Category: Modifications

Anything relating to computer and electronic hacks will be posted here.

Audio Click Xubuntu 14.04.1 LTS

Blake

I had finally had enough of a very annoying clicking noise through the headphones on my HP Pavilion dm1 Netbook. I love this machine because of its compact size and long lasting battery. The system originally had Windows 7 witch was a struggle with just an Atom processor. I fell in love with Xubuntu on this machine immediately with one slight annoyance. Every 10 seconds there was a click in the audio. This only happened when there was no audio playing. It also went away when the audio mixer was open but why waste the ram keeping it open?

Solution was simple enough. Power save kept switching the Intel sound card on and off every 10 seconds causing the click. Solution? Turn it on and leave it on! Here are the steps.

First, open a terminal window.

sudo nano /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/intel-audio-powersave

Comment out the following line with a #.

# INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE=${INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE:-true}

And then add the following line below the pervious line.

INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE=false

Save the file and reboot the computer. That is it, no more click!

Synergy with Ubuntu & Windows

Blake

Synergy let you share a single mouse and keyboard across multiple computers. In the following example, thewall is going to have our server and laptopnew is going to be our second computer. thewall, is to the right of laptopnew. thewall is also our linux box running Linux Mint (gnome). laptopnew is running Windows 7 x64.

First thing we need to do is install Synergy on our two machines. On the linux box run:

sudo aptitude install synergy

Next we need to install Synergy on our second computer. The version of Synergy in the Ubuntu repos is version 1.3 so we need to install that version. Click here for the download list.

Once you have it installed on both machines we need to create our configuration file. The following is an example of my configuration file.

gedit ~/.synergy

Configuration file:

section: screens
thewall:
laptopnew:
end

section: aliases
laptopnew:
192.168.1.24
end

section: links
thewall:
left = laptopnew
laptopnew:
right = thewall
end

section: options
screenSaverSync = false

end

For this to work correctly you must use the hostnames of both machines. Now we can open a terminal and run:

synergys

This will start the server; next we want to hit the start button on the client. You should now be able to move your mouse between the two computers! Synergy also allows you to copy and paste (text only) between the machines.

To get the synergy server to run on startup we can just add it to the gnome startup. Menu -> Preferences -> Start Up Applications.

The next time you reboot Synergy should start automatically. That concludes this tutorial, if you have any questions or comments please leave them below.

Crossfader on Behringer DX 1000

Blake

Now that I have my computer up and running I have been messing around with a program called Virtual DJ. If your into making your own mixes and DJing then this might be a program you want to check out.

Virtual DJ is really cool and feature packed. One of the features is it lets you set 2 sound cards to be the output for Decks A and B allowing you to use a external mixer as your control for your crossfading and main mix output.

After doing this and playing some songs I noticed that the Crossfader on my DJ board (Behringer DX 1000) was cutting the sound out to soon so by the time the slider had made it to the middle both tracks were at half volume. What I wanted was to have Deck A be on full volume till the slider hit half way and then have the volume decline but all of this happening while Desk B’s volume is coming up.

I remember reading in the instructions that you could adjust the slop and overlap of the crossfader. I figured it would be like two knobs on the back or something but the adjustment is on the main motherboard inside of the case. This sounded like a great excuse to take it apart 😀

After removing all the back screws I came to this.

P1020457 P1020458

Looking closer down need the Crossfader I found the two potentiometers.

P1020459 P1020461

According to the instructions it says not to mess with the overlap but to turn the Slop potentiometers all the way to the right to get what I wanted. (Make sure you check the instructions before doing this to your board) So then after putting all 10 screws back in I hooked the board up and away it went. PERFECT!

That was a fairly simple adjustment and I hope this will help you tune your board to what you want.

I Blake Miller do not take responsibility for damages you might cause to your equipment.

Winamp LED Visualization

Blake

Well I have made myself a 8 LED segment that flashes to the beat of music with Winamp. It’s fairly straight forward. I started with this tutorial.

Here is the parts list

  • 1.5 Volt LED’s (under 30mA)
  • 1 Sided circuit board
  • 1 Male LPT plug
  • 160ohm Resisters

The steps are fairly easy just go through it and you shouldn’t have any problems.
Here are some pictures on the construction of myn.

At first I had lade all the components out onto a bread board where it’s sat there for about a year. Just Yesterday I got the idea of buying a board to stick all the components on. Heres a picture of the before.

Bread Board

This next picture is of all the components soldered onto the board.

p1010322.JPG

Little bit of carpet tape had here it is.
p1010323.JPG

Done!
p1010331.JPG

PS2 Head set into Guitar Pre-amp

Blake

This struck me as I was looking for my cables and adapters to plug my bass into my laptop. As I was heading past Playstation stuff, in my crawl space, I found a broken PS2 head set. I looked at and got intrigued.

In the following tutorial I will show how to make a PS2 headset interface act as a mono input and output sound card on your computer.

What you need:

  1. PS2 Headset (Cable must be in tacked passed the volume control)
  2. Wire strippers (or Knife)
  3. Soldering Iron
  4. Solder
  5. 1/4″ Mono Male
  6. 1/8″ Mono (or Stereo) Female
  7. Electrical Tape

To start off, cut the cable on the headset closest to the top. Then strip the wire with your wire stripes.

There should be a red, ground, and a black wire. Now the black wire has two more wires inside. Start by stripping that. The Red and Ground are the output of the box. We will deal with these one’s first.

The Red is the audio output and you will want to strip the insulation about 1/2″ down. Then take the 1/8″ Mono (or Stereo) Female end and solder the Red to where the tip of the head phone jack is. Then take the ground wire and solder it to the ground terminal. Its usually the biggest and comes out of the side of the plug.

P1000623

Once that is complete you will now want to strip the black wire. Now there is a white and another ground. Take the 1/4″ Mono Male and solder it up just like the other one. Should look something like this. White to tip and ground to the outside shield.

P1000634

Next, you might want to get a peace of something that’s non-conductive to support the two jacks together and wrap them with electrical tape or something else non-conductive.

P1000652

Plug it in to a USB port and see if it works. I tested it with Guitar Rig 2 by Native Instruments and my guitar.

First thing you want to do is plug your headphones into the 1/8″ plug. Then plug the 1/4″ end into you Guitar or Bass.

In Guitar Rig 2 you can set the audio devise for input and output. I recommend using the headset for Input and Output because it has less latency then most on-board sound cards. Using the headset only gets you Mono, so if you want Stereo then use sound card as you output devise.

This is very hand for someone playing or wanting to practice on the road. Takes two seconds to hook up and can also be used in other applications.