Electronics on the kitchen table

I packed everything in my little case. It's really a mess in there, with cables flying around and every card floating, not fixed on the inside. But it looks quite cool ! I removed the old radio antenna to use its hole to pass my USB cable. Here's how it looks ! As you can see, I let the rotary knob (it's a simple angular potentiometer, in fact) from the amplifier out. It holds with a little nut that was provided with it. The buttons you can see are all fakes, they belonged to the old radio and I forgot to remove them (in fact they're simply glued to the back).  Maybe I'll find some tools to make a nice-looking front panel when my stuff arrives. I'll ask people around me to lend me their tools...  In the end, the radio would have a 20x4 LCD screen to display artist + title and useful infos (like the IP or the volume when you change it from the website, maybe). I think I'll need two more buttons to change the station. I won't...

I added the audio transistors. Before diving into this modification, I wanted to see how deteriorated the sound is when you try to link everything on the same power supply WITHOUT transistors. So I made this little video. You can hear the difference ! First, I noticed that my three little wires (on the output of the VS1053) were badly soldered and caused a short-circuit somewhere. So I removed them, and replaced them with a naked Jack plug. (I took it from a selfie stick. True story. These selfie sticks have an audio Jack plug to be able to take a shot from a button near the hand, that acts just like a button from headphones with mic. End of the story, back to business :p ) I wired the output of the VS1053 to the input of the transformers, and I wired the output of the transformers to the input of the PAM8403 (the amplifier). Since on the input and on the output, they have common ground between the two channels, I kept the common ground. You can see a rough scheme below (the ...

I've got speakers, an amplifier, audio transformers, and a KaRadio. Let's have fun with that ! So in order to connect everything, I took the plugs from the original radio and soldered them along with headers, to connect things easily. Then I soldered headers on the amp side, easy connection. And I wired them together. I also soldered a USB cable on the power input of the amp board. On the VS1053 side, I have a Arduino-shaped board, so I took advantage of some unused pins to wire the output speakers to 3 pins. Again, the easier, the better... Except that soldering these 3 little cables was FRIGGING HARD, they kept swinging and moving around, it was hellish. But oh well, it's done now. Finally, I took 3 wires to link the VS1053 to the amp (it's a PAM8403). The pair ESP8266 + VS1053 has its own power supply (it's a USB battery) while the amplifier has a separate USB power supply. Aaaaaaand it works very well :) I tried to put the whole on the s...

I'm moving out of my appartment. Since my kitchen table couldn't go with me, I left it, so you won't have the marvelous tablecloth full of little cakes anymore. :'( Hopefully, in my room where my mother lives, my desk is an old kitchen table. So in the end, I'm still building stuff on a kitchen table, which is nice.