Hello everyone,
ThomasW has graciously agreed to let me play in his digital sandbox with him, so I'll be joining him as co-moderator in this section. Thomas and I have worked together on many projects over the years, in rather complementary roles- I'm more the wildeyed electronics visionary, and he's the guy that keeps me out of trouble when he let's me play in his wood shop to build some of my more bizarre or involved creations.
I'm an electronics engineer by trade, analog and power semiconductor applications engineering, and have a pretty reasonable lab at home. Though I build kits (sometimes for friends with fine motor coordination issues!), I mostly do a lot of roll-your-own-from-scratch, including electronics and PCB design, and speaker design- both full range and subwoofers. Hence, perhaps I'm the Xtreme part of the DIY equation, though I think Thomas holds his own well in that area, too. Anyone putting 12 Avatar Shiva's in a single sub is no lightweight.
Thomas has done a great job putting together some resource lists, which are very useful for finding a lot of sources, basic techniques, and finding out about what others have done that is cool (you don't always have to re-invent the wheel, you know!).
So, we'll want to encourgage discussion of all kinds of DIY projects, including kits, semi-kits, and total home brews. As Thomas has mentioned, some of the kits can be real money savers, delivering very high performance for relatively modest amounts of money. We will warn you, though, that total homebrews, while a real gas to develop and build, rarely come into the "money saver" category, unless you're using a design someone else has done all the developmental legwork for, and you already have a basement full of tools of all kinds. It's no exageration to say that between Thomas and I we have tens of thousands of dollars in equipement and tools at our disposal- so we have to stay real busy to justify it to ourselves! Which is also probably why it is good that we don't have legal significant others that we have to justify it to- I can reckon how that would be tricky at times!
Another natural DIY project is the HTPC, but we'll cover topics for DIY'ing an HTPC in the "Tower of Power" forum where all A/V PC topics will be addressed for now.
So, all you contructors, would-be-contructors, and head scratching third party observers (you know who you are), welcome aboard, let's have some fun, and build something!
-Jon
Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....
ThomasW has graciously agreed to let me play in his digital sandbox with him, so I'll be joining him as co-moderator in this section. Thomas and I have worked together on many projects over the years, in rather complementary roles- I'm more the wildeyed electronics visionary, and he's the guy that keeps me out of trouble when he let's me play in his wood shop to build some of my more bizarre or involved creations.
I'm an electronics engineer by trade, analog and power semiconductor applications engineering, and have a pretty reasonable lab at home. Though I build kits (sometimes for friends with fine motor coordination issues!), I mostly do a lot of roll-your-own-from-scratch, including electronics and PCB design, and speaker design- both full range and subwoofers. Hence, perhaps I'm the Xtreme part of the DIY equation, though I think Thomas holds his own well in that area, too. Anyone putting 12 Avatar Shiva's in a single sub is no lightweight.
Thomas has done a great job putting together some resource lists, which are very useful for finding a lot of sources, basic techniques, and finding out about what others have done that is cool (you don't always have to re-invent the wheel, you know!).
So, we'll want to encourgage discussion of all kinds of DIY projects, including kits, semi-kits, and total home brews. As Thomas has mentioned, some of the kits can be real money savers, delivering very high performance for relatively modest amounts of money. We will warn you, though, that total homebrews, while a real gas to develop and build, rarely come into the "money saver" category, unless you're using a design someone else has done all the developmental legwork for, and you already have a basement full of tools of all kinds. It's no exageration to say that between Thomas and I we have tens of thousands of dollars in equipement and tools at our disposal- so we have to stay real busy to justify it to ourselves! Which is also probably why it is good that we don't have legal significant others that we have to justify it to- I can reckon how that would be tricky at times!
Another natural DIY project is the HTPC, but we'll cover topics for DIY'ing an HTPC in the "Tower of Power" forum where all A/V PC topics will be addressed for now.
So, all you contructors, would-be-contructors, and head scratching third party observers (you know who you are), welcome aboard, let's have some fun, and build something!
-Jon
Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....
Comment