Dec 20
Some hardware hacking
I did my first simple hardware project in a long time yesterday. I spent a good chunk of my high school years and immediately after with a soldering iron. Since then, not so much. I recently picked one up and have plans to design & build guitar effects units.
The first project was simple, and accomplished 2 goals:
- The USB cable to hook my guitar to my iMac (for Garageband) was really stiff and annoying to use. I wanted a way to use a standard guitar cable.
- Having the audio output connection on the back of the iMac is a royal pain in the ass. It wasn’t such a problem before, but now that I’m practicing with headphones, it is. I wanted to be able to move between my external speakers and headphones with a flick of a switch. It would also be nice to have a 1/4″ headphone jack
With these goals in mind, I headed to Fry’s for the requisite bits & pieces. After drilling out the project box, I had:
This project was pretty trivial. Just a housing and some wiring. A good re-starter project. Anyway, here’s with the wiring completed:
And the final unit securely in place on the underside of the front edge of my desk:
I have more ambitious projects planned 
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