The projects and tasks are designed to help you through the various courses and materials that you'll have to deal with, and also to provide an active and practical element to what could otherwise become a rather dry and technical exercise. Tasks are small exercises - you may be asked to complete one or two per week. Projects are larger and carry a higher percentage of the mark. We will undertake two, three, four or more projects and tasks. The final project is usually an individual choice project, and will be worth significantly more than the others in terms of percentages in your portfolio. We will usually try to set aside a time to perform the projects in a public setting.
Air-Mike.php From any number of places one can buy high quality 'electret condenser microphone' elements. These are the basic building blocks of recording mics.
Tape-Head.php A tape recorder works by translating audio signals into a fluctuating electromagnetic field - essentially flipping the north-south orientation of a magnet in response to the audio signal's wobbling between its plus and minus boltage extremes. This flipping magnet is the 'tape head', the small metal blob you can see inside a cassette player or answering machine. The tape head's undulating magnetism in turn aligns tiny magnetic domains in the iron-like powder covering one surface of the recording tape, as if they were tiny compass needles. As the tape is played back the process is reversed. Similar to a record groove and needle, or a set of digital on/off switches.
Clock-Tickling.php Hacking is like hot-rodding your car: you don't need to be able to build a care from scratch to swap in a 5-barrel carburetor, but it helps to know what a carburetor looks like before you get too creative with the wrench. We'll use a simple but very useful hack as a way to learn how to identify basic electronic components and introduce some electronic axioms.