yamaha YMZ294) was used in this curious “8-bit” Harmonica.
[B Arnold] is hearing voices and needs help from the Hackaday community. But before any of you armchair psychiatrists run off to WebMD, rest assured that [B Arnold] suffers not from schizophrenia but rather has an RF coupling problem.
The project (which isn’t posted yet) is an attempt to turn a C.H.I.P into an Amazon Echo, for which [B Arnold] needed an audio amplifier. Turning to the junk bin, he unearthed an LM386, that venerable power amp chip that first appeared in the mid-70s. Dead simple and able to run off a 9-volt battery, the LM386 that has found its way into thousands of commercial products and countlesshacks.
Shortly after applying power to the amp, [B Arnold] started hearing things – faint, far-off voices, scratchy but discernible. A bit of repositioning of wires and hands improved the signal enough for a station ID – an FM talk radio station on 97.1 MHz. [B Arnold] doesn’t mention the call sign, but it might have been KFTK out of St. Louis, Missouri; in any case, it would be helpful to know the range from the transmitter to the inadvertent receiver. Two low-fidelity audio clips are included below for your listening pleasure – you’ll want your headphones on, and Sample 2 is better than Sample 1 – as are photos of the offending circuit.
What do you think is going on here? We’ve heard of RF coupling of AM radio stations before, but how would FM signals be making it into this circuit and out of the speaker? Is there anything [B Arnold] did wrong to get this result? Sound off in the comments and let us know your horror stories of RF coupling.
Sample 1:
Sample2:
Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which celebrates failure as a learning tool. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your own failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.
Everyone has a chip-of-shame: it’s the part that you know is suboptimal but you keep using it anyway because it just works well enough. Maybe it’s not what you would put into a design that you’re building more than a couple of, but for a quick and dirty lashup, it’s just the ticket. For Hackaday’s [Adam Fabio], that chip is the TIP120 transistor. Truth be told, we have more than one chip of shame, but for audio amplification purposes, it’s the LM386.
The LM386 is an old design, and requires a few supporting passive components to get its best performance, but it’s fundamentally solid. It’s not noise-free and doesn’t run on 3.3 V, but if you can fit a 9 V battery into your project and you need to push a moderate amount of sound out of a speaker, we’ll show you how to get the job done with an LM386.
Stuck in the Past
There are a lot of better audio amplifier chips these days if you’re looking for lower voltages. Cellphones and lithium-ion batteries, along with the overall trend toward lower voltages in gizmos across the board, have pushed chip manufacturers to do more and more with less and less. There are some great amplifier chips out there running on 3.3 V and 5 V instead of 9 V or 12 V.
In particular, there are a number of chips that run in “bridge-tied-load” mode, which means that it drives both sides of the speaker, which makes it louder for a given voltage and removes the necessity for a big output capacitor in the design. This is a win on all fronts.
Because these amplifiers are marketed toward use in tiny devices, the vast majority are in surface-mount technology (SMT) packages. With the exception of making heat dissipation a bit difficult, we’re big fans of smaller parts and not having to drill holes in home-made PCBs. If you’re not down with SMT, you’re going to have to catch up soon. For instance, our other favorite DIP chip amp, the TDA7052, has been end-of-lifed.
So for an SMT PCB design, the LM386 is dead. There are hundreds of few-hundred-milliwatt amplifiers out there that can outperform it. We’ve designed with the TPA321D, for instance, and it runs circles around the LM386, but it’s SMT. Maybe you’d like to point out your favorite grain-of-rice, few-hundred-milliwatt, 8 ohm speaker amplifier in the comments? Anyone want to buy a stick of LM386s off of our hands?
Good, Basic Design
Just kidding! The LM386 has its place — on the breadboard, in the one-off perfboarded circuit, or even free-formed with parts hanging off of it in mid-air. And as the granddaddy of DIP-format amplifiers, it’s not going anywhere. In contrast to other, supposedly superior, amplifier chips, the LM386 is still manufactured after (who knows?!) how many years. And the reason is not just the form-factor. It’s also a very solid design.
In fact, it’s a classic push-pull amplifier. The basic design uses two output transistors, one for the positive half of the voltage waveform and one for the negative half. The problem with the basic design is crossover distortion, which can be reduced by biasing the transistors just into their operating region, or by using an op-amp to provide feedback and push them through the dead zone. The LM386 does both.
If there were no such thing as an LM386, you could take a very nice op-amp for the voltage gain stage and wrap up the output transistors in the op-amp’s feedback loop to handle the current demand. The op-amp will swing the output transistors around like wild to make sure that the output voltage is a scaled-up version of the input voltage, whatever the load on the outside. The better op-amp you use, the better the overall circuit will sound.
That’s exactly what’s going on inside an LM386. The schematic, copied from the datasheet, is a simple differential amplifier (the mess of symmetric transistors on the left-hand side) that takes feedback from the output voltage on the right-hand side between the pull-up and pull-down power transistors. The diodes are there to bias the transistors just into conduction to help minimize crossover distortion. This is called class A/B operation, and depending on the audiophile in question, it’s second only to pure class A for sound quality.
In short, aside from the simplistic differential amplifier, the internals of the LM386 are essentially what you’d build anyway. No wonder it has stood the test of time: it’s a solid, basic design. Unfortunately, that’s not the same as saying that it’s easy to use.
The LM386 in Application
This Will Sound Horrible
Have a look at the “typical applications” section of the datasheet. What’s missing? The worst omission is decoupling on the power rails, but you were going to include that anyway, right? If you’re running on batteries with low internal resistance and short wires, 0.05 microfarads is fine. If not, decouple with at least 100 microfarads plus a 0.05 – 0.1 microfarad capacitor for noise immunity.
What else is missing? In a few of the examples, they’ve included a “bypass” capacitor on pin 7, but only in a few. Even when they do add it, it’s drawn as if it were optional. It is optional if you don’t mind the amplifier hissing like a mad cat. Otherwise, this is a good place for some capacitance: anywhere from 0.1 to 10 microfarads seems plausible. Another secret trick: grounding pin 7 can be used to mute the amplifier circuit when not in use.
We’ve also noticed, and we’re not alone, that the inverting input seems to be less noisy than the non-inverting. See how the datasheet applications ground the inverting input (pin 2) and put the signal into pin 3? Do exactly the opposite and you’ll reduce your noise floor even further.
Getting Closer…
An additional circuit is listed as being “with Bass Boost”. This circuit adds highpass-filtered (negative) feedback between the output and pin 1 which damps down some of the high-frequency hiss and adds a lot more to the bass and midrange. Since a common complaint about the LM386 is that it is prone to high-frequency hiss when it’s idling, adding about 5 dB more mid-range signal to that noise is a clear win. It’s especially welcome on the small toy speakers that are usually paired with LM386 circuits.
Finally, there’s the question of the snubber capacitor and resistor on the output (pin 5). In practice, we’ve included this some times, and not other times. We built up a test board with a jumper that puts the snubber in and out of the circuit for this article. We can’t tell the difference. Supposedly, if the amplifier is prone to wild self-oscillations, this should damp it. The datasheet authors wouldn’t add it if it didn’t help with performance or reliability, we just can’t verify which of these two it is.
Not missing in any of the examples is the absolutely massive 250 microfarad output capacitor. You need it, and it needs to be big if you want to pass any bass through it. With an 8 ohm speaker and a 250 microfarad capacitor, you’re still attenuating some of the bass: 1/(2pi250 uF * 8 ohms) = 80 Hz is already reduced by 3 dB and the low E on a bass guitar is another octave down from there. That tiny little speaker is probably not helping either. Use the bass boost circuit for any low end at all.
To recap:
More decoupling of the power supply: this chip can push peaky power, you need to feed it.
Bypass pin 7 for noise immunity. Ground it to mute the amp.
Use the inverting input.
Use the Bass Boost. Think of it as hiss-reduction.
The snubber. Do what you think is best. Retrofit if you need it?
Don’t forget the output capacitor. Bigger is bassier.
That’s the Right Way
The best design we’ve seen on the web? The 9 V battery Ruby guitar amp gets everything right. Because guitar pickups have a very low high output impedance, they also add a JFET preamp. We’d also use the bass boost option, but guitarists like their high-and-janglies and don’t seem to mind hiss.
Our Cold Dead Hands
The LM386 is a well-designed, basic workhorse that does a decent job when its hooves are kept clean and it’s well-fed. Aside from having a slow op-amp stage by today’s standards, it has decent performance. It can also sound horrible if you neglect it.
Because it’s one of the classics, it’ll always be available in through-hole DIP format, so it’s easy to wedge into a breadboard or one-off designs. You’ll never have to worry about it going out of production or costing much more than a quarter. And it runs decently loud off of a 9 V battery, which is pretty convenient to just toss into your project alongside the 3 V that’s powering the logic. Keeping the power and logic supplies separate is always a win.
It’s not a modern chip, though. The modern chips have X times more stuff going on inside. Some of this is to increase audio fidelity by speeding up the op-amp. Some of this extra circuitry helps the chips remain stable even with fewer supporting parts. The killer innovation, and the one that leads us to use a modern chip in anything that’s actually designed instead of just lashed together, is driving the speaker in bridge-tied-load mode. BTL means no output capacitors and is louder to boot — loud enough that a higher voltage for the power amplifier may not be necessary after all, though you’ll still want to decouple the supplies well.
We’re not saying that the LM386 is the best amp of all time: it can be a bit noisy and it’s demanding. But with a little care, it can work out fine. It’s absolutely not our favorite amplifier chip, but we’d miss it if it were gone, and it would make our desert-island IC list unlike other parts of its generation such as the LM741 op-amp or the TIP120 transistors — they are old, but the LM386 is a classic.
[Andy_Fuentes22] likes to stream music, but is (understandably) underwhelmed by the sound that comes out of his phone. He wanted to build something that not only looks good, but sounds good. Something that could stream music through a Chromecast or a Raspi, but also take auxiliary input. Something awesome, like the Junkbots Sound System.
The ‘bots, named LR-E (Larry) and R8-CHL (Rachel), aren’t just cool pieces of art. They’re both dead-bug-walking bots with an LM386-based amplifier circuit and an AN6884-based VU meter in their transparent, industrial relay bodies. LR-E is the left channel, and his lovely wife is the right channel. The best part is that they are wired into the circuit through their 3.5mm plug legs and the corresponding jacks mounted in the Altoids tin base.
[Andy] built this labor of love from the ground up. He started with some very nice design sketches and took a bazillion pictures along the way. We think it sounds pretty good, but you can judge for yourself after the break. If VU meters are your jam, here’s another that’s built into the speaker.
General Instrument’s AY-3-8910 is a chip associated with video game music and is popular with arcade games and pinball machines. The chip tunes produced by this IC are iconic and are reminiscent of a great era for electronics. [Deater] has done an amazing job at creating a harmony between the old and new with his Raspberry Pi AY-3-8910 project.
[Deater] already showed us an earlier version of the project on a breadboard however after having made some PCBs and an enclosure the result is even more impressive. The system consists of not one but two AY-3-8910 for stereo sound that feed a MAX98306 breakout for amplification. A Raspberry Pi 2 sends six channels worth of data via 74HC595 shift registers driven by SPI. There is a surplus of displays ranging from a matrix to bar graph and even 14-segment displays. The entire PCB is recognized as a hat courtesy an EEPROM which sits alongside a DS1307 RTC breakout board. The enclosure is simple but very effective at showing the internals as well as the PCB art.
The software that [Deater] provides, extends the functionality of the project beyond the chiptunes player. There is a program to use the devices as an alarm clock, CPU meter, electronic organ and even a playable version of Tetris as seen in the demo video below. The blog post is very informative and shows progress in a chronological fashion with pictures of the design at various stages of development. [Deater] provides a full set of instructions as well as the schematic along with code posted on GitHub.
[Keystone Science] recently posted a video about building a theremin — you know, the instrument that makes those strange whistles when you move your hands around it. The circuit is pretty simple (and borrowed) but we liked the way the video explains the theory and even dives into some of the math behind resonant frequencies.
The circuit uses two FETs for the oscillators. An LM386 amplifier (a Hackaday favorite) drives a speaker so you can use the instrument without external equipment. The initial build is on a breadboard, but the final build is on a PCB and has a case.
This is the kind of project that could capture a kid’s imagination — especially one with an interest in music. We don’t have anything against microcontroller projects, but a circuit like this is great for exploring oscillators, amplifiers, resonant frequencies, and other details of electronics you don’t get with a typical Arduino LED blinker.
We’ve covered a lot of theremins in the past including some very simple ones. There’s even one that uses IR sensors.
On the day mini-amps were invented, electric guitar players the world over rejoiced. No longer would they be house-bound when jamming out on their favourite guitar. It is a doubly wondrous day indeed when an electric guitar-inclined maker realizes they can make their own.
[Frank Olson Music] took apart an old pair of headphones and salvaged the speakers — perhaps intending to replicate a vintage sound — and set them aside. Relying on the incisive application of an X-Acto knife, [Olson] made swift work cutting some basswood planks into pieces of the amp before gluing them together — sizing it to be only just bigger than the speakers. A tie was also shown no mercy and used as a dapper grille screen. Both the head and speaker cabinets were sanded and stained for a matching finish.
The speakers are wired to a simple aux jack and connect to an LM386 low-voltage amp circuit which [Olson] assembled and mounted into the header. In spite of our earlier hype, [Olson] seems to be using an external power supply for this mini-amp; but before you count that as a mark against this build, the music you hear him playing in the build video came from the amp. Pair that with this mini-not-quite-a-Tesla-coil, and you’re ready to jam.
Some of the best hacks are the ones which seem perfectly obvious in hindsight; a solution to the problem that’s so elegant, you wonder how it never occurred to you before. Of course we also love the hacks that are so complex your eyes start to water, but it’s nice to have a balance. This one, sent in by [Eduardo Zola] is definitely in the former group.
In the video after the break, [Eduardo] demonstrates his extremely simple setup for using ultrasonic transducers for one-way data communication. Powered by a pair of Arduinos and using transducers salvaged from the extremely popular HC-SR04 module, there’s a good chance a lot of readers can recreate this one on their own bench with what they’ve got lying around. In this example he’s sending strings of text from one computer to another, but with a little imagination this can be used for all sorts of projects.
For the transmitter, the ultrasonic transducer is simply tied to one of the digital pins on the Arduino. The receiver is a bit more complex, requiring a LM386 amplifier and LM393 comparator to create a clean signal for the second Arduino to read.
But how does it work? Looking through the source code for the transmitter and receiver, we can see it’s about as basic as it gets. The transmitter Arduino breaks down a given string into individual characters, and then further converts the ASCII to eight binary bits. These bits are sent out as tones, and are picked up on the receiving end. Once the receiver has collected a decent chunk of tones, it works through them and turns the binary values back into ASCII characters which get dumped over serial. It’s slow, but it’s simple.
For hams who build their own radios, mastering the black art of radio frequency electronics is a necessary first step to getting on the air. But if voice transmissions are a goal, some level of mastery of the audio frequency side of the equation is needed as well. If your signal is clipped and distorted, the ham on the other side will have trouble hearing you, and if your receive audio is poor, good luck digging a weak signal out of the weeds.
Hams often give short shrift to the audio in their homebrew transceivers, and [Vasily Ivanenko] wants to change that with this comprehensive guide to audio amplifiers for the ham. He knows whereof he speaks; one of his other hobbies is jazz guitar and amplifiers, and it really shows in the variety of amps he discusses and the theory behind them. He describes a number of amps that perform well and are easy to build. Most of them are based on discrete transistors — many, many transistors — but he does provide some op amp designs and even a design for the venerable LM386, which he generally decries as the easy way out unless it’s optimized. He also goes into a great deal of detail on building AF oscillators and good filters with low harmonics for testing amps. We especially like the tip about using the FFT function of an oscilloscope and a signal generator to estimate total harmonic distortion.
The whole article is really worth a read, and applying some of these tips will help everyone do a better job designing audio amps, not just the hams. And if building amps from discrete transistors has you baffled, start with the basics: [Jenny]’s excellent Biasing That Transistor series.
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Because it’s one of the classics, it’ll always be available in through-hole DIP format, so it’s easy to wedge into a breadboard or one-off designs. You’ll never have to worry about it going out of production or costing much more than a quarter. And it runs decently loud off of a 9 V battery, which is pretty convenient to just toss into your project alongside the 3 V that’s powering the logic. Keeping the power and logic supplies separate is always a win.
