Listen friends I need your help. I'm deeply attracted to these various kinds of enclosures and have a deep need to buy them and instal LCD screens and big click-y knobs and such in them... but I don't know what the heck I want to build.
I'm in danger of just getting one and "figuring it out later" this is madness.
I gotta find the right project!
Maybe some kind of obscure calculator? #electronics , #projects , #help , #enclosures
The Electronium, conceived as a collaboration between man and machine, could instantaneously compose and perform music automatically using algorithms that were precursors of artificial intelligence. It is undoubtedly the magnum opus of Scott's electronic music career.
@futurebird I guess just shoving in a @Raspberry_Pi and making a fake #Commodore64 #SX64 or #DX64 would be too easy...
Personally I'd use one to make some #Protoype #BaseStation equipment for several of my projects aside from the #NUCbook...
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KBtechnologies/nucbook
@futurebird Also I guess your budget won't allow you to go wild and #casebod a fully decked-out #MacStudio into a #fanless #cube like the #NeXTcube or #G4Cube...
Kinda like @snazzyq dod a #MacNano with the #M1 [#ARM / #ARM64 / "#AppleSilicon"] #MacMini... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQWGFKhBQwU
@futurebird
don't build something specific: build something that can be lots of things
8tb of storage, an embedded web server (over bluetooth), environmental sensors, magnetic field sensors and accelerometers, a local copy of wikipedia,... the larger and more expansive the range of function it has the more perplexing and bewildering it becomes... (see /The Twonky/ and or the Interocitor in /This Island Earth/)
emphasis is on /comprehensiveness/
and or replete-ness/ not /completenss/
... this lets you make the knurled knobs be kind of silly: they're mostly just U(1)-torsor inputs, but you can label them things like /Gravitational Constant/, and /Nebraska/, and /the average rainfall of the Amazon basin in the 1960s/
Nope. It's not madness. All us hams have stashes of boxen, parts, and assorted other stuff that we know is not 🚫🚫🚫 junk.
Your ham sense is just kicking in.
Go for it!!!
The second one screams to me "modular analog synthesizer". With a multi-function oscilloscope/spectrum analyzer/whatever screen for each box.
These are the kind of devices I cherish and protect. Lovely unit.
@futurebird @christiansen is there a term for this style? It's like the precursor to Cassette Futureism.
I mean, I like both, but they're quite different
@futurebird deeply relatable. I put an AM transmitter in this box for an outdoor-movie scavenger hunt, and it all started as an excuse to buy the Pelican case in the first place.
If your box is mysterious and doesn’t clearly do any _one_ thing… you could invent a new function every day? (“It’s a gorilla detector!” :push secret buzzer delay button: “OH NO IT’S GOING OFF!”)
Listen. I made a perfectly innocent transit tracking device and it looked a bit like that and I kept getting stopped and searched because no one knew what it was and it didn't help when I explained that "I made it myself" ... so... yeah.
Bitter memories.
I learned that if someone says "Well we've stopped you because someone said it looks like a bomb" responding with "How could it be a bomb? It doesn't even have a payload!" indignantly is NOT what you should do.
It's better to say "Oh wow I didn't think of that. It's really just a timer with old style of display. Let me turn it off."
Yeah. I didn't think things through much in my 20s I guess.
Alarm clock breadboarded with large red LED segments with seconds, wired up with red coiled wire, large dry cell cylinder batteries, and a bell!
Laurie Anderson, in one of her recorded pieces, talks about going through airports with huge amounts of complicated, sometimes jury-rigged electronic equipment, and being asked to explain and even demonstrate them, concluding with, "So I've given a lot of these impromptu, improvised new music performances for small audiences of airport security personnel."
@stevegis_ssg @futurebird @copiesofcopies
It’s on The Ugly One With The Jewels, stories from the nerve bible
I've had lots of enclosures like that! For power supplies and high voltage ampliers (to drive a piezo-electric actuator) or analog voltage adders and mixers...
I work with lasers, and have needed to build little servo systems to control them, or to control the interferomers or optical resonators I use them with.
You could buy some cheap lasers like these...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/134987089639
... and try to build your own current and temperature controllers for them...
Then you could also use them for experiments like spectroscopy (on little sealed tubes of iodine vapor) or measuring the refractive index of water, or interferometry... And you'd need some analog control electronics for that stuff.
Sometimes we build "noise eater" circuits in boxes like that - negative feedback loops to cancel out laser intensity variations. I suppose you could also build your own noise-canceling circuits for headphones. They work the same way.
@futurebird i am curious where to get one of these with handles https://cdn.masto.host/sauropodswin/media_attachments/files/110/737/877/758/304/023/original/9e683141dff0d960.png (from german shops)
Would stuff them with CRT and build things like signal analyzers, Feldhell mode display and other stuff definitely without microcontroller
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