OzPLAR customisation

I introduced OzPLAR in my previous post. It’s an evolution of the telephone intercom design I had published in Silicon Chip magazine back in 1992. With my 2021 collaborator Ross we deliberately designed the circuit and PCB to accommodate a range of variations and alternate components so as to make it as flexible and globally-appealing …

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OzPLAR – the 2021 telephone intercom revamp

My original telephone intercom project was published in Silicon Chip magazine here in Oz in May 1992. Photocopies of that original article are still available from Silicon Chip, and they kindly let me re-publish the circuit here. The intercom unit powered two telephones, allowing you to talk between them. Lifting one handset automatically started the …

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Raspberry Pi shutdown button

We have a small but growing collection of Raspberry Pi devices here. They’re performing a range of tasks: one’s our Pi-Hole, another runs the “Homebridge” middleware between Apple’s HomeKit and our Clipsal C-Bus, whilst a third is running the management app for Ubiquiti UniFi. And of course plenty more are strewn around the place running …

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Our annual housewarming – the DHMG

Rocky and I bought our first home together back in late 1995. It was a lovely 3-bedroom semi-detached house in one of the inner-western suburbs of Sydney. We found ourselves holding a housewarming for it in January 1996, and for some reason lost to history we settled on a parody / lampooning of the poster …

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DHMG2019 – the Disco Death Star – Pt.2

This is part 2 of a 2-part series covering how we built the “Disco Death Star”: Part 1 – The Build – construction and assembly Part 2 – Control, programming & examples – (this post) The controller Here’s the final version of the control PCB. It’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but it’s what …

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DHMG2019 – the Disco Death Star – Pt.1

If you’re new to the “DHMG” – our annual housewarming party – and its attendant excuse for some crazy home-brew tech, there’s some back-story and an index of the things we’ve done here.   This is part 1 of a 2-part series covering 2019’s “Disco Death Star”: Part 1 – The Build – construction and …

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Telephone Intercom

I’ve long enjoyed tinkering with electronics, although it’s something I don’t do a lot of these days. I find that I simply no longer have the time to invest in designing, prototyping & debugging, then the PCB design, layout, artwork and production. Home is littered with all sorts of home-brew projects, including the old stereo …

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