Make Kits and Casemods

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Kerry Phelps
5 years ago
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$\ Then I soldered up my Daisy mp3$ player and put it into a laser

1 Make Kits and Casemods This weekend, you ll learn how to make a Minty Boost usb charger and a Daisy mp3 player. After you put these together you can put them into customized cases. I made my charger fit into a plastic dinosaur! \ Then I soldered up my Daisy mp3 player and put it into a laser tag case, complete with working buttons on the gun that control volume. The trigger makes it go to the next track!

2 Minty Boost: Open Source USB Charger This project is a super first soldering project. It s perfect for beginners because its got just a few parts and is something that s practical. People who have had a lot of experience with soldering will be able to whip this up in no time flat. I ve made two. The first one took me about an hour to make and the second one took me about half an hour. When I had a power outage, I charged my cellphone with this great gadget! Lamor s instructions are perfect and they have great rollover notes on the photos that I can t reproduce here, so I m sending you to her instructions at: Get your tools together. 1. Soldering Iron Get the best one you can afford. This one is good. 2. Solder Rosin core 60/40 (It s got lead in it. The lead free stuff is hard to work with, so don t breathe.) 3. Multi-meter Make sure it s got a little speaker symbol so you can tone things out. This one s cheap! 4. Flush or Diagonal cutters Hold onto the ends of wires you cut so that they don t fly into your eyeballs! 5. Desoldering tool This is more important than you might think! 6. Desoldering Braid or Solder Wick 7. Extra Hand I need to get a better one of these!

Materials: 1. Minty Boost Kit http://makezine.com/mintyboost 2. Altoids gum tin or find a fun custom case! 3.

3 Materials: 1. Minty Boost Kit 2. Altoids gum tin or find a fun custom case! 3. Electrical tape it doesn t hurt to wrap the electronics in electrical tape to keep things from shorting out. Follow her directions and you ve got a minty boost, put it in an altoid gum tin or go forth and find something cool to mount it in. I d love to see a minty boost inside a model car! I put mine in a dinosaur to make the Minty-Saur! I just cut a flap with a hobby knife and popped the batteries in it was a tight fit,

4 I may have to make a bigger hole to change the batteries!

5 Daisy: Open Source MP3 Player The Make: Daisy MP3 player is the first open source mp3 player and it s a great kit! Raphael Abrams made it up and it is perfect for someone who has had some experience with soldering and wants to try out soldering surface mounted chips. It s not hard and if you mess up, you can just use solder wick to suck up the blobs of solder you don t want. Before you get started, go read Phillip Torrone s notes on soldering this kit up including a video a video that shows how to use solder wick on the daisy: The tools you ll need are the same ones listed above for the minty boost kit. If you re planning on doing a casemod with this kit, it wouldn t hurt you to have a dremel, which is a super fast handheld drill that s perfect for taking care of pesky plastic bits that get in your way. For materials you ll need:

1. The Make: Daisy mp3 Kit http://makezine.com/daisy 2. An SD card that has a capacity of at least 64 megabytes on it. 3. Some sort of enclosure to put it in.

6 1. The Make: Daisy mp3 Kit 2. An SD card that has a capacity of at least 64 megabytes on it. 3. Some sort of enclosure to put it in. Raphael s instructions are straightforward when combined with this great diagram. The kit comes with written instructions, but you find all the docs here: Soldering: Start with the decoder chip. Then do the stereo jack and the MMC/SD socket. Then do all the.1uf capacitors. Then all the resistors and resistor networks. Follow that with the 40 pin socket and all the remaining components. Be sure to bend the pins on the 10uF low ESR capacitor before you insert it into the board. Don't forget the small wire jumper on the mosfet pads. A piece of one of the leads clipped from a resistor or led works well for that. Remember that the LEDs, diodes, resistor networks, voltage regulator, and the four large capacitors are polarized, so they all have to be put in the right way. Also be absolutely sure to place the chips in the right direction. They have a dot or a notch on the end that has pin 1. On the parts placement diagram, all orientations are noted. The crystals, resistors, small capacitors (.1uF and 22pF) and the slide switch are not polarized, so they

can go in either way. The crystal with the ink mark on it is the 24.576 Mhz crystal.

I scoured Boeing Surplus and Goodwill and finally settled on a laser tag case, thus making this the Laser Daisy.

The gun for the laser tag thing had a few buttons that I hooked up to the pins on the daisy to control volume and

Each button had a color and the way that they work is if you take a pin and connect it to ground, then it does

7 can go in either way. The crystal with the ink mark on it is the Mhz crystal. When you ve got the daisy all made up, it s time to find a case. I scoured Boeing Surplus and Goodwill and finally settled on a laser tag case, thus making this the Laser Daisy. Some of my other options were a seismometer, a child s tape player and a robot. The gun for the laser tag thing had a few buttons that I hooked up to the pins on the daisy to control volume and advancing to the next song. I added a button to go to the previous song. It wasn t hard to wire up the buttons. Each button had a color and the way that they work is if you take a pin and connect it to ground, then it does the action of increasing volume or whatever action is assigned to that pin. I m not kidding when I say that it wasn t hard to figure out. I feel confident that anyone could do this, just check what s connected to what with your

I dremeled away a bunch of annoying plastic bits from the inside of the container to make room for the daisy and it

8 multi-meter on the tone setting so that it will make a sound when you make a connection that connects the leads. Using my dremel, I cut slots for the sd card and the headphone jack in the body of the laser tag chest box. I dremeled away a bunch of annoying plastic bits from the inside of the container to make room for the daisy and it s battery pack. Then I hot glued it in and strapped it on! In this pic you can see the switch that I added and the hot glue!

9 Before I could put music on an sd card, I had to format it FAT32 which is a type of format that can be used on cards of 64 megabytes or more. To do this I had to plug in my card reader into a pc and then just right click on it and choose FAT32 from the format options. In Phillip s overview linked to above, you can see how to do it from a DOS prompt as well. With tunes ready, I slapped together some jackhammer headphones from some ear protection mufflers and a set of headphones that were complimentary on my last airplane flight. Learn more about Jackhammer Headphones here: I m really looking forward to the casemods that you make up. If you ve made a casemod for a kit or managed to repurpose anything into a clever new container, please upload it to the Make Flikr Pool at I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

The Basic Counter. Hobby Electronics Soldering Kit. Instruction Guide

The Basic Counter. Hobby Electronics Soldering Kit. Instruction Guide The Basic Counter Hobby Electronics Soldering Kit Instruction Guide TM For the best outcome, follow each step in order. We recommend reading this guide entirely before you get started. Tools required: