To make this thing I disassembleda cheap knife to get a solid belt clip and metal back plate. I then found one of those hex bit “bandoliers” and a piece of leather. I glued the leather piece to the metal plate attached to the belt clip, and then glued the bit holder on top of that, followed by the other end of the leather piece wrapped around the bit extender tightly and then glued in place. The end result is a nice solid belt clip that holds both the bit extender and 10 hex bits.

Skin is from eBay, the cutouts around the screen didn’t fit 100% but otherwise nice (hadn’t expected 100% perfect from eBay). Matte screen is done with the help of a ViewGuard screen protector.

Tiny DIY USB connector I made for my Sansa Clip+. Instructions here.

DIY angle adapter I made to get rid of those giant USB dongles sticking out.

Moded FiiO E3 USB powered clip-on headphone amp, paired with my Beyerdynamic DT770.

VX Nano mouse and Wacom Bamboo tablet with custom DIY low-profile mini-USB cable.

Sometimes I’m amazed at some of the products that doesn’t exist. Yesterday I was looking around for a anti-dust kit (port covers) for my EEE 1101HA’s unused ports, but only found some for wholesale in China. Other items I’ve needed for my EEE is a better angle adapter, and while you can buy something along the lines of that one it’s nowhere near as small or usable. I also needed a smaller mini-USB cable as I use a Wacom tablet at school to take notes and when it’s placed beside my EEE the USB plug sticks out from the EEE and covers part of the tablet. Apparently, no-one has though of making a low profile USB plug before, at least not as I could find.

Pics really tell the whole story… the angle adapter is covered with Fiio model clay which is a material that you cook in an oven for 30 minutes and it turns hard as plastic. I’ve used it for other projects before and it’s really nice. If anyone require an angle adapter or a small cable, email me using the info here.

(One of the angle adapter pics shows how far the USB drive sticks out without the adapter, faded)

The concept here is two-fold: Add an analog volume knob, and make it USB powered. The volume control part is easy, just wire a stereo potentiometer to the line-in and you have an instant volume control that is much more accessible than the built in digital volume control of any computer. For the second part, you need more parts. USB plug, two 10uF capacitors and a 1.5V voltage regulator. Caps go on both in and out pins (between in and ground, between out and ground) and the USB plug carries the 5V to the input of the voltage regulator where it will magically turn into the 1.5V that the E3 natively runs off of (1x AAA battery).

Lastly I glued both the 3.5mm input jack and the USB plug to the Fiio in a way that makes it plug straight into the side of my EEE 1101HA, no lose cables, and act as a natural extension to my netbook. That way it’s not flimsy or clumsy in any way and I plug my headphones into the E3. The volume control works great and the bass boost is awesome. Best of all, it’s a very cheap project.

I always have a fast 4GB SDHC card in my netbook for transferring files, backing up etc- but sometimes I come across situations where I need to transfer something to or from a computer without a card reader (or one of my own computers and I can’t find the card reader). I’ve been using a small microSDHC card reader with a card to act as such a “shuttlecraft”, but it’s nowhere near as quick as the Ultra II SDHC card I use and it takes up an extra USB port.

The solution I’ve known for ages to be this SD Plus series of Ultra II cards from SanDisk, but they seem to be out of production as I’ve ordered them from several palces and gotten cancelled orders (twice) or the wrong item. I finally found a UK seller on eBay selling them for a decent price, and jumped on one.

The concept behind the card is simple: It’s a full size Ultra II SDHC card, but hinged in the middle to reveal a USB connector. That way it fits into any standard SD card reader – such as the completely flush one on my 1101HA – while acting as it’s own card reader. Awesome.

Using the 1101HA at school and out and about I often find myself with annoying reflections blocking my view, making it hard to impossible to see anything. I started searching around and found a company called ViewGuard that sold matte screen protectors. The price was decent albeit the shipping rate was a bit much, but I ended up buying two 11.6″ protectors which totalled $60 with shipping. Today they arrived and I managed to put one on at the first try with no air bubbles or trapped dust.

The result is pretty good, and while it does degrade the screen quality slightly it helps immensely with the reflection problem. It spreads out the light making clear reflections a thing of the past, and you’re left with some light blobs instead. Since the eye won’t try to focus on these, it’s very effective at making the screen easier to see.

Below are some pictures showing the result- note that the camera doesn’t provide an accurate representation of the result since it focuses on the screen not the picture behind it. Either way, it works and it works well.

Before:

After:

Outside, screen pointing towards the (cloudy) sky:

Reflection in the frame vs reflection in the screen:

A resistor adapter is simply a small adapter between an MP3 player and headphones that has a resistor on each of the sound channels. The reason for this is to increase the resistance of the headphones, forcing the MP3 player to work harder to drive them. Many players (with the Cowon D2 being the most known player with this issue due to its powerful amp) can’t perform well with low impedance headphones such as lightweight 32 ohm headphones or earphones that can go as low as 16 ohm. Beside the issue with the volume control not being sensitive enough to work well at volume levels as low as you might get in such cases, the amplifier in the player simply can’t perform as it should under such low loads.  This issue, called roll-off, mostly affects bass and the effect can be seen very easily in this RMAA graph (courtesy of elektrokrishna.com).

As you can see, the bass frequencies are seriously compromised at 16 ohm load (left side of the graph – it should be flat). At 80 ohm it’s a lot better, but only at 300 ohm is it really as flat as it should be (technically lower than that but there’s nothing showing a load between 80 and 300 int hat graph). This issue is fixed by simply adding a resistor adapter in between the player and the headphones, upping the load on the player and giving you better sound quality (a lot more bass in this case) – granted your player has a roll-off problem.

Tutorial

First off you need to gather parts. You need two identical resistors, and by that I mean IDENTICAL resistors. Two resistors that are said to be 40 ohm, might as well be 38 and 42 ohm, so I urge you to use a multimeter and measure the resistors until you find two that match. As long as they match eachother, it will be fine. Depending on your headphones and their impedance, you need to balance the added impedance versus the loss in battery life (don’t panic; higher volume level caused by the harder-to-drive headphones means a slight loss in battery life, obviously) and the fact you still need to be able to turn the volume up high enough for you to hear (so no 1 kohm resistors, people). I usually recommend about 40-50 ohm for 32 ohm headphones, as 80 ohm is a nice level – even if it doesn’t make the curve above completely flat. If you have a D2 or another player with a powerful amp, you could easily do 100 ohm for the adapter. The parts used aren’t exactly that expensive (not if you buy in bulk, anyways, one by one they might be) so why not make several to experiment?

When you have your resistors, you also need a short wire, a female 3.5mm (1/8″) headphone jack, a male 3.5mm headphone jack, some wide heatshrink, a hot glue gun and a soldering iron (the picture shows two of everything since I made two adapters while taking the pics, a custom cable job for a buyer – see the “custom cables” link at the top!). Of course this is what I used in this particular tutorial, as with all tutorials I do I can’t show you every single design you can do for a resistor adapter, I can only show you one and then you have to take the methods I use and implement them on your own adapter. In other words, you don’t need to match the parts perfectly with what I use. For example, this tutorials shows how to make an angled adapter – you might want a straight one, or one with a short extension cord- etc.

For the 3.5mm male headphone jack, I do recommend the ones I use here – they are simply old earphone plugs split open and stripped to the bare plug. These are excellent low profile plugs and far better than the DIY ones you get at “The Shack” because they are small and cheap. You can also get these from cheap audio cables sold at DealExtreme.

First off, solder the wire to the ground channel of your 3.5mm female jack. On a male 3.5 mm jack, the ground channel is the root of the plug, the right channel the middle of the plug, and the left channel the tip of the plug. You have to extrapolate this to the female jack to see what solder point is what channel. The ground channel is normally in the logical place, but on some connectors – like the ones I use here, the middle solder point of the female jack is actually the left channel and vice versa, as inside the plug there are metal springboard-like connectors that go in opposite direction of the each other, making the channels switch place inside the connector. This can be seen on picture 7 below where you can see inside the connector as the top plate is clear plastic. Bottom line: make sure that what you think is the correct solder point for a specific channel actually is just that.

Using the hot glue gun, glue a resistor to each side of the female jack.

Cut the ground channel wire to length and solder it to the ground connector on the male 3.5mm jack like the picture shows.

Hot glue the male 3.5 mm jack to the female 3.5 mm jack, pointing as shown above. Notice the insides of the female connector and how the springboard-connectors make the channels switch place. Your 3.5 mm female jack might be like this, or it might not. You have to find that out or you risk mixing up the channels.

Solder the resistor legs to the male 3.5 mm jack. Again, make sure you match the channels properly – the tip of the male plug is the left channel, which means that the tip of the solder-end of the male jack is also the left channel. Right is in the middle on both as well. Match this with the correct resistor.

Test that it works. You can use this file to check that you got the channels right (or find out which is which on the female connector if you haven’t already). The first 5 seconds of the audio file plays using both channels, the next 5 seconds is left channel only, while the last 5 seconds is right channel only.

Encase the entire thing in hot glue. This insulates against short circuits and makes the whole thing a lot more sturdy. Please don’t skip this step because it looks ugly, your adapter will self-destruct after 5 minutes of use.

To make it a bit better looking, you can use heatshrink. I found that 20 mm (diameter) heatshrink worked well for the two adapters I made here. I recommend getting heatshrink that’s narrower than what you need and then use needle-nose pliers to extend it. That way you get better shrink ratio to better cover the less-than-symmetric adapter you just made.

That’s it, you now have a resistor adapter. If you’d like, you can take a look at the video below. It’s very old, from the first resistor adapter how-to I made. Still, might be useful in some way (though I doubt it).

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The FrankenFiiO (V1-V2 link, V3-V4 link) mods were a series of mods I did to the FiiO E3 $7 headphone amp (black, white) about a year or so ago. It started with some rather ugly, bulky devices and ended with a sleek, wooden amp with it’s own analog volume control – the V4. The V4 was the one the guy in the email wanted to know about, so the schematics and tutorial shows how to wire that setup. However, the box design is more or less the only thing different between the versions, so the basic concept applies no matter what you want to do with it.

Parts needed

Obviousely you’ll need an E3. You’ll also need some wires, a stereo potentiometer designed for audio use (there are a billion different ones so pick one that fits your project), two female 3.5mm (1/8″) audio jack connectors and some wires. You also need some way of turning the thing on and off – the default way of turning an E3 on and off is to insert a headphone plug in the headphone port. A method that is even less usable when you’re going to rewire everything. You can therefor either buy a power button, or get a stereo potentiometer with a built in on/off feature. These work by having a on/off clickswitch when you turn the volume all the way down (these are very common in cheap portable radios etc so you’ve probably used one and know what I’m talking about). There are also 3.5mm jacks that will do the same as the stock FiiO jack and turn it on when a plug is inserted. Whatever floats your boat. In any case, if you’re not using the stock on/off method, you will also need a 3.5mm male hadphone jack – just cut it off some crappy headphones or acquire one in some way or another.

Wireing

The wireing is pretty simple and straight forward. First off, get rid of the casing so only the PCB (motherboard) is left. The cut-off headphone jack should be inserted into the headphone-out on the E3 PCB (you can cut off as much as you want of what sticks out, but be sure to not short circuit the 3 channels in the jack). This is necessary to have the E3 always be on so that we can wire a new power switch directly from the battery or it wouldn’t work since the E3 would think no headphone was connected and not turn on).

Each end of the E3 PCB has an audio jack. Take notice of which one’s in and out (by looking at the casing). There are basically 3 SEPARATE solder points on each jack – one on top, one in the middle and one at the bottom. On a male 3.5mm jack, the tip is the left channel, the middle is the right channel, and the base/root is the ground channel. When you insert the male plug into a female connector, that is of course flipped so the left channel (that the male tip touches) is farthest from the jack hole. The right channel is still the middle, and the ground channel is closest to the jack hole. It’s important to know where each channel is within the plug, as some female connectors are rather deceiving when it comes to this; the ones I used on my E3 mod had a transparent top plate where you could luckily see that the middle solder point actually was the left channel and vice versa as they switched places inside the connector itself. Point being: make sure you solder the left channel wire to the left channel connector, not just what you THINK is the left channel connector – and so on. The external female connectors shown in the schematics show the internal connectors, not the external, as they vary depending on what connectors you use- so pay attention.

When you have the audio connectors sorted out and know what solder point is the correct channel, the rest is pretty simple. For the input jack, you simply solder a wire each on the left, right and ground channel connectors on the stock E3 audio connector and then solder the wires to the corresponding sodler points on one of your external female audio connectors – as shown in the schematic.

The output jack is a bit more tricky, but it looks more complicated than it is. You basically wire it the same way, but on the way from the stock audio connector on the PCB to the new audio connector the wires have to “stop by” the potentiometer so you can control the output volume. A stereo potentiometer will in most cases have 6 solder points – 8 if it has a built in on/off switch like mine (and the one in the schematic). The 6 ones that are clustered together is what you need to look at first. If you hold the potentiometer with the solder points pointing towards you and the volume knob shaft pointing to your right, then you’ll have a matrix of 2×3 solder points. The bottom two solder points is the audio input for each of the left/right channels, the middle two are the audio outputs for the left/right channels and the top two are the ground pins. As shown in the schematic, you solder a wire from the left channel of the stock female connector on the PCB to the left (or right, but lets keep it clean) bottom solder point on the potentiometer, then a wire from the left middle solder point on the potentiometer and to the corresponding left channel solder point on the new external 3.5mm female audio connector. Then you do the same thing for the left channel. For the ground channel, just solder the wire from the stock connector’s ground channel to BOTH of the top solder points on the potentiometer and then to the ground pin on the external 3.5mm connector (you can do this with one wire if you wish, just removing some insulation in the middle and soldering that to the potentiometer pins. The schematic shows all of this.

The last thing to do is to add the power switch. Solder a wire on each of the battery connectors. One of the wires you connect directly to the battery (make sure you connect to the right end of the battery by looking at how it would sit in the stock battery holder), and the other one you solder to either of the two solder points on your power switch (in my case one of the two remaining pins on the potentiometer). Then you solder a wire from the other solder point on your power switch and to the other end of the battery. As for the battery, it has to be 1.5V – but if possible you should cram as much in there as possible. You can do that in several ways: by using a bigger batter, such as a AA, C or even D battery instead of the AAA, or by connecting several batteries in parallel (NOT series). For example, if you have a flat box that will fit several AAAs but no AA, you can use several AAAs by connecting the positive ends of each batteries to one another and the same with the negative ends (NOT postivie to negative as that will increase the voltage, not capacity). An AAA battery has approximately 1000mAh, an AA battery 2000mAh, a C battery 6000mAh and a D battery 12000mAh, but the actual capacities vary by brand. A crappy AAA can have 500mAh or less and a good D battery can have 20000mAh. If – for example – you used 2 lithium AA batteries with a capacity of about 3000mAh (those fancy expensive Energizer ones) that would give you 10 times the battery life of one crappy AAA battery. You get the point. Cram as much capacity in there as you can, but make sure it’s 1.5V.

That’s it. I explained this in more detail than necessary so here’s the short version: Put a cut-off 3.5mm connector into the input jack to override the built in on/off feature, rewire the audio-input to a new connector, do the same with the audio-output but wire it via a potentiometer. Rewire the battery and add a power switch.

Case

I’m not going to show you how to carve a wooden case like the one I made as it’s one of those things that require skills, not a tutorial. Either you know how to do it, or you’re too inexperienced with the tools needed to do it even if I told you. Amps fit into a variety of things from mint boxes to random plastic storage boxes or tuna cans. Use your imagination

The basic idea here is that the iPhone itself will still be about the same as it is today, but with 3 docking ports where 2 are on the side. What are these two ports for? Connecting an iPod touch that also has two connectors on the side by means of a small cheap accessory that acts as a hinge and a data transfer medium. An ipod touch is now $199, which frankly doesn’t make it that big an investment considering what you could do with such a setup, and the extra storage space it would give you.

Extra hardware

To connect the devices you could use WiFi Ad-Hoc (device-to-device WiFi) but you need a way to clip them together anyways, so might as well use dock connectors or something of the sort. I’m sure that a way of making this work isn’t a big problem for any hardware engineer.

Extended screens

One of the most obvious uses for this would be extended screen. Double the main menu icons, double the screen space for web browsing etc. It’s a simple thing to do that could really improve usability with the extra resolution.

Multitasking

Multitasking is a touchy (pardon the pun) subject on the iphone/touch. Not only would this setup give twice the RAM, CPU, GPU etc if they could work together – it would also double the screen real-estate as to letting you have two open apps at once. Imagine Spotify open while reading a book like the example below!

Keyboard

Two screens gives you a LOT of space for the keyboard- you can have it on the bottom screen while doing stuff on the top screen, or you could even split it between the two screens in portrait mode and get a 640 pixel wide keyboard- up from the 480 pixel wide landscape keyboard we have now.

Gaming

The iPhone is a nice gaming platform, but the lack of controls is an issue- you can put controls on the screen, but that means you block a lot of it as well! When you have two screens, that’s no issue – show the game on the top screen, controls on the bottom.

Seperating the devices – WiFi Ad-Hoc

Not to be overlooked is what you can do with two such devices even if they’re not physically connected. Imagine if the phone rings- you answer it on the iPhone part, while the ipod touch is taken off and show information about the caller (like the caller screen does today, but you’d have it right there without having to take the phone off your ear), take notes, look up stuff etc.

Furthermore, WiFi Ad Hoc would allow you to connect one device to a TV or a stereo system and use the other device to control it. This would not only give you perfect quality on everything you play back (vs f.ex Bluetooth audio streaming) but it would also solve the problem of interference from the iPhone GSM services if the touch was the device being docked.

There are plenty of uses for this – remote control for the camera, stereo audio recording, dual-angle video recording (once the touch gets a camera) etc etc. The possibilities are endless.

Probability of happening

This idea isn’t farfetched. It’s fully possibly with the hardware already in the devices out today if you used WiFi instead of the physical connectors. All that is needed is software – software that frankly isn’t all that complicated. Still, this is Apple. Despite the innovation they often do, they aren’t really used to thinking this much outside the box. Still, a person can dream.