BG ElectroMech

A while after I put my watch project on standby, I felt like I wanted to work on a nice electronics project for myself. I’ve done multiple successful PCBA (Printed Circuit Board Assembly) designs and builds at my work, but the projects were for the company and not for me. Even most if not all my successful electronics projects I made at home weren’t for me. Two successful projects I have in mind are a chess timer I made for my brother, and a light box I made for my girlfriend.

The chess timer was a complicated circuit I chaotically threw together and all shoved into a stainless box, and the light box was a project with simple electronics, that focused more on me finding what my design style is.

Making something cool for someone is the best driver to completing something, but attachment theory is an interesting beast. Using Christmas and the person you love as a driver to complete something is incredibly effective, at the cost of enforcing a deep anxious attachment to your projects if you’re not careful. Making something for myself, without a timeline, and actually completing it is basically project mindfulness(?) or is it project cognitive behavioural therapy? Regardless, I’m God damn horrible at it.

The two projects mentioned ended up being very satisfying and successful, but I find whenever I try to make something for myself, it often dies at the end of the rough draft, or even the first design revision. The watch is a project that I want for myself, but even that is for future me, its an idea that I perhaps may sell, or at least be the guy that makes cool incandescent art. But that project isn’t really started with the intent of being ever truly finished. After taking a bit of a loss on the vacuum chamber I feel like I need a win to happily move forward in project land. I need to make something that I love, complicated enough to have medium sized moments of victory, but isn’t all consuming and unachievable.

I’ve been getting back into playing music lately, and I realized that if I want to use a metronome, I have to use a phone app (reasonable) or I have to bring up a web page on the computer (also reasonable). Then when scrolling YouTube I found a guy making awesome circuits by using old school perf-board (a board with a bunch of holes used to create prototype Circuit boards on the fly) methods, and I got completely inspired to organize my box of electronics parts, and use some components I ordered a long time ago to make a dope metronome (probably not reasonable).

So far, I had some big successes in the project. I made a successful prototype controller circuit all out of parts I already had. Designing the controller circuit to choose between 4/4 time 3/4 time, and 2/4 time was tough, but after some iterations, and playing with the circuit, I got it to work.

The two small chips are called 555 timers. They are insanely versatile chips which although generally obsolete in modern advanced electronics, they are very much so alive and well in hobby electronics. For this circuit, they are used in Astable mode which is basically a consistent tunable square wave clock signal that goes on forever and Monostable mode which is a pulse tuned to a set length of time, triggered by another arbitrary pulse. The other two chips are a Binary Counter and a Demultiplexer or a DEMUX.

Next post I will go into more depth on the designs and the math behind the controller, but for now I’ll leave you with a drawing of what I’m going for on the outside.

I’m shooting for my favourite combo, brass and walnut, and I want it to operate like modern online metronomes. The online metronomes usually allow you to control the tone pitch of each beat (including off or silent) and they usually have an individual light that blinks for every beat. Most modern electronic metronomes might have a swinging arm or have a single light that simply blinks, but to me that sounds way less cool than multiple Blinky bulbs.

– Benjamin Galbraith