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A little over a month ago I made an entry about how I fixed a couple mp3 players never using a soldering iron before. Well today I got a bit more practice.

My grandpa wanted an amplifier so he could watch his movies. He's almost deaf so when he has his speakers on the volume is annoyingly loud. With his speakers he can plug in head phones and listen to them, but with the headphones apparently it's still not loud enough. He wasted $40 on an amplification unit that took the audio from the speakers, amplified it, then let you use headphones to hear the amplified volume. The stupid thing didn't even work so he decided to try building one.

He spent about $10 on a kit at Fry's. I helped a little and didn't do too bad at soldering for a beginner. About half way through he found out he got something other than what he was looking for. Instead of an audio input from a computer it had dual microphones so it was essentially a large hearing aid instead. We decided to finish it anyway. After we finished it the unit worked so I guess I did alright on the soldering. After dinner grandpa removed the solder for the microphones and removed the microphones replacing them with a microphone jack which pretty much turned it into what he was looking for.

There is no case or housing or anything for the amplifier though. It's just a bare circuit board with all the stuff visible. He said he's thinking of getting another kit for me to do on my own to see if I do alright. Now that I know the basics of soldering that's not too bad an idea.

The electric soldering irons kinda suck. They have about a 1ft cord on them which messes with your mobility. Grandpas got a pretty cool soldering iron that runs on butane. It refills with the standard butane cans you can get at a tobacco store. The instructions are pretty easy if you pay attention. I thought it would be a little complicated, but it wasn't too bad. Most of the capacitors you had to watch for polarity meaning you don't want to solder them in backwards. The board indicated what capacitor goes where and which terminal was positive then the capacitor had a marking on it's side indicating what terminal was negative. Then there were markings of C1 - C8 and the instructions said which capacitor number uses which type since there were 3 types.

After buying the audio jack the whole project cost about 1/3 of the price of the unit that didn't work. It was also pretty fun.