If you haven’t soldered in a while, or haven’t been happy with the results of your work in the past, WATCH THIS VIDEO.

There’s some ads to keep people from stealing it, but it tells you exactly how to solder properly. It says you need to always apply flux before remelting a joint. In the instructions I’ll tell you to do it without additional flux. It’s been my experience that this is OK. I guess the joint is still new and clean enough that it Does The Right Thing. You can always add flux if you want, it will never hurt.

Shortcuts

I’m going to take a few shortcuts in the write up, so I should tell you about them ahead of time:

• I use the now-familiar-to-me but originally wacky notation for resistor and capacitor values. For example, instead of writing “2.2μF” for the tiny capacitors, I just write “2u2″. Instead of “4.7kΩ” I write “4k7″. I don’t really get the origin of this practice, you can look it up if you’re curious. It is consistent on the board and in my instructions, though.
• Do bend the leads of any round part (resistor, capacitor) after you’ve placed it on the board. This will help keep it in place while you solder.
• Don’t bend the leads of any square parts. Those parts are soft and things can get out of hand quickly.
• I like my parts flush and square. There’s an easy way to do this: once you’ve got one leg soldered down remelt the solder with one hand while pushing the part flush and straight with the other hand. This leaves you with a nice result and is worth the trouble. You can do this a few times if you need to. You should do this on every part though the tube socket doesn’t really need it.
• I’m going to skip pictures of actually soldering the joints. When I say “install” I mean “place on the board, and then solder.”

Populating the Board

1. Get the inner-most resistors (two 4k7Ω + one 560Ω) ready. It doesn’t matter which way you put these in, though I like to have the color bands of the two side-by-side resistors lined up. Also get the tiny LED ready to be soldered. NOTE that the long (positive) leg of the LED goes on the resistor side. This is very important and if you get it wrong your tube won’t light up!
   
2. Install the tube socket. I put some tape on top so the LED wouldn’t fall out; if you bent the legs of the LED you don’t need to do this.
   
3. Install the various rectangular bits. If you look at the pieces you should have four parts with 3 legs and one part with 4 legs. You’ll also notice that they have tabs on the back. You need to line these up with the thick white lines on the silk screen. Basically all the parts will face inwards. As for the four 3 leg pieces, the pieces with “IRF” printed on them go in the position labelled “FET”. Put the LM317′s in the unlabeled positions.
   
4. Soldering those pieces can be tricky. On at least one pair the metal tab will get hot from the heat transfer of the soldering iron, so watch out! I like to solder in one leg to keep the part still, and then remelt the solder to get the part flush and straight and all that jazz. If you’re not a perfectionist don’t worry about it. Everything should have enough clearance.
   
5. Install the heat-sinks along with the little kits of screws and sheets and nuts and washers that came with them. The kit has a picture of the order to put everything in.
   
6. Next it’s time to install the capacitors. All their spots say which ones to use. They’re also marked with a + for the positive leg hole. When looking at the capacitor you’ll see that the body has a stripe with – on it next to one of the legs. That’s the negative leg. Don’t put the negative leg in the + hole or things will explode. I’m not kidding!
   
7. Bend and add the resistors. I like to have the wire side facing the tube so that when you look at the amp you see the resistors themselves instead of the leads. I also like to put the gold bands on the same side (top or bottom). I’m kind of picky like that. All the holes are marked with which size goes where. Additionally the design is perfectly symmetrical at this point so it’s going to be hard to goof up.
   
   
8. That does it for the board itself! Yay!

Peripherals and Enclosures

The next part is to connect the peripherals like the audio jacks, power jack, toggle switch, and volume pot. This is pretty specific to the kind of enclosure you’re using so I won’t go into too many details aside from explaining where the various connections go.

Power

Depending on the power supply you have, it will either be “center positive” or “center negative”. The easiest way to figure out which pin on the power jack is which is to plug it in and use your multimeter! Which ever pin is positive should go to the “POWER IN Vin” pad. Whichever pin is ground should go to the “POWER IN gnd” pad. If you’re going to use the potentiometer, you need to run a wire from your power jack positive to one of the back two terminals on the potentiometer. You then need to run another wire from the other terminal back to the “POWER IN Vin” pad. It doesn’t matter which terminal goes where.

Audio In

Your audio jack is going to have three pints: left, right, and ground. The ground pin will be the odd man out in way or another. As far as left and right, it doesn’t matter so long as you’re consistent with the input jack and the output jack. The ground pins are important, please don’t skip them.

Audio Out

The audio out can be a little tricky. The board is set up such that you can have a toggle switch to change between your source audio, and the amplified audio. This part is optional, though so far everybody’s chosen to install it. The volume/power pot is technically optional as well, though, again, everybody has chosen to use it.

Hopefully this picture makes sense. If it doesn’t, leave a comment or email me or something.

Finished Product

Here’s some photos of the Amputrons my wife and I built. She designed the enclosures. We laser cut them out of acrylic and bent them at TechShop in Menlo Park. You can see the bending process in the gallery. Don’t get two confused, we mixed up photos of two different pieces of acrylic; it’s not magically changing colors!

You might have noticed two sets of pads on the board labeled “LED1″ and “LED2″. These are for accessories and give you direct access to the regulated 12V flowing throughout the board. In the examples below, mine on the left doesn’t have any accessories. My wife’s, on the left, has two 1 Watt blue LED arrays connected to the LED1 & LED2 pads.

So there you have it! If you have any questions leave a note below!

Hannah:

Higgins:

For some reason only the small version is embeddable.

Jess is very happy with the results and is going to show it off on her desk at work. Yay!

I made a short video that shows it off.

WARNING…DANGER AHEAD…do not make these cookies unless you are on an all cookie diet. You have been warned.

Yeah, they’re that good. What’s below is the doubled up version that makes about 48 cookies. In the instructions she says to make them “wallnut sized” on the cookie sheet. I found that using a 1 tsp spoon worked really well, just be a bit generous and you’ll be set.

Sift all of these together and mix

• 4.5 Cups all purpose flour
• 1 tbsp + 1 tsp ground ginger
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1.5 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• .5 tsp salt

Put these in a mixer until light and fluffy. God help you if you don’t have a mixer

• 1.5 cups margarine/butter, softened
• 2 cups white sugar

Add these one at a time, slowly

• 2 eggs
• 0.5 cup molasses + 2 tbsp water

Then very slowly add the dry stuff. That will probably take a few minutes.

Like I said above, using a 1 tsp measure will get you pretty decently sized cookies if you’re a bit generous with the scoops. Put them about 1.5 inches apart on the sheet so they don’t run in to each other.

Get the oven up to 350°F and bake for 8-10 minutes. When they come out of the oven they’ll be pretty squishy and puffed up. They’ll firm up and flatten back out if you let them sit on the sheet for a few minutes. After that put them on a rack/parchment/paper bags/whatever to finish cooling, then into baggies.

Turns out doing that makes the machine unstable when you push the CPU to its limit. You get BSOD’s or applications crash or whatever. I eventually figured out that taking the CPU back to it’s default clock settings made life much much more stable. Once I did the overclock properly (increase multiplier and voltage) things worked better, but were much, much hotter.

Fast forward to today. My new Xigmatek HDT S1284 arrived and I was ready to strap it on. This new heatsink/fan combo is very highly rated, and quiet. It’s also very tall. You can see the difference in the pictures below.

The new cooler is a beast, but the results are impressive.

Stock system: 2.5GHz; 50°C idle → 71°C fully busy (Prime95)
OC’d system: 3.0GHz; 39°C idle → 54°C fully busy (Prime95)

The new system is 20% faster and 22-24% cooler. That’s a win in my book!

UPDATE: Real world testing (encoding 5th Element from Blu-Ray to mkv) is 15% faster! (4h 29m 54s versus 3h 49m 24s)