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amplifier electronics woodworking

Darth Vader voice changer 2.0 part 5: finished

This is the last of a series of five where I design and build a Darth Vader chest box with the HT8950A chip. The series involves all the instructions for the electronics, laser cutting and a bit of 3d printing.

This is the last of a series of five where I design and build a Darth Vader chest box. See the bottom of the this to links to the previous parts. The main features of the Darth Vader chest box are:

  • enclosure laser cut plywood (6mm)
  • easy control with four push buttons
  • DIY voice changer circuit with Holtek HT8950A
  • LM386 amplifier
  • build-in speaker
  • audio-in (3.5mm)

When I started the Darth Vader chest box early December 2015 I didn’t expect it would take me almost two months. Finally this week I finished it and I’m happy to say that it works great. For a couple of weeks it was almost finished but there always seemed to be some work to be done. A major problem was that I couldn’t get the 3D printed container for the audio-jack right. I tried it several times at my local fablab but it just didn’t fit. Finally I ordered the container from 3D Hubs and it had a perfect fit.

Audio-jack container (right) and volume knob (left). The blue parts were printed by me while the black parts were ordered through 3D Hubs. the X,Y-dimensions of the blue parts were off probably due to over extruding. The black parts were fine.

Next I made all the external connections to the perfboard, always a delicate job. I mounted the perfboard and all other components to the laser cut plywood parts.

All electrical components(buttons, perfboard, battery compartment, audio-jack, on/off switch)  fitted to the plywood parts. The speaker is fitted to the front panel of the chest box.

Finally I glued all laser cut parts together with regular wood glue except for the front panel. When the batteries need replacement or some other kind of problem occurs I still have access to the inside of the chest box.

Chest box with FM radio connected to audio-in.
Schematics of the Darth Vader chest box.

The files to laser cut the plywood can be found here. I included a .svg file and an .eps file depending on the laser cutter that you’re using.

Finally here is a video of me demonstrating the Chest box.

Demonstration of the Chest box with FM radio as sound input

Here are the links to all blog posts I wrote about this chest box:

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