#72 MOTU 828 mk3 teardown

Yet another eBay score - caught this one with a blown power supply. Blown, as in, skidmark inside the casing, circuit board scorched, tracks vaporized. But maybe i'll make that into another article on its own, someday. In the mean time, let's take a peek under the hood of one of these arguable "classics".

#53 JMicron JM20330-based mSATA to ZIF-ATA adapter power modding

A few years ago, in the quest for more storage space, power saving, weight reduction and eliminating sensitivity to shock, i decided to upgrade my old iPod Video (5.5G) from the stock 80GB hard-drive to a 256GB SSD, with the aid of an mSATA to ZIF-ATA adapter, and some mods to the "aftermarket" Rockbox firmware.

... Except that recently, for whatever reason, it's been kinda flaky, and ended up giving up altogether. To aid with stability, i had also performed some hardware mods on the power supply side of things (as well as on the iPod's mainboard). The rationale behind that, at least in part, was the source of the above-mentioned mods, so i'll need to transplant those to this newer one as well.

#28 Active full-range surround speaker project (BN96-12832 & TPA3118)

Since the "unofficial" theme of this blog seems to be repair, recycling and repurposing (more or less), i finally got around to getting knee-deep into this idea, which i started devising quite a while ago - a pair of "slimline" surround speakers.

Disclaimers:
 - No, these are not meant (or supposed) to be "hi-fi". More just for a bit of "ambient noise", if you will, for movies with 5.1 soundtracks. That, and possibly alternative monitoring for checking mixes.
 - No, these are not meant to go terribly loud. Due to, let's call them, physical constraints, they'll be placed at the corners of my sofa (right up against the wall, opposite the TV and the "mains"), so no huge SPL's are required.

#27 Samsung 5V 1A ETA0U81EBE USB travel charger

This one's a quickie, but i figured i might as well document it.

A friend passed me this a few weeks ago, not quite sure why. I don't recall it being mentioned as dead, only not-used. Either way, last night i wanted to charge the battery inside my modded M-Audio Fast Track, in preparation for a local gig next week. Upon plugging it into this thing, the power LED flashed up for an instant, then nothing. I figured it might not like the USB data lines being tied together, as they often are, in chargers; it powered on and worked well with another charger. But that prompted me to crack this one open.