Sparkbyte_Studios

Sooo I had much work these days. I ordered all the parts I need for the synthesizer, but I don’t know how long they’ll take to arrive. I need a screen, PCM5102 DAC’s, XH-A156 4 channel amplifier board, speakers and so on. Now that I have ordered them and waiting for them to arrive to conduct my tests I’ve started working on some of the code, just to showcase how it works, before my stuff arrive. since the ESP32 has internal DAC and I have op-amps, I can easily make at least some of the tests so that the code I make and the things I ordered will work as intended. Anyways to show you what else I worked on since I need it for school, below you can see an AC generator that powers an LED. Since later this month my school will have an event where it’ll open our STEM centers and individuals like the minister of education of my country and so on will be there, the school has decided me and some other people to represent the school with a presentation for alternating current, so I made this project and the one before with the sine wave generator and I have other ones that I haven’t posted about that are homemade phase meter and some osciloscope projects to represent the school in my own engineering way and to wow the people that I’ll be presenting to. Hope you like my project too! Tomorow I’ll make a video as a demo of the waves I’ll be using and some mathematical equations of how to express them so I think that’s what I’ll post for the second week of “Locked in” sidequest.

Started working on the ESP32 code and made a sine wave output. I will post the code on github and make a tiktok video about my progress and how to make a Wien Bridge oscillator. Then Imma ship the project to keep the requirements of the “Locked in” sidequest. I will continue the project in a few days and post it as an update to this one, but for now this are my acomplishments. This will be a fuuun project :).

I saw the “Locked in” sidequest and thought “hmm what project should I do??” I went through 20 different stuff and got ideas from chatgpt, but I didn’t like any of them. Then I remembered 2 things, one - that I needed to make a sine wave generator for a presentation in school, and two - a girl I like who wants to be a singer told me that she saves money to buy a synthesizer for her music production (I told her she can ask whatever questions she had, and Im certainly helping her with her own song she wants to produce :) ). Anyway I started thinking of something interesting, why don’t I make a synthesizer from a few different types of waves and there we go, that’s what Im making. For now I made the Wien Bridge oscillator for the sine wave generator and it’s a massive success. For my project though I’ll be using ESP32 and it’s wave generating capabilities. I’ll just be using some Op-Amps to clean the generated waves. I’ll also add 2 rows of 8 buttons for the notes and 2 octaves (making it like a 4x4 matrix since the ESP32 doesn’t have a whole load of pins to work with) and a homemade oscillator to visualise the waves. Im making them interfere (mix) when some buttons are pressed together. I think it’s going to be so cool. P.S. I really need a variable power supply and Im thinking of buying one soon.

Made the tik tok video so now the project is ready for shipping. Added a sample video of my game down below. The video you’re going to see is an unlisted youtube one, but you can always go to my tik tok page and follow it if you like what I do! Thanks alot! :)

For the last week or so I thought it was ok, but it still isn’t :”( The copper wire that me and my friend ordered that was supposedly good for coils was straight up just a copper wire. Me and my friend were upset that nothing worked until we went to my dad’s friend again. we discussed for about 20 minutes what could the problem be until we finally knew i was the wire we purchased. the coils were acting as 0.28 ohm resistors all along sine they had no polish and were shorting out. Today we went to another guy in my town who winds coils and sell them. he wounded us 8 and did not ask for an euro too which suprised me, and although I wanted to give him the money he wouldn’t take it. Anyways for the first time the project was going fine, it finally worked as intended!!… buuut only for one coil. We solved all kinds of maths and physics equations so that we were sure about it. The only thing we need right now is a bigger power supply. Something over 6A I think. While we find it, it was a great journey to get to here. 3 days in a row me and my friend went to each other’s homes to work on it and we are so close to finishing. I wanted it to work for today since my school had an open doors event. Although it didn’t It feels good that after this much struggle it is almost done! Bye for now!

Hello everyone! This is the first devlog for this project. I had only a few days to make the game and had to act fast. This project was for my school’s open doors event and both me and a friend of mine worked on it. I forgot to make at least one good picture of the prototype, but what I have is a photo of the layout since I needed it for the final soldering project (Turned out great btw). It’s nothing fancy for sure, it has an arduino nano, a cheap TFT screen, 3 buttons and a passive buzzer. The game is nothing better than a 80’s game where you shoot meteorites with a rocket, but it looks cool and both my classmates and the people that came on the event realy liked it. Anyways I’ll submit the code in a githhub repo so that you can try it if you have the necessary components to make it. I’ll also make a tik tok video these days since it’s not that serious for an youtube video. after it’s been posted I’ll ship the project. Hope you like it!

These few weeks were painfully filled with work. The base with the coils is ready. It’s not in a perfectly clean condition and me and my dad will cut the top of the tube the ball goes in so it’s visible. I’ve made the final design of the pcb’s and ordered it. For it I consulted with a friend of mine that is an engineer and knows at least 100x more than me. He explained the flaws in my previous design and schematic and made me a new one which works great. I’ve added in a few stuff in it, but the structure is mostly his. The consultation also gave me better knowledge of how to properly structure my scematics ao all and all it was great to do this project since I learned a lot of stuff too. After I made the schematic, the pcb’s and the base is almost done, it’s safe to say that soon it will be ready. Aaand it should be since my school has an open doors event and me and my friend should show it off there (Which is a part of why these past few weeks I’ve been working my a** off to get it going so that I have test and fine tuning time. I will finish the project here after I complete a podcast for my school and I finish the video for the project on youtube. Btw to whoever is seeing this, how’s your day going?😁✌️

Still working on it. Wounded up some coils yesterday, My grandpa had some work to be done, so he didn’t have the time to start me and my friend’s project, but now he finally has started. I’m working on the code still, but it’s hard when I don’t have the construction on me. I’ll tune it once we are ready. I still am thinking of how do I make the cirquits that attach to the coils. I didn’t have the time to design a cirquit board so I’ll be soldering the parts on a development board. In my opinion if everything is in order it’ll work amazing. The picture below shows the plans me and my grandpa made yesterday about how it’s going to look. Stay tuned!😁

Me and a friend of mine were working on that for some time and I have to tell you we have a full proof plan. As of now I’ve collected most of the components and maretials I need. My grandpa, a woodworker and a great influence for my sketchy ideas🤭, is making the stand we need to make the project real. As you can see on the photo below we need a few things: coils (in our case 8 since our coils are smaller…), magnetically neutral base and a chote which the ball moves in (They’ve done it with some metal rods, we are doing it with a metal pipe (basically the same, with some limited visibility ig🙃)) and other components which we don’t have, but will make on our own. We are adding in a microcontroler (aka Arduino Uno Mini) which controls the mosfets, that are connected to the coils and make the switching on and off possible (we are making it so the magnet stops when the ball passes through to avoid overheating) and we are adding hall effect sensors to get data for how fast does the ball move at any given time. I’m thinking we’ll need something ese since I don’t know if we’ll be able to calculate the exact time the ball passess through the magnet, but well figure it out. we still have some things to figure out beforehand so tune in!😁

The board is finally ready and what can I say… It looks absolutely amazing! I couldn’t write a dev log when I made since I was busy making the youtube video and now that it’s done I am writing this. I gave it to my friend, he made a beautiful box and filled it with chocolates, paper confetti and put the board inside with a note saying “This heart needs a battery to glow. Mine only needs you” which is the cutest thing ever. Anyways thanks for reading this and supporting my humble idea. I’ll be thankful if you watch the youtube video, give it a like and write a comment if you like it. Thanks again and till the next project!

I’ve been busy this past week (02.02–06.02) and some time before that. I made a working prototype first to check if everything was OK before designing the PCB (the video below shows it — I’ll explain the parts list in the YouTube video and in the GitHub readme when I post the final design).
I modeled the PCB from the schematic I showed in the previous devlog. I did it in KiCad — slowly 😅 since I was learning the app WHILE working on the project and didn’t have much spare time. I recreated the schematic but changed one thing: I flipped the batch of 3 LED pairs 180° because otherwise I couldn’t route them properly. More details in the video, which should come out on Valentine’s Day or the day before. I’ve got about 4 hours of footage to edit since I recorded almost every step 🤭.
The PCBs should arrive tomorrow according to JLCPCB. I’ll solder everything and post another devlog showing how it looks and works. Honestly super excited — it’s my first PCB ever!
Sadly, the original idea for a book-style card that lights up when opened (reed switch + magnet) won’t work. I planned to 3D print the body at school, but it takes too long 😣. Our school recently did a game hiding 3D printed “school coins” (≈5×5×0.2 cm), and one coin takes about 4 hours to print. My book would need ~2 days. Plus the printer can only run during school hours, so there’s no time.
Me and a friend came up with another idea: I’ll use a normal switch on the PCB and he’ll make a card to house it. Final photos coming when it’s ready.
Till tomorrow yall 😁!

I collected what I need for this project. I bought all kinds of parts - LED’s ofc, capacitors, resistors, transistors, a mosfet, and all of these cool stuff. Unfortunately I won’t be able to make a passive buzzer sing songs through an ESP-32 SuperMini since it’s too much work and I wont be able to complete it in time (Maybe next year I’ll make a v2, who knows?😁). I told my friend that when I’m ready, he can send it to his long distance GF so I need to get it ready in time. However I thought of a better idea to add effects to the LED heart, without a microcontroler, by making an astable oscillator, and in my schematic projects I did on my tablet in school (Proto app on android, it’s pretty cool) it’s looking fantastic. More on how it works in the youtube video I’m making about it, that will come up either on Valentine’s day, or short before it.❤️☺️