Last time, I had the circuit board made, the parts on hand, and I was just waiting to find a few solid hours to sit down and put everything together. All it came down to was soldering everything together, pulling out the old board, and popping in the new one. One Sunday I did just that and everything went as planned. Continue reading
As much as I like to procrastinate, I did finally manage to test out the circuit I described last time. I put it all on a breadboard, tested it independently, tested it in the DAC itself, finalized the circuit board for it and ordered the board. Unlike the hen and her bread, I am willing to share the penultimate fruits of my labor.
Last time, I described the problem I was having with my DAC control circuit. At that point, I was still working on the schematic and had yet to finalize the design. I finally came up with one I’m satisfied with and I’m going to step through the different blocks here. Continue reading
A while back I built a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) for my audio system. What it does in a nutshell is take the digital stream of data (one of the standards for a stream is S/PDIF) from a player and convert it into an audio signal. Today, most digital audio systems (CD players to computers and everything in-between) have a DAC internally. On nicer computers, this is what a sound card is primarily for. Building a stand-alone DAC enabled me to get the audio signal away from the noisy environment of most digital systems. On my old computer, I could actually hear noise when I opened and closed windows. Continue reading