Now that I have my computer up and running I have been messing around with a program called Virtual DJ. If your into making your own mixes and DJing then this might be a program you want to check out.

Virtual DJ is really cool and feature packed. One of the features is it lets you set 2 sound cards to be the output for Decks A and B allowing you to use a external mixer as your control for your crossfading and main mix output.

After doing this and playing some songs I noticed that the Crossfader on my DJ board (Behringer DX 1000) was cutting the sound out to soon so by the time the slider had made it to the middle both tracks were at half volume. What I wanted was to have Deck A be on full volume till the slider hit half way and then have the volume decline but all of this happening while Desk B’s volume is coming up.

I remember reading in the instructions that you could adjust the slop and overlap of the crossfader. I figured it would be like two knobs on the back or something but the adjustment is on the main motherboard inside of the case. This sounded like a great excuse to take it apart

After removing all the back screws I came to this.

Looking closer down need the Crossfader I found the two potentiometers.

According to the instructions it says not to mess with the overlap but to turn the Slop potentiometers all the way to the right to get what I wanted. (Make sure you check the instructions before doing this to your board) So then after putting all 10 screws back in I hooked the board up and away it went. PERFECT!

That was a fairly simple adjustment and I hope this will help you tune your board to what you want.

I Blake Miller do not take responsibility for damages you might cause to your equipment.

Well I have made myself a 8 LED segment that flashes to the beat of music with Winamp. It’s fairly straight forward. I started with this tutorial.

Here is the parts list

The steps are fairly easy just go through it and you shouldn’t have any problems.
Here are some pictures on the construction of myn.

At first I had lade all the components out onto a bread board where it’s sat there for about a year. Just Yesterday I got the idea of buying a board to stick all the components on. Heres a picture of the before.

This next picture is of all the components soldered onto the board.

Little bit of carpet tape had here it is.

Done!

Heres a Video of all LEDs working!
Click Here (8MB)

This struck me as I was looking for my cables and adapters to plug my bass  into my laptop. As I was heading past Playstation stuff in my crawl space I found a broken PS2 head set. I looked at and got intrigued.

In the following tutorial I will show you how to make a PS2 head set interface act as a sound card on your computer.

What you need:

1. PS2 Headset (Cable must be in tacked passed the volume control)
2. Wire stripers (or Knife)
3. Soldering Iron
4. Solder
5. 1/4″ Mono Male
6. 1/8″ Mono (or Stereo) Female
7. Electrical Tape

Ok to start off cut the cable on the headset closest to the top. Then strip the wire with your wire stripers.

There should be a red, ground, and a black wire. Now the black wire has two more wires inside. The Red and Ground are the output of the box. We will deal with these one’s first.

The Red of cores is the hot and you will want to strip the insulation about 1/2″ down. Then you want to take your 1/8″ Mono (or Stereo) Female and solder the Red to where the tip of the head phone jack is. The take the ground wire and solder it to the ground terminal. Its usually the biggest and comes out of the side of the plug.

Once that is complete you will now want to strip the black wire.  Now there is a white and another ground. Now take the 1/4″ Mono Male and solder it up just like the other one. Should look something like this.

Next you will want to wrap it with lots of electrical tape.

Now plug it in to a USB port and see if it works. In my case I wanted my guitar effects to go through a program called Guitar Rig 2.

First thing you want to do is plug your head phones into the 1/8″ plug. Then plug the 1/4″ end into you Guitar or Bass.

In Guitar Rig 2 you can set the audio devise for input and output. I recommend using the headset for Input and Output because it has less latency. Using the headset of cores only gets you Mono so if you want Stereo then use you sound card as you output devise.

This is of cores very hand for someone playing or wanting to practice on the road. Takes two seconds to hook up and of cores its a easy way of making a cheap pre-amp.

I’ll post some pictures of my complete setup.

About a month ago I went out and purchased a book on C++. I went through it and learned the basics. Yesterday I began work on a program to control inputs and outputs on the LPT port. The interesting part about this is I plan to wire some relays to control back yarded lighting, a few pond pumps and mabey even pool pump and heater.

In this testing stage I just wired some resisters and LED’s onto pins 0 to 7 on the parallel connector. The LED’s I used were 1.5V so I used some resisters to bring down the 5V. If you need any more detail on this feel free to e-mail me.

It’s fairly simple to make the program to run the parallel port. You just have to do some math to figure what values you send out to make certen LED’s light up. The following code is what I used to make sure all 8 outputs are working. It justs randomly flashes the LED’s wired to the parallel plug.


#include
#include
#include

return 0;
}

I saved the following as test_lpt.c. The compiled the file with the fowloing command.


gcc -O test.c -o test_lpt


Then I executed the new test_lpt that I just compiled and made into a program.


sudo ./test_lpt


Now I had to use sudo because the parallel port only works if your logged in as root in the terminal. The program is a continues loop so to escape out of the loop just press Ctrl + C to shut down the program.

The next program shows how to light up LED’s one and two. We will be sending out a value of 3 to do this.


#include
#include
#include

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
if (iopl(3)) /* you could also use ioperm(PORT, 1, 1) */
{
fprintf(stderr, “couldn’t get ports,\ntry running as root\n”);
exit(1);
}
outb(3, PORT);
usleep(500000);
return 0;
}


The one peace of code we will be looking at is outb(). The first value, 3, is what value we are sending out to the parallel port. Now this value will tern the LED on Pin 0 and Pin 1. I recommend learning about binary if you plan on building this your self. The second part, PORT, is just specifying what parallel port to use. This was defined at the beginning of the code.

#define PORT 0x378 /* use your port address here */


Once compiled this program should execute then bring you back to the command line. Your LED’s should have changed.

To conclude, I plan on eventually building a board that will hold 8 relay that will let me control multiple devices executed via cronjobs in Ubuntu Linux. I will update this as the project continues.

As most of you know I have a auxiliary amp that is also used as a second sub woofer. I have found lately that I don’t always want to plug my laptop into the 5.1 surround sound and blast the bass and every thing else through the house. So I have made an adapter for anything with a stereo controlled out put to be converter to Mono. (one channel)

Now here are the specs on the amp.

• 1/4 inch input
• 100 watts (single Channel)

This is what you going to need.

• Stereo head phone cable (Left, Right and Ground)
• 1/4 inch mono plug male
• 1/4 inch stereo plug female (can be 3.5mm if you want to plug in a CD player or something
• two 10k resistors
• solder iron

Okay now I’ll lay out the rest of the process into steps.

Step 1

Cut a length of the head phone cable about 1 foot long. (or how ever long you need to go). Then strip the first jacket of insulation off then you should see one with no insulation, one with red insulation then another with white insulation. You will want to twist the ground (no insulation) together so there tight. Next strip the insulation off the red one then twist it together. Do the same for the white. Then do the other end.

Step 2

We are going to do the easy part first. Take the female stereo end and solder it to one end of the cable. Make sure the ground (no insulation) goes to the ground of the plug. Some are tabs right off the metal case.

Step 3

Next will be the complicating part. Take one of the 10k resistors and solder it to the red lead at the other end of the cable. Next take the second 10k resistor and solder it to the white lead. Then twist the ends of the resistors together. Make sure that before the resistors aren’t touching. I taped myna very well so they wouldn’t touch.

Step 4

Next solder you ground to the out side shield of the 1/4 inch male end of the plug. Then solder your twisted 10k resistors to the tip tab on the plug. Slip the covers over top of them. (or tape them )

Step 5 (only if you have the equipment)

Get out a voltmeter and set it to Ohms. Next you will want to check the grounds to make sure there not shorting out the audio.

Finally

Now if every thing checks out and you are confident, plug the adapter into your amps Line level input. Next tern the volume down on you devise. (CD player, Laptop, Tape deck, etc.) Remember to use the headphones output so you can control the volume. Then plug the other end into you devise. Now tern on the devise then the amp. Now run away just encase it ignites. Now insert a CD or whatever your using that as a part where it uses only the left or the right. In this case I used Queens - Fat Bottom Girlss .

That should be it. If you have any problems, feel free to post them on the forum. Here are a few pictures of the final product in use.