I’ve been trying to play guitar more lately, but one of the holdups is the lack of an amp for practicing my electric. A few weeks back I found a great little electronics project called mintyamps (named for the Altoids tins these projects usually end up inside).

Today I finally got my new soldering iron (Weller WLC100), so I decided I’d throw together the mintyamp board and get things together on my breadboard.

Here are the pieces of the PCB you can buy from mintyamp:

They give you the printed PCB with some caps, an amp chip, an LED (blue) and a variable resistor. The first step is solder these components on to the board:

That’s what it looked like halfway through the process, and here’s the completed board. A few things to note:

1. The caps I bought didn’t have the dark stripe - the shorter lead was the negative side.
2. For the ceramic caps, you look at the first digit of the farad capacity of the cap and match it with the number on the board
3. Dont touch the neck of the iron. It hurts.

Here’s what it looks like when it’s all done:

Next, I put the rest of the pieces together on the breadboard to make sure things were working properly. The parts I added to the mix were:

• 9V battery whip
• Guitar input jack
• 2.25″ low-profile mini speaker

When my mintyamp order arrived, the vendor had thrown in the speaker for free! Thanks Bob.

So, how does it sound? You be the judge (please ignore the supermodel I hired for this shoot: I had to get someone in a pinch):

Next on the list is using some of these mini notebook speakers I got from Digi-Key:

I hooked em up but the gain is too high - I’ll be playing with the settings to see if I can get it to work well enough. If I can, the largest component in the set would be the battery!

Tune in next time to see what it looks like in the enclosure.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, guitar, electronics, diy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.