Nocturnal Transmissions

After a fairly promising day working on my rotary switching mechanism, I ran into a few major stumbling blocks. One: My amplifier which was supposed to make my motor go along with the music stopped working, and Two: my radio transmitters didn't work yet. Both of these things were hugely critical for my project to keep on advancing, so I spent the last few days just banging away at my circuits.

Unfortunately, so far I've only been able to crack the amplifier circuit, and it was a bit of a stupid problem. What happened was that I tried to insert a darlington transistor into my circuit, in order to alleviate the heat runaway I was experiencing with my normal transistor, but when I did it, I ended up feeding a nice nine volt shock straight into my iPod's headphone jack. Initially, they only damage was a burn to the left hand side of the screen, but alas, my problems didn't end there. As I figured out today, after two days of buggering around with this circuit and getting extremely frustrated, was that my iPod was now constantly putting out 1.3 volts, even when it was paused. This meant that my circuits were always on, and led me to believe that I was using PNP transistors or something else was wrong, and so I've been working this circuit over for the last two days unnecessarily.

The happy news is that this thing will work, and I even have proof!



As you can see, the switch is rotating along with the beat, which is exactly what I want it to do. Now the only thing that needs to be provided is the music, which will be transmitted through the ether to my machine.

This calls for an FM radio transmitter, of course! I found a great website with a few different FM transmitter circuits on it, and so I decided to try them out, with sometimes humourous results.
This eventually turned into this:


When I actually tried this out, I had to take it outside to due crazy interference inside our studio space. When I took it out, though, I got a very interesting result. With my radio tuned to 88.1 MhZ, I started picking up a Kanye West Song, which was odd, since I was playing AC/DC. I didn't think it was my transmitter, but as I was adjusting the trimmer, I got the channel to come in clear as a bell, and when I listened for a bit, I found something incredibly interesting. I was broadcasting a perfect signal from 107.9 MhZ over my transmitter... Weird, no? Somewhat disheartened that my circuit didn't work, but encouraged by the fact it actually did something, I went back to studio and made a new radio transmitter.


This turned into this:

The second one is a lot more complex, but I think the result was a bit better. I didn't get a clear signal, or anything discernible at all, but I did manage to detect a strong distortion that I could control with my trimmer while I was using it. It doesn't necessarily work just yet, but I plan on doing a lot more work on it tomorrow, and playing with the inductor coils to play with my frequencies a bit. I imagine I will be able to get a signal tomorrow, so here's hoping.

Wish me luck, I'm going to need it, that's for sure.