Time to start trawling through the backlog of things waiting to be posted! Starting with a recent project – a game-in-a-week I did in May. Read on for more details, gameplay vid and download.
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Something’s going wrong.

I had an unusual valve kicking around – an ECH83. It’s a triode-heptode designed for use in car radios, with an anode voltage of only 12.6V.

I also had a couple of the ubiquitous Park G10 practice amps from my early guitar-playing days waiting to be recycled into something better, so I thought I’d see if I could concoct some sort of bastardised hybrid.

The G10 actually has quite a nice chip amp for it’s final stage; the TDA2030A. What a pity about the JRC4558 preamp stages. I really hate the sound of that particular 80’s opamp.

Inspired by this wanton ECH83 abuse by Engels, I decided to use both the triode and heptode in the ECH83 as preamp stages and salvage the silicon from the G10 for a power amp stage.

This is the result (click to enlarge):

Read on for explanation, layout and construction notes.

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I’ve been getting back into electronics. High voltage stuff this time around – I’m trying to get a small Tesla Coil running at the moment (and to that end just let the magic smoke escape from my cheapo bench power supply).

Going through my camera, I found some photos of some robots I built last time I was in a soldering mood and thought I’d share and document – read on for pics and details.

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EYEkanoids is a webcam-controlled Breakout/Arkanoids type game. I made it a few months ago but I dug it out, applied some polish, and decided it’s ready to post. Click here to play now (Note you need a webcam!)

The little cityscape banner at the top of the page has been part of the site for years and years, but it used to be static. I decided I’d update it with some parallax-scrolling animation and ended up building in a little game.

Just click the little Start Game button in the banner to play.

Happy {midwinter festival of choice} to all. I’ve turned on the traditional coldcity snow

I’m off to Skye tomorrow, back on the 3rd.

I’ve been concentrating on music and mad circuit-bending rather than code recently; I left Earbirth and I’m working on a new project with bassist Bannon. My myspazz is down at the moment, but if you’re after a copy of my solo album Cut+Push I’ll put one in the post for free if you give me your address.

I really will get round to releasing the latest raytracer source version in the New Year. I also need to post the Flex SDK webcam game I made a couple of months back.