Chu Moy Amplifier

Today I started working on my Chu Moy pocket amplifier, named after the creator. I'm working from a set of plans I found at tangentsoft.net which are very good and very detailed. A few days ago I bought almost all the parts from Digi-Key for under $20, and I bought the remaining little bits from Radio Shack this afternoon. An important note for anyone who attempts to make one of these, is that some of the parts listed on the tangentsoft pages are obsolete, and you have to do a little searching through Digi-Key for an equivalent piece.

I've never done any serious electronics work. In fact, the only thing I have done is put an EL panel in my Linux Zip-It, which I had a marginally tough time with. I was going to do the 5-Wire hack on it, but the points looked just a tiny bit too small, thus I have a serial d-bus and an RS232 IC lying in a box somewhere. Anyway, I'm off topic. I've almost no experience with electronics, thats what this paragraph is trying to get at.

Let me be the first to say, this was a mistake. I don't know what I'm doing here. This picture is the result of about an hour of work. That's 6 components and 4 jumpers in an hour. Plus, if I had a picture of the underside, it would be even less of an accomplishment. The camera batteries died, so I do not, PTL.

I am decent with a soldering iron, and I can make nice, smooth joints on the board. The problem is, I bought a generic PC board that doesn't have any traces, so I need a bunch of jumpers. Getting the jumpers in the right place along with the component and soldered all nice just wasn't happening. I'm still confident it will work, but it sure ain't pretty.

I've finished the power section, got the op-amp on the board, and most of the other components. I still have to put on another 4 resistors and then wire up the potentiometer (thats a fancy word for volume knob) and the input/output jacks. Once I've done that and the batteries have recharged I'll get some more pics up here and we'll find out if my skillz were sufficient to result in a working amp.

9/24/06

As promised, here are some more photos. They're blurry because it's dark in here and my camera doesn't focus well.