Below are some of the projects and experiments that I recorded in 2020. This year was different as I had graduated high school and entered university. From this year onwards, the projects made will have a page of their own.

January 2020

• I started 2020 off by experimenting a little with casette tapes. I was watching some youtube videos on tape delay audio effects and wanted to look into making my own. At the time however I didn't know much on how magnetic tape really worked, so I went to a local thrift store, found an old casette player and took it apart. I tried making a tape loop as well.

• I also did some more experiments with the PT2399 reverb IC, making some more modifications to the circuit and playing the piano audio through it.

Febuary 2020

• In Febuary I made a simple "On Air" LED sign using the addressible LEDs I experimented with in Nov 2019. The display itself was 3D printed and the LEDs were controlled with an Ardiuno Pro Micro. I had some fun programming different color animations as the addressible LEDs could make some pretty neat effects if done right. I added a button to switch through the different animations.

April 2020

• In april I worked primarily on a simple IR strobe light with a tunable frequency.

• I also began configuring a Minecraft server on my UDOO X86 Ultra using Ubuntu as an operating system.

May 2020

• Carrying on from April, I continued working on that Ubuntu minecraft server and made an enclosure for the UDOO X86 Ultra. I needed to make a PWM controller so the fan wouldn't sit at 100% all the time (very loud), so I threw one together using a 555 timer IC and some other components.

• I came across a forum that mentioned a way to overclock the TI-84 Plus graphing calculator. After some digging I found where the clocks resistor and capacitor were located on the PCB and I soldered a potentiometer in parallel to the resistor. It is a little touchy when tuning, mainly because of the parallel combinations equivalent resistance relationship, but also because the potentiometer I used was a 3/4 turn pot.

• Going back to the NOAA-19 satellite antenna, I had to do some repairs as the antenna was getting beat up from the elements. While I was at it, I also decided to make some improvements as well. At the time, I had purchased a NanoVNA which is a very small vector network analyzer. With this tool, I was able to dial in the antenna to be very resonant on 137.1MHz. At the same time, I also added a low noise amplifier to improve the reception. Sadly I didn't take any images of the S21 measurements of the antenna.

• Later in the month I worked on a small audio equalizer/amplifier for fun.

June 2020

• I continued to explore my new NanoVNA and made a bandpass filter centered at 137.1 MHz to maybe get rid of unwanted harmonics from other transmissions during a 10 minute NOAA image reception. I made each coil for the filter making sure to measure inductance with my LC meter, and used beeswax to keep the coils rigid once soldered on the board.

• And here are some images I was able to capture from the satellite.

Remarks

The projects I worked on from 2018 to the end of 2020 were very defining. They really show how far I have come in terms of self driven learning and discovery. I enjoy electronic circuits very much and have chosen my career path because of that.

From here onwards is where I began my university education. All the projects from here on will be given a dedicated page which will be indexed on the Projects page