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Bendy Projects

You’re a busy person. You’ve got school, a job, a significant other, friends, and family that all take time out of your day. But in all the hustle and bustle of everyday life, it’s important to take care of yourself too. Pick whatever you please, but tech people like me often just like to tinker with various side projects. Here are a few of mine.

  • Watch repair – I’ve got an old watch laying around that employs a cool concept: using LED arrays to represent hours and minutes when lit. I broke it while playing a pickup rugby match at my old college, and I kind of missed the WOW factor of the watch. I cracked it open last night to try to figure out why the LED arrays were not lighting up and ended up having to resolder the power circuit. The watch works now, but I still have to repair the band.
  • Headset repair – A few months ago, my headset went kaput. One of the cans just wasn’t functioning right. So I took the earpiece apart, desoldered the speaker connections, then resoldered them with a more solid connection. This fixed the issue, but occasionally, I hear random static noises for a split second. I suspect that there’s a short somewhere that charges a capacitor on the circuit and the static I hear is the interference caused by the capacitor discharging, but I’ll investigate later.
  • Mining rig – I’ve got a dumpster of a PC hanging around. It’s running a collection of old hardware that I somehow hacked together to get it working, and I use it for all my testing. It has an older AMD GPU in it, so I decided to mess around and see if I could get it running as a mining rig. So far, I’m unsuccessful, but this will hopefully change in the future.

So that’s what I’ve got going on. Hopefully you all have some projects going on; the world is better when people do things for themselves and gain experience through messing around (in a safe, controlled manner, of course). Keep tinkering, folks!

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